We started selling our handmade gadget cases a couple of years ago. We try and fit in our own projects around client work and the shop was one of them. At the start we had a simple setup: WordPress with the eshop plugin. As we out grew eshop, we began to develop our e-commerce strategy and thinking about the bigger picture.

This is by no means an exhausted list, it’s a summary of the services we’ve tried and our experiences of them.

Amazon (Pro Merchant Account)

Amazon approached us nearly a year ago now and said that they’d like us to sell our handmade phone and laptop cases on their site. We were really excited about this and promptly accepted! However, our experience selling our handmade products on Amazon was a mixed one.

Pros

• You have the potential to reach millions of people!
• Our handmade products were very different to the current gadget cases listed on Amazon. They are mainly made from silicone or neoprene and are *cough* a bit dull.
• Your contract with Amazon is renewed monthly, making it easy to leave at any time.
• Amazon are on hand to help answer any questions you have about listing products, and they are very prompt.

Cons

• Products are required to have a unique barcode (EAN) number. We looked at various sites when trying to decide where to buy our barcodes from, but whether these barcodes were being ‘legally’ sold was a bit of grey area. In the ended we decided to do it properly and register with GS1 (who Amazon also recommended). £204 got us 100,000 barcodes in our number bank (for one year). However, once you’ve purchased your barcodes, you need to renew these every year otherwise they will expire.
• There are vast amounts of gadget cases listed on Amazon and many are cheaply made.
• Sales and feedback reflect your listing position on Amazon so as a new seller it was quite difficult to stand out from other sellers and items.
• You have to pay a fee +VAT (£28.75) each month regardless of how much you sell.
• They require you to have a minimum of 30 products in order to launch your shop.
• It took us quite a while to list our products. They’ve created a very powerful system but it’s a bit of a beast to use.

We decided to close our Amazon seller account a few months ago due to disappointing sales. Their suggestion to this was to buy plastic screen protectors and list them alongside our products, which wasn’t really going to fix the problem.

This experience taught us a valuable lesson: know your target market! Amazon is all about stacking products high and selling them for the best price possible. toggle are the opposite, we create limited run products created with love and sell them to people who appreciate the time and effort that goes into handmade products.

Folksy

“Folksy is a place to buy handmade things, and for makers to sell their work and find supplies. Based in the UK, Folksy aims to reclaim craft and showcase talented makers and their work.”

Pros

• A very supportive and friendly community of crafters. Many sellers regularly showcase other sellers’ Folksy products in ‘Folksy Friday‘ blog posts.
• Low commission rate of 5% per sale.
• Low listing fee of 0.20 GBP per item.
• Folksy is smaller than sites like Etsy, so it’s easier to stand out.
• We’ve had quite a few customer orders for laptop and phone cases from Folksy customers.
• They are trying hard to promote the site with things like the ‘Folksy Festive Sampler‘.
• They’ve made quite a few updates to the system which is making it easier and quicker to list products.
• You can add stock levels to each product.

Cons

• It can be a bit of a ghost town at times – but I think this is in part down to how much you promote your Folksy shop.
• It costs 20p to list an item. Although this is a very low cost, it soon adds up if you are listing lots of items. If your items do not sell you’ve made a loss straight away.
• Listing products is not difficult, but there are ways this could be improved.
• The site design doesn’t look as ‘polished’ as some of the other third party sites.

Etsy

“Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers.Our vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice:Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade”.

Pros

• Etsy is always innovating with new site features.
• It has a vey active community: teams, virtual labs, forum and events.
• The website looks great and makes it easy for buyers to get sucked into a world of beautiful handmade goods for hours (guilty!).
• Etsy is branching out across Europe.
• A low commission rate of 3.5% per sale.
• Low listing fee of 20c.
• You can embed your Etsy listings onto your website as widgets.
• Listing products is very easy, especially with features such as shipping profiles.
• You can add stock levels to each product.

Cons

• Etsy is becoming a very big community of crafters (which is excellent), but due to the volume of listings it’s easy to get pushed deep into the site very quickly.
• Payment is not integrated into the checkout process – which means the buyer is not required to proceed through PayPal in order to complete their transaction. This has resulted in us having a couple of orders that were never paid for.
• It costs 20c to list an item. Although this isn’t much, it soon adds up if you are listing lots of items, and if your items do not sell you’ve made a loss straight away.

Notonthehighstreet.com (NOTHS)

“Everything you see or buy on notonthehighstreet.com comes direct from the small, creative British business that designs, makes or sources it. We simply bring these unique businesses together under one roof making it easy for you to browse and shop.”

