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How to Promote Your Shop - Portland


Story by EyePopArt Published on September 24, 2007 in Events	Photo by Minda Seibert

Trillium Artisans, a nonprofit organization in Portland, Oregon, USA, will be hosting a special workshop on Wednesday, September 26, for artisans in the community, including members of our group and of the PDX Etsy Street Team.

Our guest speaker will be Ryan McAbery of Littleput Books. This will be Ryan's "dry run" for the class she is teaching at the Etsy Labs in October - "How to Promote Yourself on Etsy - Tips, Tricks, and Secrets from a Successful Etsy Seller."

Trillium Artisans is a community economic development program that empowers low-income artisans by actively connecting them to markets and supporting them in growing their "green" crafts businesses. We offer consignment opportunities through our gallery, our website, and our Etsy shop, as well as credit card processing services, contracting opportunities, small business counseling, and help with product development. The products that we carry are all made from a minimum of 50% recycled, reclaimed, salvaged, found, and "trashion" materials. Our product lines include gifts, women's accessories, home decor, garden, and pets. We promote a triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit for all.

Trillium falls under Etsy's description of a "collective" - "A Collective is a group of people who know each other personally and make things together: either sharing a studio space and/or sharing knowledge." Our artisans do not share studio space but we do have a collective gallery where our work is sold, and one of the ways we share knowledge is through our monthly artisan meetings such as this one.

This project is funded by a grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, which awarded us an Arts Builds Communities grant to maintain our monthly artisan meetings. The meetings are used to educate our artisans on a variety of business related subjects, and to facilitate peer networking.

Past meetings have included field trips to galleries, presentations by bankers, artists' representatives, and boutique owners, and speakers from Portland Supercrafty, Lov.li, and Craftypod.

Selling art and crafts online through Etsy.com is a very hot topic right now, and our artisans are hungry for information and assistance about how to use Etsy and market their work on the site.

The meetings are free to our artisan members and $5 for other community members who are interested in joining us. When we announced the workshop to the PDX Etsy team, the response was overwhelming - it filled up within about 8 hours!

We have approximately 30 people attending the workshop, 18 of whom are Etsy sellers. The remaining twelve are Trillium Artisan members who are interested in starting Etsy shops and will most likely do so after the workshop.

This is going to be an amazing class. We are so grateful to Ryan for donating her time and skills toward helping us meet our goals by showing our artisans and team members new ways to grow their sustainable micro-enterprises.

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