This isn’t the “Hey, there are new plots in the shop, and you lovely readers get first dibs because I haven’t mentioned them yet” update I’d hoped for when I started the newsletter. Although I’m sure, that moment will come.
This is the “you get to see my struggles with working out what the hell I’m doing” update.
When I started the shop, I decided to have collections; at the time, I thought it’d make sense, plots all fitting neatly into a collection or the catch-all “experimental and one-offs” category.
It turns out I don’t work like that, and everything so far is pretty much an experiment or a one-off.
I realised that without knowing it, this was both a) making me avoid dealing with the shop and b) unhappy.
I have a big hangup about displaying things with “SOLD” on them, in that I feel, or felt, I guess, that it’s important. When I look at someone else’s shop seeing a few items marked as “SOLD” is somehow reassuring. For that reason, I wanted to give the same reassurance to potential buyers on my own online store, that other people were also buying things, so “no” you’re not making a mistake buying one, you, like these other people, have great taste.
But now my shop is pretty much all “SOLD OUT”, and who wants to buy the last couple of items that no one else has purchased yet? Obviously, there’s something wrong with them.
Does that make sense? Am I overthinking this?
So, here’s the plan, which also may make me unhappy and be weird but gotta start somewhere. I figured I’d try to put sixteen items into the shop and always keep it at sixteen items.
When an item is sold, I put a new one in the shop — no “SOLD” on things, no external validation.
When I make a new item that I want to sell, I put it into the shop and remove the oldest one.
There’s a couple of physical shops here in Shrewsbury that I also put my work into, which is more of a vanity “oh look, I have my stuff in a shop” thing, to be honest. So when something is “retired” from the online shop, I can move it to one of those two places before ultimately recycling it.
I’m not sure what that means work-wise. It feels like it ought to be simple, but I have the developer/engineer thoughts coming into my head that I want to tear down the whole shop site and rebuild it… which is when you can tell I’m trying to avoid sorting the entire problem.
The very imminent issue is that I need to get sixteen plots into the shop, which is fine because I have a stack that I’ve been meaning to put into the shop for months, but the whole things above has been stopping me.
Luckily I feel like I actually have the time to deal with these things now.