Hello! I hope everyone who celebrates Christmas had a wonderful day. We had a very nice day in our house, our kids were happy and the turkey supper I cooked was well appreciated by all so I was happy. 🙂
I am doing my usual end-of-the-year look back and planning ahead to the next year. 2018 was a bit of a strain but it was also our best year yet for Daydreams of Quilts and we learned a lot. We almost gave up when we were being hit by so many things that were out of our control but at the encouragement of customers, friends and family we have stepped back and taken a look at things and are making some changes which we hope will be good for our customers and for our family business.
One of those changes will be to say Good-bye to our pattern shop on Craftsy. I knew this day would come when Craftsy was bought out so I am not surprised that it’s happened. For those who don’t know, Craftsy had a free pattern marketplace. Designers could upload their PDF patterns and sell them on Craftsy for free. Craftsy did not take a cut and there were no fees (other than PayPal fees.)
Just before Christmas Craftsy (or Blueprint as I guess it’s now known) sent out an email to designers informing them that some pattern shops would be closed and some would be allowed to stay but not all of the patterns would remain in the chosen designers’ shops. In my email I was told I had been chosen to stay. However, when I checked my Craftsy shop today only one pattern remains. (The Pixel Heart in a Pixel Heart pattern.) So I will be closing my Craftsy shop and all PDF patterns can still be found in my Etsy shop. I did have a Shopify site for a couple of years but at $60 CDN a month any funds that came in from pattern sales were being eaten up by the monthly fee to have the website so I closed that site in October. We may revisit having an e-commerce site later in the year.
Although Etsy has upset a few sellers with their recent fee increases (fees went from 3.5% to 5% on sales and postage) and changes to how payments are made (they now take all their fees immediately from the funds generated by a sale rather than billing at the end of the month) I feel that this way is more transparent plus I am happy not to owe them any money throughout the month. I can see exactly what I am paying Etsy for each item I sell now and can adjust my prices accordingly. So I am staying put on Etsy and am actually planning to open two more shops. More on that to come soon. 🙂
We will be offering some custom listings this year as well as some designs we plan to carry throughout the year (rather than one-of-a-kind). We hope our customers will like them. We have a few new pattern designs in the work as well.
Thank you for standing by our side and supporting myself and all the other pattern designers out there as we transition through these changes. Change can be stressful but it can also be a transforming force for better things to come. I am working on new product lines and ideas this week which I hope to have ready to show soon.
Have a Happy New Year!
This is interesting, as up til now the other people I saw talking about the Craftsy thing only had their free patterns kept, me being one of them, this is the first paid-for pattern I’ve seen them keep!
I can recommend Payhip to host your patterns, it’s free to set up and you just link it off your blog. They take a percentage of the sales but it’s not too bad.
Thank you Kerry. 🙂 They didn’t keep any of my free ones which was weird because some of them had hundreds of downloads. It’s okay though, I was thinking of shutting down my Craftsy shop for a couple of years but didn’t because I knew some people preferred to buy their patterns there. I had a Payhip shop but I closed it because I never sold anything there.