Pros

• NOTHS are very active when it comes to promoting the website both online and offline.
• They have a fantastic product listing system, which they are always improving.
• They conduct seller surveys which are considered when improving areas of the site.
• Very good seller support for issues and technical queries.
• They provide sellers with style guidelines for the site. This results in listings looking professional and coherent.
• As a buyer, it’s very easy to find and browse products.
• Payment is integrated into the system, so buyers have to pay for goods for the order to be complete.

Cons

• Selling on NOTHS is by application only.
• If your application is successful, you have to pay a joining fee. This is a large initial investment, but it does give you ‘membership’ for life.
• NOTHS take quite a high commission of each sale +VAT.
• Advertising costs for the catalogue and gift guides are high. Unfortunately they do not provide many low cost advertising opportunities at this time.
• You cannot link to your own website on any material sent to the customer with their order. We have had to re-design our shop tags since selling with them because we used to include a link to the the toggle website.

toggle website

The toggle website is powered by WordPress. We use the Shopp plugin as the base to run our shop and manage our orders.

Pros

• It allows customers to buy our products directly from us rather than a third party site.
• We have full control over the shopping experience we provide our customers.
• No commission or listing costs.
• We have been able to fully brand and customise our shop.
• We are directly building our brand.
• The shop looks professional.
• We were able to plan for shop growth from the beginning.

Cons

• Creating our shop has been a larger cost in the short term (but will save us money in the long run).
• Bug fixing and updates are a big responsibility. When selling through sites like Folksy and NOTHS, this is done automatically for you.
• Large time investment.
• The checkout is controlled by PayPal which takes a cut of each shop sale.

Conclusion

Custom solutions

Custom solutions offer you great flexibility and can sit directly on your domain. They take longer to set up but in the long term you are building something unique to you and your products.

Third party sites & handmade marketplaces.

Selling on third party sites is a fantastic way of spreading the word about your company and it’s products. Selling on these types of sites can be a compromise (site design, layouts etc), but it offers you a great deal of exposure. Although we have our own online shop, we continue to sell on third party sites for this reason.

For us, the best solution has been to use a combination of our own site and third party sites.

Tips for selling your handmade products online

• Are there already a lot of people selling what you make on a particular marketplace? If so, think about your USP (unique selling point) and use this to decide whether it will be the most beneficial place for you to sell or not.
• The more sites you sell on, the longer listing products will take. This might sound very obvious but it’s something I didn’t appreciate when setting up shops in the beginning. Different sites will have different guidelines for listings – some have none at all. Look for ways to standardise your listings and photos.
• Take the best photos you can. Generally, products that get featured on other blogs and websites are those with good photography.
• Know your target audience and where they are likely to be shopping.
• If you’re thinking about creating your own online shop but don’t know where to start, try services like Folksy. From using their systems you’ll be able to decide what you do and don’t like.

We’d be very interested to hear about your experiences with any of these services or others you’ve tried. Feel free to leave us a comment! If there’s anything you’d like to ask us, get in touch.

It’s been a while since we’ve created any new stationery designs. Our last stationery products were made from photos we’d taken using our vintage cameras. We sold the last of these cards and postcards over Christmas and decided this range would be discontinued as we wanted to experiment with illustration instead.

A month or so ago we created some new shop tags:

We loved creating this hand drawn type and wanted to use the technique to create some illustrations. Our leather bird laptop cases have been selling really well so we’ve combined the motif from these cases with our new type design.

The wing area of the bird can be personalised with either a name, a short message such as ‘happy birthday’ or it can be left blank.

You can check out the card in our shop or contact us if you are interested in stocking this card in your own shop.

This project explored the use of story telling within our society and culture as a means of helping consumers to understand the background behind the products they were buying. So, as makers of handmade gadget cases, we were ideal candidates for the brief!

The outcome of the project was a piece of editorial design describing the maker, their products and the philosophy of their business.

We went to see our groups work on Friday – and were so pleased with what they made, we decided we would showcase the projects on our blog…

Emily Wright

Emily Wright Design »

Mark Walter

Mark Walter on Behance »

Katie Heward

Katie Heward on Behance »

Dan Annett

Dan Annett on Behance »

Ash Jordan

ashjordandesign.co.uk »

Manjing Yu

Manjing Yu on Behance »

We get a parcel in the post and the packaging goes into a box for reuse. We save the lot – bags, foam beans, tissue paper and bubble wrap. You can imagine how it starts to look around here at Christmas! You’re probably wondering why on earth we’re telling you this – well it’s because we have been thinking about how we package our shop products for shipping.

When we created the shop, we wanted to make sure that were responsible with the amount and type of waste we created. We use alot of upcycled materials and keep all our offcuts and scraps for other projects.

