Folksy Summer School

I thought I'd share with you the fantastic weekend I've just had at the Folksy Summer School in Sheffield. When Folksy first revealed they were planning a weekend of workshops and speakers for designer-makers I knew immediately I wanted to go. There were a nailbiting few weeks while they decided on dates - it would either take place on a weekend when I was going down to Cornwall for a friend's wedding, or the 10th of August, when I was free. Thankfully they picked the 10th and so I bought an earlybird weekend ticket the first day they went on sale! A few weeks later I booked my train ticket from London to Sheffield, and two nights at a Premier inn (£29 a night, bargain!). I was all set! Just had to wait until the big day now...

How to (try and) combine a shop with a full time job!

On the Etsy forums this week, a newish seller was asking for tips on how to run a shop around a full time job. Having done this for the past two and a half years I thought I’d give a few suggestions that have worked for me, and thought I’d flesh them out a bit in a blog post.

Bad online experiences - in real life

My brother pointed me to these great videos from Google Analytics just before Christmas. They were designed to make webshop owners think about some of the barriers between your customers arriving at your site and actually completing a transaction. Instead of a boring lecture, they've turned some common online shopping frustrations into real life comedy scenarios which take place in a poorly planned supermarket with some rather annoying staff.

Famous for five minutes!

As you may already have seen if you follow Mog's Togs on Twitter or Facebook, or are visitors to the Folksy or Etsy forums, last week I was included along with some other UK sellers in this article on the BBC website, all about the resurgence in crafts and particularly selling them online.

You can read it here: Etsy, Folksy and the mania for making crafts

Saving time on packaging orders

My sales are creeping up at the moment (I think Christmas shopping is already beginning!), which is great of course, but I’m increasingly conscious of how much time I spend packaging orders. Because I work full time everything is done in the evenings and at weekends, so most nights before I go to bed I package up any orders outstanding, and even 4 or 5 orders seems to take me half an hour to take through from on the shelf to ready to post. I think this is too long, considering that I don't have particularly fancy packaging. International orders are the most time consuming, and since most of my increase in sales is happening on Etsy, the hours spent sticking, writing, printing, are really starting to encroach on both making time and sleeping time!

Determined to do something about it I realised that the two big time-killers are finding the extra 4 digits for US orders, and printing postage on Royal Mail’s online site, so I tried to find ways around these.

Well that's summer done...

Hm, so it seems I haven't blogged since May! I guess I got struck down by blogger's block, and a bit of Olympic and Paralympic fever too, and Mog's Togs has been keeping me pretty busy as well. I've hardly written anything on my cat blog either. Ah well, onwards and upwards!

Airmail: Small Packet or Letter?

In my article on postage I say that you can send anything internationally as a Letter rather than a Small Packet if it is cheaper. When I first wrote that article, it was only cheaper up to 40g, but now it is cheaper up to 100g, so this issue now applies to more people.

I had a question on the blog about whether I had any proof that this was true, and also got involved in various threads on the Etsy and Folksy forums about this issue, so I wanted to collect together the facts and myths in one place. Let me warn you, this is a bit of a long post, and there are no pictures to break it up, sorry! Update - I think we've cracked it! Whizz down to the bottom to see!