A bit of a make over!

If you've previously visited our Esty Store, or taken a look at our blog before you may notice some things have changed. Namely the looks of our banners and graphics!

Original store banner.

This was our original store banner. Crystal was gracious enough to sit down with me and create it on the fly after I had spent hours reading the Etsy message boards. Everyone seemed to say "No banner, No sales", which of course made me have a slight nervous breakdown and call her in a hissy.

After some very fast talking, some cropping, some cussing, some whining, a bit of squishing, and a lot of tweaking our store banner was born. Considering it was done on the fly, and from scratch we were both exceedingly pleased with it.

We have been open for almost 5 months now as a formal online store, and I've been doing a lot of looking around and asking other successful sellers what they did in their infancy as an online store. The general response was a lot of changing, and tweaking, and perfecting. This got me taking a good long look at our online presence and what we could do to be more appealing to customers that we would, unfortunately, probably never have the pleasure of meeting face to face. After retaking as many product pictures as my poor camera and mind could handle (for the time being), I started noticing that our banner and graphics could use some tweaking. So I kidnapped Crystal and chained her to my dining room table and threatened her until she produced an awesome banner!

Ok! So I didn't kidnap her and chain her down, I told her if she came over and helped me I'd feed her... twice.

Yes, here she is hard at work. It ended up not just being a shop banner that she worked on for Serenity in Chains. I also ended up getting her to create the lovely Blog header that you now see above, as well as tweak our logo, adjust our business card templates, and start on the vending banner (a 6ft by 2ft work in progress).

It only was a total of 5 hours of work. If it wouldn't have been for the fact that I kept her in caffeinated beverage, and played silly YouTube videos to distract her I'm pretty sure I'd be missing an eye right now.

Is that a happy dance, or did I break it?

I am very fortunate that she can do this stuff for me. I'm not computer illiterate, quite the contrary. But if I can bribe someone else to do my digital art with poorly cooked cuisine, I'm all about it.

And for the record it as Blackened Chicken sandwiches and fries for lunch, and Eggs and Chorizo, hash browns and tortillas for dinner.
Yeah, we played it healthy today (that was my heart screaming you heard).


However, even after hours of going back and forth, of picking pictures and cropping, and cropping and cropping and cropping, and shuffling them around we were finally able to come up with a basic store banner design that we both liked, and that I thought would be attractive to customers. If you have a moment, take a look and compare it to the old one. We would love some feedback!