As I've mentioned a few times before, one of the ways we sell Alchemy Stones is by participating in an assortment of art shows, festivals and highly targeted conventions that have vendor booths.
When we're not selling live, most of the stones are actually listed in our various online shops, including eBay, Etsy, Amazon Handmade and Facebook Marketplace.
That's easy enough to keep track of when we were at home because the stones are all neatly sorted into large flat bins labeled with the corresponding online marketplace where they are listed for sale. However, when we get to a outside venue, all the stones come out of their respective bins and they're displayed on our various shelving units and tables.
Of course, once you get to the end of an outside event, you not only have to get the displayed items back in the bins where they belong, you have to have a real accurate record of what you sold, as well as which sales venue you now have to remove sold inventory from so you don't end up "double selling" anything.
It took a while, but I eventually settled on having different color-coded price tags for each venue. That way, when it's time to break down at the end of a show — and put the stones back into the bins — we don't have to worry too much because we can just sort the stones by the color of the price tag. In actually, we seldom sort anything while we are still at the event, we just put the stones randomly into the the nearest bin and then when we get home we sort them back into their appropriate spot, by online sales venue.
It might not seem like much, but this is actually an important and time saving exercise in logistics. Unlike a painter who might go to an art show with 12-15 paintings, we go to shows with something in the region of 500-600 painted stones!
After we get home, I also sort the sales receipts "by color" because we paste the price tags off the bottom of each item sold to the receipt. Super easy.
It's interesting how often we'll be somewhere at a show or festival and somebody will ask me "what do the different colored price tags mean?"
And so I go into explaining that it's my own little bureaucracy to keep track of where things are listed for sale online so that if I sell anything during the show I can pull it from the right website without having to do a bunch of research.
I suppose the thing that surprises me most about the the reaction to my telling people this little story is the number of raised eyebrows I see and the way people are actually surprised that somebody who is an artist would be that organized!
From an event, back in 2019...
I guess there must be some stereotype out there that if you're an artist or creative individual you must by definition also be a chaotic mess!
Quite frankly, if I didn't have a fairly well structured organization system I would have to spend untold hours trying to figure out where stuff belongs! So I'm glad I came up with the system I have because it's actually very time efficient both in terms of originally labeling, and subsequently keeping track of where things are.
And with that thought, I need to go photograph some new inventory!
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend! Do leave me a comment if you feel so inspired — interaction and engagement are always welcome!
If you enjoy painted rocks, do check out The Hive Rocks Project and help spread the word about Hive, while also being creative!
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2022.04.22 AS-TXT-097/063