Money Making - Second Attempt

In my further attempt to generate an additional income of $150 a week I fell in love with the idea of making my own jewelry and selling it at a profit. I have seen what crafts people are selling in the local Saturday market, I figure it must be easy to make and the learn that most of the pieces have a markup of anything between 500 - 1000%

For me though, this was just a stupid idea. I do not have an eye for detail, I am clumsy and I don’t have great taste in fashion. So what do I decide to do? Invest some money, purchase a lot of jewelry pieces from a national craft warehouse and decide I will make and sell jewelry myself. I was surprised when I found it pretty easy to make and ended up with over 50 pairs of earrings, rings and necklaces and it was quite a pleasant way to spend a rainy afternoon.

I hadn’t however, considered how I would sell my new range. I concluded that TradeMe (New Zealand’s version of Trade Me) was my best choice and spent longer putting the listings on auction that it took to make the bloody things. To make matters worse because of the competition online I placed the items at a very low reserve (assuming it would attract more people to bid) and over the course of a week sold a quarter of them at about the same cost it took to buy the pieces in the first place then the auction cost, the shipping and finally the winning fee you have to pay to Trade Me for every item that sells! To make things worse as I was packing some of the rings to post, the adjustable ring pieces were snapping off as the craft glue wasn’t strong enough. I attempted to fix this issue with superglue despite the fact that I know I am not trained to use superglue and should avoid it at all costs, I have never had a good relationship with superglue.  As a normal person (not me obviously) may expect the superglue got everywhere, all over the back of the rings, up the sides and even burnt through some of the plastic cameo’s melting the design on the front, my fingers were sticking together, it was on my clothes and all over the pages of my nearby diary. I separate my fingers as wide as I could and resolved to sit completely still, not move or touch anything until everything dried. What a fucking disaster! I cleaned it up, attempted and failed to fix the sold treasures and decide to email the successful bidders and offer a full refund. Now I have refunded all the money, minus what I had to pay Trade Me for the action and the winning fee and have a shitloads of ruined jewelry that needs to be binned. Another Epic Fail!