The 'inspiration' section

Lol :joy: @HelenSmith

Would you go to a large company and ask for the 'trade secrets, methods and recipes, list of suppliers? I don’t think so they’d laugh at you and get ā€˜security’ to remove you.

So why do we think it’s all fine and dandy for small one person soul traders to freely give this type of information away

We spend time and learning our trades often paying people to teach us, we spend time experimenting and perfecting our techquines, time spent find just the right supplier.
All this time and research and development costs us. Why oh why would anyone give that away??? Just because we are not large companies?

If we want to be seen as professional businesses or not?

We need to put on our business heads.

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Not everyone does, though. Some item descriptions are pitiful. Others are full of information, so lengthy to read, and highlighting this info in a separate box wouldn’t be a hassle to do. The idea behind it is to differentiate between those, like yourself, who genuinely craft items, and those who glue one item to another, or even buy in items to sell on.

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I can’t really see a ā€œhow I made itā€ section stopping the resellers - its quite simple to write ā€œI knitted itā€ or ā€œI carved this piece of woodā€ etc even when you didn’t. I suppose it might stop some of the crafts where the technique is perhaps not so obvious but its still open to misuse.

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I used to cut and paste a description of of my making process in every listing until I was told that cutting and pasting confuses search engines. I still make it clear that everything is made by hand. Perhaps if the shop I keep reporting that is selling bought in charms and chains actually had to say ā€œI made this charm by handā€ or ā€œI made this chain by handā€ she might realise that she is misleading people (which surely is illegal?)

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That’s really my problem with the section, I have 80-odd listings which are all a variation on the theme of ribbon-flowers-made-on-a-flower-loom - it’s hard enough to give them all different descriptions (tbh I have failed miserably) without trying to find 80 different ways of saying how I made them as well! Which is why I’d rather just say it once in the meet the maker section.

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If you think I’m secretive now you should have met me when I worked in drug development!

Lol I think that proves my lecturer’s point about the different areas for different people!! :smiley:

The problem with just having information in the Meet the Maker section is that the person I’m thinking of does make by hand a minority of the things in her shop, but doesn’t differentiate in the listings…

Just to add a bit of light relief. Picture how one of the big guys would show ā€œhow we made thisā€. Rats running over their stock, and doing unthinkable things in the process. People working to keep a whole family on $2 a day.
The meet the maker section must be hard for new sellers on Folksy to find, as quite a few don’t fill that section in. So maybe an easier way to find this might be an idea.

Yes I think you must be right about new shops not knowing about the Meet the Maker part as most don’t put anything in there.

Also people have come to the forum and when someone mentioned they need to fill that section is they’ve not know how to get into that section or in fact there was a meet the maker section.

@memicrafts and @EileensCraftStudio its not obvious on the dashboard - I went looking for it before I suggested an expanded meet the maker page. I knew that it existed but it still took me a while to find it clicking on pretty much all the tabs on my dashboard in the process. We know it as ā€˜meet the maker’ but there is no tab called that and the profile tab that it is in is way down the bottom of the dashboard so I’m not surprised that newbies aren’t aware of it. I’d like to see it given a tab of its own (called meet the maker page) under the shop settings header (please Camilla @folksycontent).

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I have to agree, it’s totally hidden and not part of the process when you set up a shop, so it’s really hard for new sellers to find or know they should fill in. I flagged this issue up with the team a couple of weeks ago, and it is on our list of things to change.

I also totally agree that it would be great to have a better Meet the Maker page, and one that’s much easier to navigate to. I’m hoping that’s going to happen this year, but it’s quite a big job - Doug has patiently explained to me why and it’s something do with it being on the old code base, and that we have to update all that first before we can start work on it. But I’m crossing my fingers and still pushing for it…

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ā€œOld code baseā€ wow that sounds technical to me, Doug deserves a piece of cake when he’s sorted that out.