Fabric Gallery

[MariposaCraft]

So I've been selling here on Etsy for a while and have a decent number of sales. I've always put "custom requests welcome" and told customers to message me. That ha worked okay so far, but I'm doing more and more custom requests and I've run into an issue.

How do you show all your fabric for custom requests? Do you limit what the choices are?

I ask because I'm a fabric hoarder - I have TONS - and would like to give my customers all the options. I don't think doing a collage or two as one of the listing photos would work because I have so many fabric options.

Right now, I have some not so great photos on a separate website. I've updated the photos so the quality is improved. But I'm debating spending the money to get a new, more professional looking external website and was wondering if you guys had any thoughts?

Cathy Wagner
MariposaCraft

[Former_Member]

Hi Cathy,
What I do for my custom orders is ask for a general description of what they are looking for, then I send them photos in a convo for them to pick from.
And I have an external website as well as my Etsy shop. Beware of high costs for advertising a stand alone website. You'll need to use pay per click and work hard at link exchanges and seo to even be remotely visible against your huge competitors. Not to mention the cost of hosting, shopping carts etc etc. If you have any questions feel free to convo me as well.

[MariposaCraft]

Thanks Adrienne.

I do the convo thing now and it's working. Since I already have my website (I've had it since before I started selling on Etsy) and I'm paying for hosting, I'm just looking to spruce it up and provide better options for custom orders. I don't intend to sell directly on it nor do I expect people to do a web search and find me. That's why I'm looking to spend very little $ to update it but still get a more professional and usable website.

A photographer friend of mine uses Bludomain.com for her site - plus hosting. I'm looking into that because I like their galleries and the templates available. I can get a nice website that's very customizable and transfer it to my current hosting provider for about $100.

Just wondering what everyone else does!

[Former_Member]

I used to take pictures of each fabric I had and then had an album that I directed people too. It was a great idea until it got to be a huge pain maintaining it. Deleting photos when I ran out of the fabrics and couldn't purchase more, taking and uploading pictures when I buy new fabrics. Trying to keep it organized by color/designer/line.

I finally gave it up entirely and now will occasionally just take a few pictures of my "wall" of fabrics. And like you and Adrienne will mostly go with convo's to narrow down specifically what the client is looking for and see what I have to match that.

[TwistedKnickersInc]

i've used clanteam.com to make a free website before, and then you just provide the link. and i've also used an album on my facebook page (tell people to ignore the prompts to log in and they can still browse)
but keeping it up to date is the problem :(

[TheHomespunLoft]

I also do a lot of custom work.. I ask the customer when they start the convo to give me direction.. Then work from there. I too have a "ton" of fabric.
Sometimes if I have a lot to show them in their color.. I just do it via email.. then I can send them lots of choices at a time.

An Album on something like FB doesn't work for me.. It would be too time consuming to create it.. and once a fabric is used up for me-- there is generally no place to get more as I have a lot of out of print fabrics.