We also try and use as little packaging as possible for our actual products. Each case has a small handmade card tag attached with string and is wrapped in paper for protection – at the moment we are upcycling old maps from the 70′s. However, the one thing we’ve found ourselves continually needing to buy is jiffy bags. They aren’t the most environmentally friendly choice of packaging because plastic is glued to the paper, making them harder to separate for recycling. But

1. They protect goods in transit – the bubble wrap layer makes them resistant to water and protects the case from cuts and scrapes.
2. They can be reused. Reuse is always preferable to recycling.

When you buy something online, most of the time it arrives in a brand new jiffy bag, box or bag. People have come to expect it. You associate new goods with new packaging. But this got us thinking – why are we buying all these jiffy bags when we have a whole heap of used bags here already?

So we have decided that going forward, our products will be sent to our customers in used packaging (where possible). Although this may not look as nice, it will greatly reduce the amount of jiffy bags we need to buy, creating less waste when the product reaches it’s buyer. If everyone reused a jiffy bag at least once, think how much packaging waste we could all save!

We have created a label for our reused packaging to let people know why they are receiving their order in a less than perfect bag. And we hope that this will encourage reuse of packaging from toggle shop products,

“I know I know! I may be a bit tatty, but before I retire I’ve got plans to see the world! Preloved packaging, from toggle.”

You can see some of the photos from it’s creation here:

The label has been hand cut from lino and took a whopping 4 hours to cut out.

After searching for the perfect wool and make some prototypes, the cases are ready. Each case is hand knitted from soft, lightweight merino wool. They are made for the iPhone but will hold most similar sized or smaller phones.

We’ve introduced a custom order option for this style, giving you endless colour combinations!

To order: add the custom knitted striped iphone case to your trolley and then specify a body and stripe colour in the additional notes when you enter your address etc. If you want a colour that’s not in the wool swatches, drop us an email and we’ll see if we can get hold of it for you.

Custom cases are knitted to order and therefore take 7 days.

Take me to the toggle shop! »

Between projects, we’ve been busy planning some new ranges for the toggle shop, so I thought I’d share what we’ve been up to.

In the near future we’ll be introducing some knitted goods. Our iphone cases have received great feedback, so we thought this would be a good place to start. The new range of knitted cases are based on stripey vintage sports socks.

Image source: Richard and Gill on Flickr.

Sneak peaks

Each case is hand knitted with Debbie Bliss merino wool. This wool isn’t the itchy sort your Grandma use to knit jumpers with – its very soft, keeps its shape, lightweight and can be machine washed at 30 degrees. For our crafty readers: this wool also knits up with a lovely even tension.

In the near future, we are hoping to offer a ‘custom’ knit option for these cases. The idea being that you’ll be able to choose your body and stripe colour.

We’ll let you know when the cases are ready for sale!

After weeks of quietly beavering away behind the scenes, we have a new website, a new office and are pleased to announce a new way of working – the toggle Design Laundry Service™

Office

Weve moved the toggle-plex down-river from its original site near Staines to just south of Tower Bridge. Its a lovely old London brick warehouse, tucked away down a side lane. It even has a tiny roof terrace for the one or two days of summer we may have!

This is a quick peek of our new office – well give you the full Cooks tour later in the week.

Website

The biggest change for our new website is that we have moved to WordPress. This doesn’t mean we are abandoning Pixie, we just wanted to try something new. As soon as we have a couple of minutes, well write a separate post all about the intricacies of the new site. For now, here are some top-lines on our favorite new features…

Shop

By popular demand weve finally integrated our handmade craft skills into the business and launched a shop. Were currently selling iphone cases and gorgeous postcard packs – but keep checking back because we are planning to add lots of other toggle branded goodies in the near future.

Going mobile

We also felt it was time to build a proper mobile friendly version of our site – and so we did! Visiting from a mobile device will automatically serve you a simplified (but still beautiful) version of our website. We’ve tried and tested it and were happy, but would be very interested to hear any feedback you may have – good or bad…

toggle design laundry service ™

When we launched toggle we wanted to set up a different sort of operation. For a while now we’ve all felt quite deeply that to keep our standards high (and our clients happy) our business practise needs be sustainable – in the way we run it as well as environmentally. So after many late nights thinking and talking it through, we’ve changed the way we work – and this new way of working is called the toggle design laundry service™.

We have opened a toggle shop on Etsy (a community of people who make things by hand). At present, we have iPhone and mobile phone cases for sale, but plan to launch more handmade items in the future.

Here is a sample from our first batch:

Providing this phase goes well we will be looking at expanding both the shop and the products we sell into the year. We look forward to welcoming our first customers!