Subscribe & Save—Lollipop Delivery

One of the most rockin’ items we offer is six months of lollipop delivery – in which you receive six lollipop collections for the price of five. About half of the candy subscriptions we’ve sold have been gifts, confirming what we suspected to be true: our customers are awesome, thoughtful, and generous :-)

photo by Kevin Keeker

Whether the subscription is a gift or not, I always handwrite a little note each month to say hi, introduce the lollipop flavors, and remind the recipient of which month of the six they’re receiving. Right now I’m weaning myself off mass-produced cards and transitioning to cards created by our artistic colleagues in the handmade community.

I’ve got a few lovely cards made from vintage wallpaper by Sydney Designs, and I was thrilled to get these sweet cards featuring an image of the vintage Atari joystick, by Rakkadeer, among my Schoolhouse Craft conference swag:

photo by Susan Dziadosz

If you’re a subscriber, watch for ‘em! If you’re not a subscriber, why not become one today?

Eye and Ear Candy: Billie Jean

Kate and I think this is still such a fantastic video, all these years later. We love the mad style of MJ’s incredibly shiny (and short) pants, spectator shoes, little tie, and jacket lapels. We love the video storyline. Most of all we love his outsized talent and dancing ability.

THE KID IS NOT MY SON…

What's your favorite Michael Jackson song/video?

Boo!

photo by Kevin Keeker

We would be remiss if we didn't point out that Halloween was only a couple of weeks away! Our little ghost is excited about her Maple Sugar lollipop. Order your Halloween candy from This Charming Candy on Etsy before October 24th to make sure it gets to you in time!

The First Shall Be Last

YAY, DELAWARE!!

It’s been a over a year since we published an update to this post about everywhere we’ve shipped to. In that intervening time, we shipped to all of those remaining states except Delaware, which remained stubbornly beyond our grasp. Such a tiny state – the first state! – and such a lengthy holdout.

We've just passed our 2-year anniversary of selling lollipops on Etsy, and we are thrilled all out of proportion to say that a customer recently purchased a gift to be shipped to a lucky resident of Delaware.

Offbeat Bride @ Geek Girl Con

The only downside to participating in Urban Folk Art last weekend is that we missed the first ever Geek Girl Con here in Seattle. We are mathematicians and former high-tech workers, we are fans of Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, Dr. Who, the X-Files and the collected works of Joss Whedon. And we are feminists who love interrogating the intersections of gender and sci-fi. Dang this blasted timing!

Even though we didn’t get to celebrate geek girl culture en masse, This Charming Candy had a wee little presence at the event, via another equally awesome avenue – the Offbeat Empire, whose Sunday afternoon panel, “Rocking the geek niche: Nerdiness is your superpower” sounds pretty sweet indeed.

So what’s our connection to all this? Offbeat had a pre-con party on Friday night, and we contributed some swag to the goody bags!

First, we got some postcards from Moo.com that show all of our lollipop label colors (the reverse side is about our custom label service):


We slipped those into re-sealable sleeves from Uline…


… like so!


We happened to have 75 extra lollipop bags with custom initials (J+S and T+Z) on hand…


… so we tucked them along with a lollipop into the plastic sleeve…


… like so!


Those stupid strips that cover the sticky stuff were totally static-y and stuck to my hand…


Aaaaand here’s what the 115 finished swag items looked like:


Did you attend Geek Girl Con? Which sessions did you go to? If you attended the Offbeat Empire pre-con party and received our swag in your bag, please let us know what you think of it!

Schoolhouse Craft Wrap-up

Towards the end of September, I attended two of three days at the Schoolhouse Craft conference here in Seattle. It was organized by some of the best & brightest craft businesspeople in the area, as a grassroots way for the crafty community to network with and educate one another. To scan the collective wisdom that attendees tweeted during those 3 days, search the hashtag #schoolhousecraft.

First I should commend the organizers for putting together a truly wonderful and professional event that was very well organized and had lots of lovely little touches to make every aspect of it special – including the official conference bag in my photo at the top of this post. The venue, Phinney Neighborhood Center, had an ideal blend of classrooms and a larger lunchroom/auditorium for mingling.

One of the cool opportunities I had was to have our shop reviewed by one of Etsy’s Community managers, HeyMichelle. Her insights and suggestions were really valuable. One of the changes we’ll be making based on her input is photographing and creating a new Etsy listing for our “regular” bulk order (8 dozen lollipops for the price of 7 dozen). Right now our only large quantity listing is combined with our customized label service. Making it easier for people to order a simple mix-and-match bulk order makes a lot of sense!

Thanks to the excellent Blogging 101 panel, we’re now reading several new-to-us blogs including http://www.fiberfarm.com/ and http://blog.alittlemorelikethis.com/.

There were loads of useful insights in the Connecting With Your Customers panel; too many to list. Here’s just a smattering of paraphrases from my notes (hopefully accurate ones):

As a new business owner, you may think you have to say yes to everything, but it’s more important to think about your values and stick to them – Jennifer Shea, owner of Trophy Cupcakes 

I reward the loyal person by offering the best of what I have, and trust that they will talk me up in places I might not have been able to reach – Kari Chapin, author of The Handmade Marketplace 

I try to strike a balance between what people have told us they’re looking for and what *I* want to do and what is inspiring to me – Rebecca Pearcy, owner of Queen Bee Creations 

Daily someone has a suggestion for a new [design], and they all would be cool, but… it’s not always possible to address them all. Things that were repeated requests across customers do wind up being good sellers when we do them. – Ryan and Lucy Berkley, owners of Berkley Illustration 

Oh, and I was honored to be a panelist on Jessie Oleson (aka Cakespy)’s Guerilla Marketing panel. I hope that the attendees gained some useful tips from us, and personally I was really happy to meet Erica McGillivray, the marketing director and president of GeekGirlCon.

So, YAY for the amazing crafty community! Can’t wait till next year!