Another in-depth review for you today, or is it? Truth be told, the shop I’m reviewing today needs to do very little to improve, in my humble opinion. That shop, is Waterrose.
Right off the mark, I fell in love with the Waterrose banner. Very nice, appealing and shows the range of products without looking like an Etsy Mini. The shop announcement is short but inviting and the policies are in place on the profile page, which also adds warmth in it’s initial description of where the name of the shop comes from.
The item photography is nice and bright and shows off the cute little items very well. The colors are vivid, the backgrounds nice and basic so as not to clash with the items themselves, the descriptions are strong, and the shipping costs are reasonable. Truthfully, it’s hard to do an in-depth review/critique of this shop as I can’t find anything to really suggest for improvement! The ONLY suggestions I can come up with, and that’s after taking a break last night and looking at the shop again this morning, are firstly that the shop accepts money orders and checks so may want to add something into their policies to protect themselves regarding time for the payments to clear before shipping. Secondly, that the shop needs to fill those empty sections or remove them for now.
Truly, this is a very well-done shop and I enjoyed looking at it. Let’s see if anyone else can come up with some constructive commentary that i might have missed!
Posted by Keith on Friday May 2, 2008 Under Other Crafting
Looking at all of the wonderful sellers on Etsy, I often remember fondly some of the other crafts I’ve worked on in the past. While I’m not about to bore everyone by discussing them all here, one in particular stands out to me, simply because it shows how long I’ve been obsessed with cherry blossoms!
Keith’s Craftworks Products Circa 2006
As you can see, I used to be in the soap and lotion business under my second shop name, Keith’s Craftworks (Mindless Pursuits was just a personal blog back then). I was obsessed with differing scents and loved making everything from lotions to shampoos to body washes. Experimenting with scents was a lot of fun, but what I enjoyed most was playing around with packaging design. Considering I have a background in graphic design/publishing and am an artist, this should be of no surprise to anyone!
My favorite scent, however as well as my favorite package, was the ‘Cherry Blossom Festival’ line.It smelled wonderful and I loved the stock photography that I found to use as the background. I still use that background on my PC today as an occasional wallpaper! I’m currently working on making a cherry blossom logo to be my brand, but we’ll talk about that in a future post. For now, I just thought some might find a quick glimpse of my crafting past to be of interest!
In my never-ending quest to milk every cent out of my art… errrr… I mean, to broaden the appeal of my creations… I have been experimenting with different ideas on how prints, cards and other reproductions might be made. Frankly, because it’s fairly easy to do, everybody seems to have cards and prints of their works and some even have mousepads, puzzles and mugs! I make such items available through sites such as Zazzle and DeviantArt but to be honest, I don’t really like having the same old stuff as everybody else. I do it because I need to make some money in order to keep creating but I hope someday to end my need for those external outlets and focus on my own end-products. Until that day comes, I keep experimenting!
Quick Note: I apologize to those who have tried to comment but have not wanted to register. I had not realised that the need to register had been re-enabled after my last upgrade. I have corrected it and you no longer need to register to post a comment. My apologies for the inconvenience and hope you’ll try again!
Today begins a new and hopefully regular feature for my blog: reviewing other craft and art shops and products that are not mass-produced. To start with, I am going to review an easy target: Freshline Illustration and Design. Why do I say easy? Because for my first review, I’m choosing a seller and artisan that I really enjoy. Thus, it’s a pleasant review for me to write and I’ll admit up front that it is positive. I can’t promise that all reviews in the future will be positive but hopefully they will all be constructive, and artisans will need to request a review before they are featured. But for now, let’s discuss Freshline!
