Patty and Friends Antiques and what I'm doing there

I have the pleasure to be a part of the staff of Patty and Friends Antiques in St. Petersburg, where Bob and I have booth space. It is so rare in this life to be able to work in a field that is also your passion - I can say that this is the first time it's happened to me.

It's a dynamic place, with many recent changes as the mall absorbed dealers from a store that closed elsewhere in St. Pete; it's those additions that necessitated the extra staffing that allowed me to come aboard as a member. I find that every single day that I work I get the opportunity to learn about another aspect of collectibles and what people find desirable and valuable. Whether it's Depression glass, celluloid animals, restored furniture, or vintage designer jewelry, I get to go to school every day that I show up to work.

I took the initiative to create a Facebook page for Patty and Friends, and slowly I'm learning about how to manage it as an informational and promotional tool for the store. Just as I learned about the building of my own website and store on eCrater; this very blog, and those darn Squidoo pages, I am determined to make the Facebook page yet another destination for Patty and Friends' fans and customers.

It's mighty quiet

The eCrater store has been silent since September. I've been adding items dutifully, posting about them on the member forum, and blogging here. Still (gritting teeth) have not paid for any advertising anywhere. Search after search for collector forums have turned up few, if any results, for me to post about our offerings. The odd hit here and there has new rules for those wanting to post about selling collectibles. No surprise, really, since the competition is so very fierce. But the few collectible forums that exist now exact a payment - nominal, but still - for those who want to post about their e-stores. As long as we're paying rent for booth space at Patty & Friends here in St. Petersburg; that is, paying out money there, I'm not keen about paying out more money on the internet to attract sales for the eCrater effort. One money pit at a time, as it were. This year it's the retail booth space. Next year maybe I'll try a marketing budget for e-retail.

The saving grace is, of course, that the eCrater store is not costing us any money. It's just sitting there. And sitting there.

I could be writing more Squidoo Lenses - but I'm still rather at a loss about best to utilize this tool. I know that it's a directional, traffic building internet tool; but I'm at a loss at how to fill the content to my satisfaction. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, or what a Squidoo even is, just try Googling it, and see if it makes any more sense than I can explain it here!! To me, it seems like more of an informational tool, rather than something that sends buying traffic to the store.

In the meantime, then, I've taken up with some limited jewelry making designs to use the odd, single earrings and broken necklace and bracelet bits that surface from our purchasing. Lately I have been dealing with a strained elbow injury, and so I found that a project using magazine pages actually used my non-dominant hand, allowing the injured arm to continue to rest.

The photo is of my first ever necklace. I am pleased with the colors, and the use of a single earring.

This is what a squidoo looks like

I made a Squidoo lens about Wedgwood Jasperware. I still don't quite know what a lens is or what it is supposed to do, but I did it. Along the way I found a site for the Wedgwood museum, which was kind of cool. And I also found out that in the 19th century the company supplied a dental firm in London with the porcelain required to make artificial teeth!

Kind of a neat loop given my experience working in a dental laboratory, and then a dental practice. Synchronicity...

Growing the store

I've got the Attributes thang down! And figured out how to copy an item, so now when I add something new to the store, I select something that is similar (in type and maybe color, if I'm lucky), and the attributes are copied over along with the rest of the file. This rocks - it saves SO much time.

I put Bob on to the task of the metatags and description, since I totally didn't know what I was doing there. He found a free metatag analyzer through the eCrater forums (which also rock - so many resources there) and spent over an hour tweaking the words to get the percentages up. It turned out that my blind shot in the dark wasn't so bad in the first place - we had a better than average outcome with the keywords I had originally chosen. Dropping the extraneous "ands" and what I call fluffy words helped to get the numbers up.

And every time you add more items to your store, or you sell stuff, it's worth running the analyzer again, because it can change your numbers. I don't know if this is hard science or snake oil, though... hard to tell without any sales yet.

And Bob was flummoxed by Squidoo! At least I wasn't the only one :-) I'm going to give it another go, though, and see if I can't make some more sense of what on earth those lenses are all about!

Today's picture is of an absolutely lovely piece of Carnival Glass that Bob found this past weekend. This is a tumbler from the Dugan and Diamond's Storks and Rushes pattern, which was made between 1920 and 1931. This color is called Marigold - you also see it in Blue. The iridescence is just so very pretty in this piece, and it's in perfect shape. The mold markings are very bold and pronounced, which is perfectly acceptable. This pattern was reissued later on, by Westmoreland, but was marked as such with a "W" - which this tumbler lacks. By deduction, it's an original.