July Schedule for Lollipop Pickups

For over a year now, we've been pleased to offer Seattle customers the opportunity to pick up their orders on Mondays from 4-7 pm  at our kitchen facility, The Wandering Cafe in the Maple Leaf neighborhood. We want to advise of some upcoming Mondays when local pickup won't be happening:

Monday July 9th - you can come to Urban Craft Uprising on the Saturday & Sunday of that weekend instead!
Monday July 23 - Susan won't be back from San Fransisco's Renegade Craft Fair in time for pickups that day, so we're just straight up canceling it.

Thanks in advance for your understanding!

Summery Goodness

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

If our Adventurer's Packs make me think of spring, then it's only appropriate that our Fruit Basket lollipops remind me of summer, with their bright yellow labels and tropical, fruity flavors. It's time to relax and enjoy the sunshiny day!

Cheeriness!

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

These Celebration Time lollipops look so pretty and happy in their blue wrappers. The Bubble Gum lollipops even look pink while the Cherries Jubilee lollipops look red, which is something we've struggled with in the past. So yay all around!

Springtime Adventure

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

I really like how much these new photos of our Adventurer's Pack lollipops remind me of spring. The new-growth green color, the brightness... They make me happy!

Breakfast at Snack Time

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

We don't actually encourage you to eat lollipops for breakfast, but who doesn't love having breakfast for lunch or breakfast for dinner or breakfast for a snack? We've just made having breakfast flavors at snack time a little bit easier.

Happy Birthday Centerpieces

Oohhh, check out how one of our customers used our lollipops wrapped in Happy Birthday labels at a party last week! Pretty!

photos courtesy of Ellen Stearns

Om nom nom

I might be a little hungry as I sit here and type this blog post. And why not? After looking at a lot of pictures of delicious lollipops (not that I'm biased), it's almost time for a snack. And the Spice Rack collection is our most popular variety pack. 

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

Choco-Choco-Chocolati

Susan will be selling our delicious lollipops at the Chocolati in Greenwood tomorrow! This is a last-minute addition to our craft show schedule, so our apologies for the last minute notice. We'll be there with a handful of other local Seattle crafters, who will have a wide variety of goods, not just chocolate and candy. But who doesn't love chocolate & candy, amirite?

Where: Greenwood Chocolati Cafe
When: Thursday morning from 9-12am

New Love Triangle Photos

We've been updating our photos, as you know. The photos that were the oldest are our Love Triangle lollipop photos. Probably because the lead photo of them is just awesome. But we wanted some in our back pocket that were more in vogue with our updated lollipile style. 

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

Not to mention that our old packaging photos were, um, dark. To say the least. These packaging photos aren't super-exciting, but at least you can tell what the package looks like, both front and back. :)

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

 These photos are definitely an upgrade!

Doubling Up!

photo by Kevin Keeker

Brought to you by yet another super-cropped in photo of our new packaging photos, this time of our Adventurer's Pack lollipops. There are 2 lollipops of each flavor in the bag, and I love how the backlighting shows how these Black Pepper Melon lollipops look when they overlap. These lollipops' green color is the bees knees, as far as I'm concerned. (They're also delicious!)

More in extreme photo cropping

photo by Kevin Keeker

Every once and awhile a happy accident occurs. I was posting some new packaging photos in our Etsy shop, and Etsy automatically cropped down the thumbnail to look like the above Breakfast Tray photo. And I kind of love it.

A Matter of Light

photo by Kevin Keeker

This is an angle we don't often take pictures from - this up-top, from-the-side view. I do think it shows an interesting lighting problem though. Those pops in front are getting all the light, to the point that the one on the front bottom is washed out, and the labels in the back are in a lot of shadow.

But with our set-up, I'm also not sure how we'd solve that lighting problem. More light coming in from the top? Putting the white background somewhere else entirely? It's something we'll have to think about.

Becoming (Even More) Professional

As This Charming Candy matures – we’ve been open for business since October 8, 2009 – we always strive to improve our practices and increase our professionalism.

An area where you’ll eventually see this happening is one where you might not think to look: on the back side of our packaging. Now that we’re beginning to work with larger retail establishments such as Made in Washington, we’ve realized that we need UPC barcodes on our products because larger shops use scanners at checkout and internally.

