New Places to Sell Your Handmade Jewelry

Have you ever stopped to consider how many potential places there are for you to sell your handmade jewelry? A quick perusal of the yellow pages will give you tons of ideas for selling your jewelry either wholesale or on consignment to a variety of types of retail outlets. Here's just a partial list I came up with. Hopefully these will spark even more ideas for you:

1. Craft galleries
2. Art galleries
3. Nail salons
4. Hair salons
5. Bridal shops
6. Gift shops
7. Clothing stores
8. Coffee shops
9. Christmas stores
10. Hospital gift stores
11. Hotel lobbies
12. Pet shops
13. Museum stores
14. Shoe stores
15. Religious book stores
16. College book stores
17. New age stores
18. Food coops (New age jewelry sells well here)
19. Retirement homes

This is by no means an exhaustive list. The point is that there are probably many outlets that you haven't considered other than the obvious clothing and jewelry related stores.

If you happen to make handmade jewelry for a focused niche market, other outlets become available to you. A lady whom I'm acquainted with designed a very clever line of teapot jewelry. She made a nice color brochure and starting marketing her line to tea stores and tea rooms across the country. She can barely keep up with the demand!

Is there a way you can modify your jewelry to meet the needs of a particular niche? For example, you could design a line of necklaces for small dogs who are pampered by their owners. I'm sure the pet stores in your area would love to see what you have to offer.

By no means should you restrict yourself only to outlets in your area. Plan on calling stores in cities within 2 hours of you. Schedule appointments to show your jewelry to a variety of stores in that area on a particular day. Once you've established your accounts, you can make a trip every few weeks to restock your stores in that particular area.

If you're successful selling in retail outlets on a consistent basis, you might want to consider using the services of a jewelry rep to free up more of your time to grow your business. A jewelry rep wil market your handmade jewelry to stores in other areas. In return, the jewelry rep is generally given a 15% commission. This small commission is well worth it when a jewelry rep can bring in a nice volume of orders for you.

We'll discuss how to find and use the services of a jewelry rep in a future posting. Until we meet again, may I suggest that you dust off the cover of your yellow pages and see what new retail outlets you can come up with for your particular line of jewelry?

Thanks for reading. :-)

Kristie