Stocking Up Time

Is it Christmas time yet? Of course not, but August is a good time to start planning ahead for the Christmas selling season, and stocking up on parts and packaging for the Christmas sales rush. I found last year, that some suppliers ran out of stock on certain parts near Christmas time, so I’m making sure to stock up early, so hopefully I won’t run out this time around.

As part of my stocking up, I’ve brought a number of new charms that I’m going to use on keyrings, pendants and velvet chokers, so they’ll be added to my shop within the next few weeks once I’ve taken pictures of them all.

Product Photography – Lightcase

I recently brought myself a new “toy” to see whether I could improve my product photos. I came across a product called the Lightcase that was raising money via Kickstarter to help launch their product idea.

The Lightcase comes flat packed, which you then unfold and clip together, and then can unclip and fold back down when you’ve finished using it. So it’s really great if you don’t have space to have something permanently set up for taking product photographs.

It also comes with three different backdrops that can be inserted in to the Lightcase – black, white and transparent. It also has a hole on the top, so if you use a smartphone camera you can take overhead shots of your products.

I thought it would be interesting to show some comparison shots of what photos I was able to do before, and the type of photo I can take with the Lightcase. (The photos have been taken with the same camera, using the same product etc, and also have been edited in the same way for light levels and cropped using the editing program Gimp.)

On the left is the previous photo, and on the right is the Lightcase photo:

As you can see, whilst the background which is white, is still a similar grey colour, the actual product is less shadowed and comes up a brighter silver colour.

I found that using the transparent background and placing the Lightcase on top of wood, it gave a nice background effect in my pictures.

I like the improvements the Lightcase has allowed me to make in my product photos, it really helps the metal in my products shine and pop out more, from the type of pictures I was able to do previously. The one downside I’ve found is that when the Lightcase has been put up and down a few times, it does tend to twist slightly. This hasn’t hampered me taking photographs, but it might if you tend to want to take lots of top down photos using the hole on top with a smartphone camera, as the smartphone might have issues sitting nicely on top (as the twisting that has occured on my Lightcase is near the top on the sides). However, overall I think it’s a great product and one I will be continuing to use to take product photographs with.

One Year On…

Today Purple Wyvern Jewels is officially 1 year old!

I’ve learnt a lot over the past year, and I’m sure this coming year will teach me a lot of new things too. Purple Wyvern Jewels has changed and grown over the past year, I started out with only making sterling silver and gemstone jewellery, but have added and expanded on that to now include a wider variety of items as I kept on trying out new items and new ideas. Initially, I also was only selling on Etsy, but over the past year have created my own website and tried out Folksy for a few months. (Although I’ve recently not renewed any items on Folksy as I just wasn’t getting the views). Plus having my items on the high street in my local Community Pop Up Shop.

I’m excited to see what this coming year brings, and how my business changes and grows over this next year.

Busy Tuesday

I had planned on creating an Etsy treasury for my “Tuesday Treasury” series, but I didn’t get time to create one this week. There will definitely be one for next week, and unsurprisingly enough it will be Valentine’s Day related.

We had a decent snowfall here at the weekend (which is unusual for where we live), and my little boy was absolutely thrilled. He got to build a snowman, throw snowballs and pull a sledge around.

My next main task for the Purple Wyvern Jewel’s shop is to take photographs of all the jewellery items I’ve made and write descriptions for all of them.