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The Seller's Dilemma

For me, taking pictures of items for my shop Say It Ain't Sold! Vintage is always is always a bit of a gamble. The reason being that when I look through the lens there is always a chance that I see what I am selling in a brand new light. Meaning I want to keep it!

It's hard being a seller because you've always got to be impersonal when it comes to listing items.

Honey don't you remember when you wanted me to buy this...?

I live with my boyfriend in a studio apartment in the "nice",and "safe" but expensive part of the city of Chicago. Since my financial situation isn't what I'd like it to be bf pays most of the bills for our nice apartment and I pay for groceries. If that sounds kind of messed up, believe me it is.
I know I shouldn't complain but often times when we go grocery shopping bf will put things in the cart just because they are on sale. Sometimes I don't like what he puts in the cart and so he has to be the one to eat it. This wouldn't be a problem if he did EAT what he insisted on me buying. I put in the cart what we both want to eat and some of the things that I want, like snacks. The things that he puts in the cart are usually sale items like Indian dishes that are too spicy for my taste or frozen vegetables.
What ends up happening is that we both will eat the best things, the things that we were most excited about buying to eat and he will forget about the stuff that he wanted me to buy until I remind him about it a few months later. He doens't like snacks but I do and he eats my snacks. He blames me for buying them in the first place because he can't help himself. Ugh...

Baby Names

I'm not pregnant and I have no plans on being pregnant in the next five years (in fact I could easily see myself never having kids) but for some reason I've become fixated on coming up with an appropriate baby name so I'll be ready when the moment arises. 

Girls names:

Justine (I just came up with this one today)

Nina

Ivy

Simone

Zoe

I had a reverie once where I called my imaginary kid by three different names because I couldn't decide which one I wanted. When I call out to my daughter I want to actually like her name.

Vices

I live on $400 a month and I have clothes from all over the world.

Heel Heels Heels! Nicholas Kirkwood

Can you really walk in those? via The Gaurdian

I am not a heels person. It is my feeling that even if the heels were comfortable I would feel slightly like I was walking on stilts.

My "heels" are Fly London wedge shoes which top out at a whopping 2.5" ^_^

The shoe to the left is Fly London's Yale Wedge. I have a pair in black. They are SO comfortable and funky! At $169 they are my most expensive shoe beside my UGG boots.

Postal Rates to go up,again. from www.walletpop.com

The issue of the rising cost of postage is certainly important for those who buy from small businesses such as those found on Etsy or any other e-commerce retailer who chooses to use United States Postal Service.

For the past few years postal sales have been on the decline because of people's use of the internet for communication and for paying bills, among other things. ll of these were once taken care of by the postal service. And

"With volume down, the Postal Service has fewer pieces of mail to pay the same fixed costs"

I'm not sure what these fixed costs are and this might make for some interesting reading material if I do find info on it.

There is a proposal going through Congress I would assume which would increase the price of postage. Most rates are expected to go up 4 to 6% which doesn't sound like a lot but an increase in shipping charges can be a buzz kill for online shoppers.

Any increase in postage prices will take effect in early January.

The article can be found here:

Postal Rates to go up,again

Myers Briggs Personality Test

My results after I took the Meyers Briggs Personality test:

Introverted (I) 76.67% Extroverted (E) 23.33%
Sensing (S) 63.89% Intuitive (N) 36.11%
Feeling (F) 51.52% Thinking (T) 48.48%Judging (J) 60.61% Perceiving (P) 39.39%

ISFJ - "Conservator". Desires to be of service and to minister to individual needs - very loyal. 13.8% of total population.

Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test

A list of Make-your-own e-Commerce sites you might want to check out

I just thought about compiling a list of eCommerce sites that provide people the opportunity to sell mainly bespoke, handmade or vintage items. This is for myself and for anyone else:

image from st.johnsbury academy website

Winkelf site closed for good due to web host issues
Bonanzle now Bonanza
Smashion
Market Publique
Etsy or course
Ebay obviously
Shophandmade
Artfire
European Etsy.com Dawand


* UPDATE ADDITIONS*

                                                                                                                                                                          Pappa Shop I'm not too familiar with  
                                                                                      this one     

                                                                                      I will have to look into it more.

                                                                                      Big Cartel
                                                                                      Goodsie
                                                                                      Zibbet 
                                                                                      Copious

A few others to consider Magento/Zencart/Volusion/Shopify. Links coming soon!




