Friday, April 01, 2011

State of the Shop Address

I'm sure everyone is just dying to know how the Quiet Mischief Etsy shop is doing, and even if you're not, I really want to put up a bunch of stats and feel proud of them. Hence this report on the first quarter of this year.

189 items sold this quarter (324 total)
94 PDF tutorials
19 duct tape rose rings
7 duct tape rose hair clips
3 custom orders

42 tiny friendship bracelet sets
6 sets of wish bracelets
5 bracelets costing $20 or more
5 flame patterned bracelets

272 shop hearts this quarter (498 total)

Top five hearted items:
146 hearts on the PDF tutorial
90 hearts on the rainbow set of tiny friendship bracelets
40 on the neon rainbow rose ring
30 on the custom rose ring order form
29 on the black heart duct tape ring

First sale: January 5th
Last sale: March 30th
Most items sold in one day: 10 on March 15th
Most items sold in one month: 104 in March

Compare these numbers to my last state of the shop address, and you'll find that I'm doing better. Much, much better. Most of the numbers here are significantly higher than those of the last post, and the last post was for a full year while this one is just three months. Now you see why I was so excited to write this post. : D

Before I close this post, I want to address the last part of my last post: my goals for the year. Here they are:

Average 20 sales a month
I thought this was a decent goal for the year. I had sold 24 items in December, but that was a holiday month that was universally expected to bring high numbers. However, I am currently averaging more than 20 sales a week, and have almost made enough sales that I could stop now and still have 20 per month for the year. My new goal is to average 30 sales a week by the end of the year (though how things are growing maybe I should shoot for the end of the next quarter?)

Get over 100 hearts on a single item
Another goal that, at the end of the year, seemed challenging but doable. However, we have already gotten almost 150 hearts on the item I thought most likely to get to 100 hearts, and we have another item 10 away from 100. Obviously this goal needs some revamping as well. I'm shooting for two goals here now; one is to get 300 hearts on one item, and to have at least five items with over 100 hearts.

Sell a single bracelet priced at $40 or more ($35 is my current record in an off-Etsy purchase)
This became a goal both because I had started concentrating on wider and more difficult bracelets, and because I had a specific bracelet I was working on that would be priced at $40 if not more. That bracelet has not been finished, nor has any other really wide one, due to the explosion of our shop in early March and the wholesale orders that started before that. Therefore, I still have some time to go before I can really try for this goal.

Get on the front page of Etsy, in Etsy finds, or be featured on the Etsy blog
Sometime in January or February I despaired of achieving this goal. All I can really do is have the best pictures possible and try to stay visible so that the right people will notice me at the right time, and even supposing that happened, I didn't think that my style of pictures and my items would fit in with the usual items that are featured. In other words, I was sure I wasn't indie enough. However, on March 4th, abnormally high activity in my shop led me to find out that I had been featured in the Etsy Finds email. I was absolutely floored, and I am sure that my abnormally high numbers for the rest of the month are due at least in part to that feature.

Have 550 shop hearts
I haven't quite hit 550 shop hearts yet, but with only 52 to go I could probably do so this month. So instead I want to shoot for 1000 shop hearts by the end of the year.

See you next quarter!

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