Friday Interview with Butterfly Design

1.Tell us a little bit about yourself and how and when did you get started with arts and crafts?
I am a middle school librarian from Boston MA. I started knitting scarves during grad school to help me concentrate during lectures. I found that when my hands were busy I could listen better. But soon my friends got sick of me giving them as gifts, and then when they started to get married, well I had an entire new generation to knit for.

2.What is the main thing you make and sell in your shop? What else do you make or sell?
I mostly sell cotton and organic cotton handknit baby hats. I also sell handknit baby sweaters.

3.Where do you get your inspiration?
I love bright fun colors, and as a children's librarian I get a lot of inspiration from picture book art, so I enjoy selling hat and books sets.

4.What are your favorite materials?
The organic cotton. It took a while, but I found a really snuggly-soft brand, and I like knowing that I am doing something good for the environment as I make a product.

5.What advice would you give other Etsy sellers and those interested in opening up a shop?
Take the time to do it right. Make a banner, list your location, take good pictures in good light, and be accurate in your descriptions. Prompt responses and attention to your customer goes a long way. There is a debate as to relist every day or several times a day, I just relist as things are going to expire, but I have enough options in my shop to do so. I find having at least a couple of pages of options is preferable to searching. And use your tags wisely, what best describes your item? I am a little biased, as I do keyword searching all day, and teach it to students, but I try to think of accurate keywords to describe my hats as someone would search them.

6.What is your Etsy shop address and name? Where else can we find you?
My Etsy shop address is butterflydesign.etsy.com and I am known as butterflydesign.
I also have the domain name mybutterflydesign.com that links right to Etsy. I have listings at other places, but no real sales, not like on Etsy.
My blog is at mybutterflydesign.blogspot.com

7.How did you come up with the name of your shop? What does it mean?
My grandmother calls me her "Little Butterfly" so I have always loved them. It just seemed right to have the word Butterfly in the name of my shop.

Prepared by
Tricoteria