It’ll take some time for us to incorporate barcodes into our existing packaging designs. The upcoming “All of the Above” multipack of all our flavors will be the first product that has a barcode on it.

It’s a weird milestone we probably had never thought about when we started this business, but it’s one I’m oddly excited to be hitting!

Party Time!

photo by Kevin Keeker

Do you have an event coming up? Need to say congratulations or thanks? Someone having a baby? We may have labels for that! Take a look in the events section of This Charming Candy on Etsy, and we may be able to hook you up with what you need. 

photo by Kevin Keeker

Color Schemes: They're Important

When we took photos for our new event lollipops, we largely matched the lollipop color to the label color. But we did snap a couple of pics of the labels with different color lollipops to show customers that they can choose whichever flavor/color they wanted. These two ended up being my favorite.

I lovelovelove this aqua blue "it's a boy" label with the green Vanilla-Cardamom lollipop. But I also adore green+blue in everyday life. So maybe that's not a surprise.

photo by Kevin Keeker

What was a surprise was our guava pink "it's a girl" labels with the rich brown Hazelnut-Coffee lollipops. I mean, I know that pink & brown generally work well together, but this color combination just hit it out of the ballpark. I kind of wish we'd photographed the dozens with these pops instead of the Guava Colada ones. Except not really because the guava pink labels look fabulous with the guava pink lollipops too.

photo by Kevin Keeker

What's your favorite color combination either on lollipops or in real life?

What's the real color?

I have to confess something: photographing our Bubble Gum lollipops and getting that hot, neon pink to show up? Is really, really HARD. This is the color of the lollipop: a fabulous neon pink that reminds you of the 80s and early Madonna videos. It gets used a lot in Etsy treasuries, because it's a trendy color right now.

photo by Kevin Keeker

But when we moved to what we like to call the lollipile photography style, those pops looked red. So red, in fact, that it was hard to tell their color apart from Cherries Jubilee. There's one lollipop down in the bottom of the pile that looks more pink than red, but if I were looking at just this photo? I'd think they were red.

photo by Kevin Keeker

We played around with the lighting and camera settings some to make the lollipops look pinker, but this was the best we could get: half the lollipops still look red, and the labels are NOT that blue, they're way closer to the aqua of the above picture.

photo by Kevin Keeker

We played around for awhile, but eventually threw up our hands in frustration. Either the labels had too much pink in them or the candy looked too red. We're still using the top lollipop photo as the lead instead of the lollipile because we're (ok, *I'm*) too ashamed to advertise our neon pink lollipops as being red. Because they're not.

Anyone have any tips? Because product photography is hard, y'all.

Paying With a Credit Card

Until recently, PayPal has been the only online electronic payment option for shopping on Etsy. But we know that not all customers want to use PayPal for various reasons (my mom, for one).

Good news: Etsy recently started offering US-based shops the ability to accept credit card payments directly through Etsy itself. Many shops have added Etsy’s direct checkout as another payment option – and we are now one of them as shown in this screenshot from the bottom of our Watermelon-Basil lollipops listing:



and here’s what it looks like in the shopping cart:



From there, you’ll proceed through a typical online shopping checkout of entering a shipping address, entering the credit card number, and finalizing your order. All without leaving Etsy! We’re glad to be able to offer more payment options to make online shopping easier for more of our customers.

If you have questions or want more information, this Help article should be just the thing.

PerkelePerkelePerkele

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

photo by Kevin Keeker

We've still got some Perkele lollipops for sale! Head over to the shop if you want to get yours.

The Shadow Knows

photo by Kevin Keeker

The shadow behind the lollipop in this photo of our congrats lollipops just slays me - it's so noir and looming. Not a shot that made it to our Etsy listing, but still a fabulous one.

First Look: All of the Above

After a frustrating couple of months spent searching for a good, attractive way to package a collection of all our lollipops, we finally found something that works perfectly.

The “All of the Above” collection will be packed in a cute and sturdy white cardboard box with a clear plastic lid that fits over it:


Oh my gosh! It’s tall enough, long enough, and wide enough! It’s a bit of a departure for us, in that we usually have the lollipops facing forward with their flavor labels visible:

But with so many lollipops in this new collection – twenty – we realized we needed a different approach. We still wanted you to be able to see all the gorgeous lollipop wrappers in all their colorful glory. 

Our next step is to design new product labels for this awesome box. Stay tuned!