The other companies that make money from just selling online vintage. You cannot setup a shop on their site

        

                                                                                        image from criticalmiami.com

Violetville
Free People Vintage Loves* outrageous prices

And there are websites that specialize in selling consumer products made in developing nations. These are called worldshops and they might sometimes be apart of alternative trade organizations. Here are a few I know of:


SERRV
Greenheart
10,000 Villages









I will be adding more to this list in the future and doing reviews of the ones I've tried.

New Project LIGHT TENT: UPDATE

This epic project that started off as an idea for a solution to my problem of not being able to catch the sun for picture taking has ended and here are the results!

My pictures SUCK! And with that said let's toast to my next project. Getting a shiny new camera because it has to be the cameras fault that my pictures are bad.

The camera I'm using now is a 4 megapixel Fujifilm Finepix e500 and these are the pictures it took for me:

 
 

The middle picture isn't so bad but generally I think the pictures are pretty dark in a lot of place. The contours of the clothing don't capture all of the light. The strange thing is that the camera is not capturing what I see. The placement of the overhead light clamps gave me a lot of trouble. At first I tried duct-taping it to the ceiling but it came down after about thirty minutes - thankfully on the top panel. My attempt at putting a nail in the ceiling didn't work either. I just settled for putting the nail as high on the wall as possible below the ceiling. I would have preferred to have to light shine at the object and not directly over it. Then again I would have preferred to have a drill and an actual wall sconce to house the light bulb so that I could extend it over the tent and adjust it as needed but we can't have everything now can we?

 When I was buying all of the supplies for this project I had to fight my boyfriend tooth and nail over the light bulbs because even though he had never done anything with photography for some reason he was adamant that I use regular light bulbs and this had nothing to do with the price. I got him to buy two 42 watt CFL's which are 150 equivalent and one 150 watt incandescent because the cfl's can be pretty pricey and I wanted this to be a low budget project.

Hairwrapping

I have what people in the African American subcultural community call natural hair. It is not straight. The picture above is is one I found while searching for hair wrap styles. This is the only one I could find that I liked. A lot of the ones I came across looked like the ones that Erykah Badu would wear

and these are pretty ostentatious in my opinion. I don't want to look like a diva or an African queen. I just want to protect my hair and put it away when I don't feel like dealing with it.

OKAY! No more spending starting NOW...

Wait! Okay maybe after I this:

Southwestern style backpack from Santokivintage. Price $199

I've been into vintage rug/tapestry purse lately of the IKAT Kilim style ever since I found this one from Dusty Rose.

And I really love bonheur's shop on Etsy. She's made some beautiful pieces over the years.

New Project LIGHT TENT

As I've mentioned before, I do sell vintage items on Etsy. I first found out about this website in 2009. I can't even remember how but I get the feeling that I might have been thinking a lot about starting a shop there before last winter. In any event, I started selling in late February of this year. I had a different shop that I do now and it was more for my handmade items than for things of a vintage nature. It didn't go well for me and truth be told I don't think I would like doing it. I kept imagining scenarios where I would get maybe 10 orders (which I never did of course but just humor me) and then have to make the same thing over and over again! Talk about boring! So I guess I like the design side of business more than the putting-things-together side. This doesn't count for the first few times though. I could make something I design probably four times tops. I think efficiency in design is important.

Selling vintage is a much more pleasant experience for me. And I have a lot of confidence in my future as a seller of vintage things. I've never had a ton of confidence in my design capabilities. I don't tend to do well with designing mass marketable things. I think I may be a good artist. I think I have very eccentric tastes so when I design something it might not be attractive or marketable objectively but it might be pretty to me.

So anyway, I've been thinking of a way to make it easier for me to work and take pictures at any time I want. I've been thinking about light boxes a lot lately. I would think having one would make it so convenient to photograph anything I sell. So it wouldn't matter if it were cloudy, I would have my light box, or light tent (which would be way better).
    Searching for fabric I ran across some rip-stop nylon which is supposed to be a good diffusive material that is also heat resistant. I have some metal poles around the apartment from my boyfriends abandoned rep-rap that I might be able to use for the support. So the only thing left to figure out now is how to make it collapsible because space is precious in a studio apartment shared by two people.

Why does everything I do HAVE to be so complicated?!

How shopping for VINTAGE clothing can be REALLY hard.

photo courtesy of creative commons

    I sell vintage clothing on Etsy. The things that can be seen in my shop Say It Ain't Sold! Vintage, are acquired from a variety of sources, and as unremarkable as this might sound, The Salvation Army, is one of them. So I was in there today on a whim because I was looking for some cheap pierced earrings that hopefully had glued on post backs which could be removed. I needed them as replacements for screwbacks for some adorable unsigned Merriam Haskell earrings I found on Etsy.

