This has been a lot of hard work but we have finally been able to list our products and make our website a place where you can now order directly from us wahoooo! There were a lot of mistakes and lessons learnt such as...once everything was listed we had to change something on all of them and can you do this as a bulk change? No you cannot! So we had to go back to every, single, listing individually and then guess what? It happened again and we had to do the same for a third time (ahhhhhhh). We also needed time to get our heads around doing shipping, tax, messages and listings on our own as Etsy obviously takes care of lots of this for you. But after a few months we think we are there! We want to take risks and try new things and learn more but we also don't like to rush anything either.
We are still currently on Etsy as well but the plan is to build up our traffic and then hopefully just have the Website one day (fingers crossed). This may be a short term or long term goal we will just have to see how it goes.
Some of you may be thinking why? You could just stay on Etsy? That is very true we could but we are doing a lot more offline now with Happy Place Print and for these more Custom pieces and requests there really isn't the need or audience for them on such a large platform like Etsy. We have been in local Magazines, we are advertising locally and have local craft fairs so it is important that we have somewhere more personal for our local customers to go so they can shop our collections. You may have noticed our collection on Etsy is 181 prints and on our Website we have 217 prints so far...with more coming VERY soon.
Etsy is great but there is a lot behind the scenes that could be better (for us). We love how we have been able to make the website our own, with our very own style. Even being able to write a blog has been great too so we like the extra freedom and how unique we can make it. As I said Etsy is great. It really is but it doesn't mean that because something is great you can't look for something better.
We see Happy Place Print as our long term business and we want it to grow and become more and more unique so we feel like having the website is a step closer to making this true for us. We are just so excited to offer the option of shopping directly with us. We feel like we are learning new things and taking more control of what we want Happy Place Print to be and that is very exciting for us. We can't just sit back and do the same thing over and over that just isn't us. Happy Place Print is part of our family now and we hope it continues to be. Thank you to every past, current, future customer for your orders through Etsy or the Website. Every, single order means the world to us and always will.
We will be offering exclusive website discounts and updates to everyone who subscribes to our newsletters so be sure to do that :)
Thanks for reading, speak soon x
