Retiring my Etsy shop

Back when we were living in Atlanta, I opened an Etsy shop. I had inherited some vintage dresses and figured Etsy would be the simplest way to sell them. I added a few other items over time, like vintage costume jewelry, some Depression glass, and postcards. I began collecting post cards in high school and kept it up for over 20 years so have hundreds from all over the world, although most of them wound up being from East Germany and Sweden. 

For the first couple of years things sold fairly steadily. Nothing dramatic, but steady. There'd be maybe a sale a month. Not exactly enough to fund a posh retirement but enough to make it worth the minor effort involved. Then things slacked off. A lot. It struck me recently that it had been at least a year since the last time I found myself counting out a stack of post cards to send to a buyer. The dust has gotten pretty thick on the Sterlite tote that holds the Etsy inventory. 

At the same time the physical inventory is gathering dust, the online one keeps getting charged listing renewal fees. It's not a dramatic amount per item, but multiply it by a dozen or so items and then multiply that by close to a full year with no sales. . . the inevitable question, the only rational question, is why the heck am I doing this? 

So, goodbye Etsy. Now the only question is what to do with the contents of the tote. Maybe I'll give Ebay another shot to try getting rid of postcards. I tried EBay back  before they started letting sellers set prices. Tried auctioning a couple things and ran into some bizarre scammers so gave up on EBay pretty quickly. Since then I've revisited EBay on behalf of the museum. The museum sells items that don't fit into the museum's mission or are duplicates of things it already has. EBay has the distinct advantage of not collecting any fees until an item sells, which means no constant (if small) bleeding away of the bank account. The worst that happens with EBay is occasionally someone will make an insulting low-ball offer, which is easily ignored. The museum sells a lot of vintage postcards.  

I do know that if I shift some stuff over to EBay I need to think long and hard about the combination of pricing and shipping fees. Postage continues to creep up, as I learned the hard way after selling a pint of buttons a year or two ago. Cheapest way to send them turned out to be in a small flat rate priority box but even then my profit margin dropped to effectively zero. The only positive thing about that transaction was the faint satisfaction of knowing the buttons went to someone who was probably much craftier than I am and so would put them to good use. 

It has occurred to me that one solution to the pricing/shipping question is to simply make the prices on everything high enough that I could say "free shipping" as an enticement. People love illusory bargains. 

I was wrong about Precious Moments

They are not the most common collectible on the planet.  These are:

Electrical insulators, all made by Hemingray.  They used to be common on power lines, telegraph lines, and telephone lines.  They now fill page after page on Etsy.  I learned this while trying to find a source for the holder shown below:

We've got about a dozen Hemingray insulators kicking around the house purely by accident -- I never set out to collect them, but there were a bunch at the farm and I've never bothered to jettison any.  If nothing else, they're good paperweights.  A number of years ago my cousin Chris mentioned seeing metal stands for them in a gift shop in Michigamme that turned them into votive candle holders with minimal hassle, so I bought one.  It was the last one in the store.

So do you think I've ever stumbled across another source for those stands?  Of course not.  But Christmas is coming, and I do know someone who would actually appreciate a glass insulator candle holder, so I went looking on the intertubes -- and discovered that while there are about a zillion sites that sell insulators (and, wow, do they ever come in an amazing variety of colors) and different items for displaying insulators (nifty little LED pads that will light up the insulator from below, for example) something as simple as the holder shown above was nowhere to be seen.  There is a guy on Etsy who makes an insulator holder from used horseshoes, but (a) it's $65, and (b) the recipient I had in mind for this particular gift is not into Western themes.  Country chic, yes; cowboys, no.  

I'll confess I don't get the attraction of collecting insulators.  They're pretty when the sun shines through them, and there are some bizarre shapes (there are some that look winged), but when you can find Hemingrays in every flea market, junk shop, and "antique" store in the country, there doesn't seem to be much of a challenge involved. I have no idea why anyone would ever bother to order one from a website when a stroll through the nearest rural flea market would turn up dozens priced at about $2 each.      

On the other hand, if and when a person can find a decent stand, they do make nice candle holders. 

Shameless self promotion

I finally got around to starting to stock my Etsy shop. I'm starting off with a few vintage dresses, and a vintage pattern. I'll be adding more dresses, patterns, and some jewelry over the next few days.

Wish me luck. Like everyone else on the planet, I could use some extra cash.

A distraction

Today's the election, it will be in the back of my mind most of the day -- will the Rethuglicans manage to steal another one? How successful will they be with their vote suppression efforts? -- but for now I'm focusing on other issues. Like sizing vintage dresses.

I inherited about a dozen "Lucy" dresses from an aunt. They were stashed in the attic when we cleaned her house out about 12 years -- she put it up for sale after moving into an assisted living place. Most of the clothes and other attic odds and ends went to the Salvation Army, but I took about a dozen dresses that looked to be circa 1955-1960 because I thought they looked kind of neat and they might come in handy for Halloween costumes. Plus, of course, the dresses with full skirts had zillions of yards of material (this striped sleeveless number being a classic example; that skirt has about four yards of material in it) -- and I quilt.

The dresses are great -- I'm willing swear I saw Lucille Ball in one just like a blue linen number that's part of the stash, and, if not Lucy, then for sure it's been in a Doris Day movie. There's a pink polka dot sun dress that would be ideal for anyone who wants to channel her inner Marilyn Monroe (and it's even the same size Marilyn supposedly wore, a 14), and several nice cotton house dresses that just beg for a string of pearls to complete a June Cleaver outfit. Some are brand new, still have the store tags on them -- which is a minor mystery (why buy a new dress at Gimbels and then never wear it?), but not something I'm going to worry about much.

At one point I almost donated the lot to a small museum in the U.P. that has a "fashion through the years" focus. I also thought about donating them to the theater department at a university for use in costuming. Then I started thinking about selling them -- and did, in fact, try one time on E-bay. The E-bay experience was sufficiently horrific (who would have thought an auction for a vintage dress would bring lunatics out of the woodwork?) that I vowed to never go near E-bay again, either as a buyer or a seller.

Then I discovered etsy.com, "your place for all things handmade." Turns out it's also your place for things vintage, both clothing and supplies, so I'm contemplating opening an etsy store. The big question, though, is what size do I call these dresses. Thanks to vanity sizing, a dress that was a size 14 or 16 back in 1959 might be only a 10 now. A 16 is supposedly a size Extra Large in 2008, but looking at these size 14, 15, and 16 dresses I'm guessing they're Mediums at best. Research is called for -- hence, a distraction. Instead of thinking about stolen votes and/or voter intimidation, I can focus on doing web searches for information on converting 1950s sizes to 2008 sizes.

All I have to do is figure out how to describe them in a way that gives an honest approximation of what body type they might fit now. So I'll spend my day worrying about defunct fashion instead of thinking about the many ways ballot boxes can be metaphorically stuffed (or emptied), and maybe one of these days I will actually set up the etsy store.

Update: It appears vanity sizing is worse than I thought. Several sites have informed me that what was a size 14 for my mother's generation is a size 8 for my daughters. One site had a photo of a model wearing a vintage garment (circa early 1950s) that was a size 12 when originally sold -- the dress appeared to fit quite well, and the model wears a size 2/4 in 21st century clothing. This trend keeps up, who knows? Maybe we'll all be size Zero in the not too distant future.

I guess I'd know this stuff if I ever wore anything other than jeans and souvenir tee-shirts.