Hosting Home Parties- Focus On Jewelry Parties-Part 2

This is part II of Hosting Home Parties - See Part I here

Party set up

Start with creating a nice display with your items on a table in the center of a cozy room, use your creative abilities for this one. With the holidays coming you may want to set up a display with faux snow and some other holiday decorations.I would not advise doing anything too elaborate; you do not want to overshadow your handmade creations.

Make sure you have some order forms for taking orders. You can buy carbonless ones at Wal-Mart or any office supply store, one copy for you and one for your guest. Make sure their copy has a stamp with your name and number on it and be sure you get their name, number & address and ask if it’s ok to follow up, or add them to your mailing list.

If at all possible it would be helpful to bring a portfolio of your work. This should be an album of photos of your work, past and present. For items you can recreate, assign them a stock number so you can easily write down the number for orders and revert back to it when filling orders. If you make rings, make sure you bring a set of sizers.

Organize a fashion show.

To further focus the attention on your products, get together some friends and organize a fashion show of your best selling or favorite pieces. Time the fashion show for after everyone arrives and has had time to circulate, look at the display and get some food. Customize the fashion show to match the tone of your jewelry.

Refreshments- This isn’t a pampered chef party, it’s a jewelry party so quit freaking about food! They aren’t expecting a meal. It would be very classy to have a wine and cheese themed party; everyone spends more when wine is involved. You can also find a ton of great wines now for under $15 a bottle, just google it. Other great ideas for refreshments could include hot beverages like tea, coffee or hot cocoa and holiday cookies. This is a great way to get people into the mood for holiday shopping. For summer parties, fresh fruit is always great with iced tea or sangria, try to cut the fruit into pieces and put them on toothpicks for easy eating. Keep in mind that greasy foods will for sure lead to fingerprints on your jewels.

Keep in mind that many people will bring cash to spend at the party so make sure you bring along a change box so you can give change to people who purchase. One thing that can increase the amount of each sale is to accept credit cards, there are many ways to do this. If you have access to a computer at the home of the party you may just want to use paypal. If you have a merchant account set up already for craft shows, use that. Keep in mind that people who weren’t planning on spend much may not bring that much cash or the checkbook but if they see something they like they WILL pull out that credit card. You want to be able to make that happen! Read up and research beforehand to make this a streamline process.

So it was a success! Here’s what to do now!

Create and deliver your orders. Better yet- make sure you collect everyone’s mailing address and save yourself some gas. Pop your orders into a padded envelope and use paypal shipping to print your labels. Most often you can send a piece or two of jewelry locally for $1.52, insurance adds a bit extra. Seriously do this and save yourself a TON of trouble and money.

Make sure your packaging is fabulous! Doing something as simple as printing off clear labels to personalize your boxes is a really professional touch that people enjoy. Take it a step further and order some ribbons from papermart.com at a really amazing price and tie a ribbon in your signature color onto your boxes. Make sure to include a couple business cards and maybe some type of coupon to encourage them to shop with you again. Enclose a little note on hosting their own party and the benefits.

For the hostess- If you’re not hosting your party, make sure you have something set up for the kind lady who hosted the party for you. Give her a choice of a discount on her products, a free product, or an allotment of $ for her to spend on products of her choice. This is all according to how much the total party sales are. With that kind of incentive she’s going to make sure her friends spend that little bit extra. Make sure her guests are well aware of this so they will want to book their own parties.

I know this ia a lot of information to digest, but I hope I have given you an idea of where to start on hosting your own at home jewelry party. It is very easy to have one booked for every weekend and people are always willing to have a get together and earn free stuff! The same principles can be applied to parties for any product line, from candles to hats and scarves.

About the author: I'm Julia Catherine from Julia Catherine Jewelry. I live and work in NJ, im very familiar with all aspects of jewelry creation, sales and even repair. I enjoy creating new jewelry items in my spare time and also work as a jeweler as my day job. My specialty in SASsy is listing creation and tagging, but am willing to give help in all aspects of etsy!