Saturday, September 19, 2009

New Shop

As I continue my quest to explore new marketing avenues, I stumbled upon a new site called Shop Handmade. Although I had completed the shop set up about two weeks ago, this morning I finally got around to adding some Inventory to the shop: HMMills

Below is some information about Shop Handmade

About Us

At ShopHandmade we're here for two reasons:

We enjoy handmade crafts and we want to help people enjoy crafting and enjoy giving handmade items. Handmade items are personal, special, and unique in this world.

We love the environment and want to demonstrate good stewardship. We want to demonstrate how to make a difference. We want to demonstrate through our own action how small things can make a difference. It's remarkably easy to make a meaningful difference.

We think that handmade crafts and the environment both go together hand-in-hand. Both are about a quality living environment.

How we got started:
We started as a spin-off from the best internet craft retailer in the whole wide world. (No bias here:) Seriously, they have a million items in their warehouse. And they have great service. (see our sponsors although we're quick to point out we would love to have any company help with sponsorship.)

Our customers would often ask:

How can I sell the things I make? We tried contacting companies such as eBay, etc. etc. et.c to see if we could partner with them in some way. But they were after their millions and profits and didn't have time to work with us.

How can I sell my used craft supplies? People have left-over supplies that they would just love to not throw in the trash. (Maybe used rubber stamps or half a sheet of stickers, for example.) It pained us to think that we were contributing to environmental waste without doing something about it.

With a bolt of lightening (not literally) we realized: We could and we should do it. So we did.

We already had a world-class eCommerce system, a data center, and brilliant people who knew and loved crafts. Like many a midnight project that you are probably well aware of, we built ShopHandmade in a couple of nights and weekends out of stuff we already had. (It's not like this stuff is hard anymore.)

In an pleasantly ironic way: ShopHandmade is itself made from recycled software and computers...literally.

We then showed ShopHandmade to our sponsors and they got excited! This was a great thing! So they agreed to sponsor our operating costs as a public service so we could get started for real.

Today we are a forum for artists to sell their handmade craft items and for crafters to recycle their craft supplies. And it is good. Welcome!

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