Imperial Jasper

We opened a jewelry shop on Etsy this year at the beginning of February. I’ve been busily photographing and profiling and listing jewelry for sale.

Fain Jasper. Named for where we found it.

We have quite a backlog of jewelry of all types due to our love of making it and no real avenue for selling it until Etsy. It’s very handy, though, when birthdays come up.

Biggs Picture Jasper

As part of the process, I’ve been going through supplies and looking for inspiration for making new items. That’s when I realized that we have a very large number of cabochons that we have made over the years. There are so many that both Bernd and I could not possibly make them all into pendants and jewelry. So I decided to list some of them for sale in our shop, jewelrybysyzygy.etsy.com

Fain Jasper with hematite

So yesterday, I selected seven cabochons to start with. I photographed them and wrote up the profiles. I’ve created my own profiling form. This makes it much easier and faster to list the items in the shop because I’ve already worked out the title, dimensions, description, materials list, shipping weight and tags for each item.

More Imperial Jasper

Pricing is also included in my form. That has proven to be the most difficult part of the profile. When I make a finished jewelry item, I keep a running log of the materials used (what’s used, how many, and cost per each). I also keep track of the time it takes me to make the item.

More Fain Jasper

With finished jewelry, you can recover some of the cost of the labor. With cabochons, you recover almost none of it because they require a lot of time to make. And you can’t go only with the cost of the materials because sometimes it’s something you found lying on the ground. So you have to figure out what it’s worth in today’s market. That requires research. I’m working on it.

Picture Jasper. Lots of jasper to begin with. We also have turquoise and jade and petrified dinosaur bone, to name a few.

I have no idea how well cabochons might sell in our shop. I actually still have no idea how well our shop might do. Since opening our shop, we’ve had only three sales and those were to two of our friends.

But we are giving it a shot. We’ll see how it goes.

Courtesy of Pinterest