Ebay

With our bracelets getting a lot of attention through Facebook we thought it would be a good idea to place these onto Ebay the world's biggest auction website. At first we were unsure on how to place them on, we thought we would have to place them on individually which would take forever to do. But once we went to sell an item we had a pop up box quoting that we can post multiple items onto one listing.


This was great for us as we would save money on placing the items up for sale as well as have more control on how to list them, it also has a category where we can have how many quantities we want of each bracelet. This is a great way for our bracelets to get noticed. After about 15 minutes, we had our page up and away.

Here is how our page looks, there are drop downs with the colours you can have which links to a photo and the size customers wish to have. It cost us 40p to set up the page, and for every bracelet we sell, they take 10% which is 25p per sale. I guess all we can do now is wait to see what Ebay has to show. In the mean time we are busy making bracelets through Facebook. We have asked for people to pay through Paypal if they have it or through the bank.

New Order

Well our new order has come through and we are much happier with the 8mm beads, they are the perfect size to make the bracelets. We have been making a few prototypes just to see how they would turn out as we did not expect them to be perfect the first few times. I have been coming up with the colour schemes as it is easier for me to know what a girl is looking for being one myself. We were quite chuffed on how lovely they looked that we decided to make a E&E photo album on Facebook to see what others thought. Within the first half hour we already had a few ordered, it was great! We decided to sell them for £2.50 per bracelet and you that would include a gift bag. Below are some of the photos of our bracelets.

Chocolate Brown and Caramel

Black and Ivory

Baby Pink and Black

Electric Pink, Baby Pink and Ivory

Purple and Ivory

Navy Blue and Ivory

Some of our friends were really taking a liking to them which was great news for us. With a few orders already requested, we were in business. As more people started to ask about them we started to think that we would have to order more as we had only ordered a few packs just to get us started. After discussing about how much we should invest into the bracelets we decided we would order £30 worth of multi-coloured beads. Many different colour combination's can still be created to suit every person. We may even let people decide on there own colours if they so wish. More photos shall be put up soon.

Changes and Maths

A few things have changed since our last post but for the better. When we got our first order come through i was horrified about the size of the beads, i did not realise just how small 4mm beads were. We was not happy with what i ordered and we would not be able to make money from these unless we done them as a set of 4 or 5. So with that said i went to order more straight away for the same colours but in a bigger size you would only get 70 per pack for £1.39. I did not order much to begin with as we had to make sure this order was going to be correct. We only got a few colours to start with and waited for them to arrive.

With the order having to change we now had to re-think about our sales, how to make profit, what price to sale them at and how to sell them.
Our original idea was to sell each bracelet for £1 when we were going to sell the 4mm beaded bracelets, but this is now been scrapped.
If we only get 70 beads per pack for 1.39 which makes that about 2p per bead. There would roughly be around 20 beads per bracelet, depending on the size, which equals only 40p per bracelet. The cord we got cost us £2.50 for 12 meters. So times 39 by 12, (39 inches per meter, 12 meters in role) which equals 468 divide by 10 which equals 46. So we can make about 46 bracelets per roll. which means the cord per bracelet only costs 5p . The crimp beads cost £2.15 for 500, if we use 1 per bracelet then we could make 500 bracelets out of them. This means that each crimp beads is less an half of 1p, giving us the total of about 45.5p per bracelet.
We could still sell the bracelets for £1 if we wish and still make double the money, but i think we can push them up higher because if they are to cheap they may see them as being low quality and walk away.

Once our new order comes through and we start combining colours together, then we can come up with a price then, but for now i think we could sell them for about £2.00, making four times the money for each bracelet.

Market Stall

Over the weekend i found a couple of jewelery market stalls which were selling the same types of products as Ryan and i are going to do. The first one was in Bromley, they had a wide range of man made bracelets with many different kinds of beads. The only thing i found with that was the prices, they were asking for £6 per bracelet which i thought was to high. Although they had many different designs to choose from i still thought they were rather expensive. They were also being beads and charms on there own, but wanted from £1 upwards for just one. They had quite a lot of interest but i noticed that people were walking away empty handed, which i think proves that they were selling them at to much of a high price. You would normally see a price range like that from a retail store.

This should help us when selling our bracelets because we now have a better understanding of the types of prices to sell them for and they also had different types of ages interested, which helps use to believe that girls no matter what your age is will be interested in such lovely beaded bracelets.

Here is a photo of the stall which i took in Bromley, as you can see there are many different kinds of beads used to make such lovely jewelery.

This is making us more confident about our product and is looking forward to the reaction we will get from people. The only thing that we may have to think about is getting beads which are of different sizes we are currently only have stock of one size which is 4mm beads. If things go well then we shall look into getting a wider range but we do not want to get to ahead of our self's and find that they do not sell and would have a lot of stock that we would have no idea what to do with.