     I didn't find what I was looking for so I began hunting for some things for the shop. About half an hour into my search I began to get frustrated and I almost gave up. I know I can't be alone in having
the problem I was having. This problem should  provoke many amateur vintage sellers, the problem being: Is what you are buying to sell really vintage?
    Let's face it, clothing that you can buy out of a store or online, clothing, that was manufactured within the last two years can be really cheap. So I'd like to have the piece of mind to know that when I'm asking a premium for something that can be found at any store it's because it's vintage (though the ethics of buying pre-owned clothing period is a conundrum which I'm sure many people are aware of and is something that I might discuss in a later post). So when I'm hunting for authentic vintage clothing I sometimes find it difficult to determine if what I am looking at is vintage at all.
    If you have ever been in a big box place like the Salvation Army you know that they can be overwhelming in terms of the amount of crap I mean things that are there. Though I will say I've never been to any Salvation Army outside of the Chicagoland area (they have them all over the world) so I am only familiar with the starkly lit, the Jesus-Bop, the gray speckled white vinyl floors, and uninspiring metal display racks crammed with clothing, that I have seen at the locations in Chicago.
Perhaps it would be cheating to ask if they could have a department, if you will, for only vintage things? That way it would take the guesswork out of digging!

Survey Results for Buying Vintage!

Buying Vintage Survey

Survey results imminent I promise!

So it's taken me an embarrassingly long amount of time to publish these results. I've got them all up on a spreadsheet and nicely sorted out into graphs and things. Now I've got to figure out a way to get them on here.

Dreams

Sometimes my dreams are so real, or they correlate so closely to my desires, that I have to confirm whether the event in the dream actually occurred. For example, I dreamt last night that one of my mom's prints, that I currently have listed in my shop (which my mom really wants me to sell) acquired a heart (for sellers on Etsy this is good because the garnering of these means that someone likes your item and wants to remember). When I looked in my Etsy shop this morning there is no such thing. It kind of scares me sometimes because these aren't outlandish phenomenons they are subtle, and believable.

Sometimes I even dream about past events or I dream about about the aftermath of embarrassing events. I remember I used to read a lot of epic novels in high school. I don't remember my professor ever saying anything about it to me. In a dream my dream teacher said something really incisive and was so spot on as to what I thought he might have been thinking about my underlying reasons for reading all of those books.

Say It Ain't Sold! Again?!

I'm really greatful for the sale but I hate filling out customs forms! Someone just bought something from my shop that lives in England last week and I just was able to ship it off yesterday. And guess what! Someone else just bought something from my my shop from that same country.

The Evolutinary Psychology of Shopping

"Here's a woman,
she's shopping again
there's no point
trying to understand this"

When I was riding the bus home one day I saw this quote on a shopping bag someone had. I can't, for the life of me, remember what store the bag was from; I do remember that the words were white and they were imposed over an image of a woman from the shoulders down with a multicolored striped dress. I do remember being disgusted by the quote and I do remember why. I would of course feel more comfortable talking about this if I remembered the brand, but since I don't, and I'm not incriminating anything, I shall progress. 

The company might for all I know be an okay company, though the chances of this being the case I think are slim. (and by okay I mean have Fair Labor certified clothing, have eco-friendly sustainable manufacturing processes, maybe be worker owned, etc.) I know for a fact that it was a big brand located on the Mag Mile. I do remember thinking that it wouldn't have been so bad if it were a company like Patagonia, at least something that I could relate to, but I felt that the words were first both enabling and encouraging mindless consumerism and secondly that they were an opportunistic copout for feckless humans (that most of the time cannot help themselves when it comes to pretty things).

I felt that it was enabling the belief that shopping is an accepted habit that one doesn't have to understand. That the Patagonia retailer tries to be socially responsible is something that I can relate to. In the unlikely event that one of their shopping bags were to feature words such as these I would perceive them as an acknowledgement of peculiar human characteristics. 

Please humor me because most of the time I feel like I'm beating a dead horse by talking about this stuff. Most people know about what is "right" and what is "wrong" so to speak and once they know the difference it feels redundant and preachy to speak about any particular issue. But even though I hate redundancy, I like to write and it is part of my character to write about these things, so I shall continue to do so.