It has been a long time- but I finally have some free time to update my blog. I really like having this blog to give customers and potential customers some behind the scenes action and insights into V*Dazzled Jewelry. So as some of you might remember my earrings were featured on The Pioneer Woman’s blog on Feb 15th (I am just now getting time to write about it so that gives you some idea of how busy the feature made my site!) here is how it happened, how that day was, and how my business changed after….
How I got featured:
This is kind of random but I found this gorgeous leather fold over clutch on etsy from K.Slade Made (she is now no longer on etsy) and after looking at her site she mentioned that there was a lengthy wait time after purchase due to her feature on The Pioneer Woman (PW). That was when I started looking at all the independent sellers PW had been featuring on her blog and thought to myself “maybe if I alert her to my site she might feature me”, so I emailed Ree from PW sometime in early February telling her a bit about myself and my shop. I never got an email back so I assumed she is a very busy woman and probably gets tons of email from tons of independent sellers so I didn’t get my hopes up. Then on Feb 15th I was sitting at my desk in lab just checking my real time google analytics– this will show real time data about the people visiting your site– this is how it normally looks:
I took this screen shot at 9 AM this morning, normal amount of people is between 1-10 at a time depending on the time of day.
The day of:
You can see that still to this day I still get traffic clicking through from PW!! So the normal amount between 1 and 10 suddenly jumped to about 50 on Feb 15th, then 100, then 200. Needless to say I was quite shocked looking at those numbers! I realized all the traffic was coming from the Pioneer Woman as I was getting all excited I went and read the feature, I could never thank Ree enough for that feature!!
The V*Dazzled feature on PW!
Almost immediately I started getting sale notifications on my iPhone (thank you etsy app!) and I was getting so excited! By lunch time I had sold 200 pairs of earrings (in a matter of about 3 hours) and the sales kept coming. Pretty quickly I realized I better change the wait time for my earrings (which became 3 – 4 weeks at the busiest point) because there was no way my fingers could make hundreds of earrings within a couple of days. That day I started stressing out in the afternoon and quickly left lab to go make as many earrings as I could.
I ended up taking 1 full day off from lab and a few hours here and there to try to get more and more earrings done and all hours of the weekend were dedicated to V*Dazzled for awhile. I enlisted the help of my fiancee and both my parents for packaging, relisting items, post office runs, and jewelry making. It was a crazy busy few weeks with very little sleep. My fiancee and I actually had a planned vacation to Vegas at the end of February and we even took supplies to make 100 pairs of earrings while on vacation!
about 100 orders ready to be shipped out!
Lots of earrings ready to ship out to customers.
- Working on orders during my weekend at my Fiancee’s place (this is before we got our place together)- excuse my make-up and tan free appearance- all free time had to be dedicated to earring making!
Now:
Of course my shop has slowed down since the time right after PW’s post, but thanks to PW I have a ton more repeat customers, I still get new customers who find me through PW, and in general have more sales. Also the cream/stardust earrings are still the most popular pair of earrings I sell. It was stressful getting so much business at once but more importantly it was exciting!
And if it isn’t obvious by this blog post, I am forever grateful for the feature on The Pioneer Woman!! Thanks so much Ree!!
Any other questions about the whole experience feel free to leave a comment or email me 🙂
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