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It's Christmas in July!

How Top Seasonal Businesses Maintain Cash Flow and Survive the Off-Season

Many handmade businesses sell seasonal products, and even those that don’t are affected by the seasonality of craft fairs, art shows, farmers markets, and the like. Most of the advice on setting up your seasonal business to survive year-round comes down to socking enough cash away during the fat times to survive the lean ones. That’s good advice, but your seasonal business should do more than simply survive. Here are four ways to not only survive, but thrive for all twelve months of the year. Continue reading “How Top Seasonal Businesses Maintain Cash Flow and Survive the Off-Season”…

A lego version of Jeff Daigle at Jeff’s WooConf 2017 talk.

WooConf 2017 Presentation: Moving from Etsy to WooCommerce

One of dbdc’s core services is helping artists and makers with growing businesses make the move from Etsy to an online store of their own. Usually I recommend using the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress, which is powerful, easy to use, and open source.

I had the honor of speaking on the subject at the 2017 annual world-wide WooCommerce Developers’ Conference, a.k.a. WooConf 2017. The conference itself was an amazing opportunity to meet people from all over the world who contribute code, provide customer support, write plugins, and build stores, and run businesses using WooCommerce.
Continue reading “WooConf 2017 Presentation: Moving from Etsy to WooCommerce”…

Vertical columns of green characters on a black background, as seen in The Matrix.

You Need an SSL Certificate. Here’s Why, and How to Get One.

HTTPS, SSL, tokenized transactions—if you sell anything online I’m sure you’ve heard the words before and have some sense of why they’re important for ecommerce. Without HTTPS and SSL Certificates all of your online transactions would be basically open for anyone to steal. But I still see stores out there without SSL Certificates, sending data over plain old, unprotected HTTP instead of HTTPS. HTTPS and SSL are important now—and they’re going to be getting a lot more important to Google.

Continue reading “You Need an SSL Certificate. Here’s Why, and How to Get One.”…

Jewelry from Ashley Shenkein‘s Collection

5 Keys to Building a Really Successful Maker Business: An Interview with Ashley Schenkein Jewelry Design

Ready to take your maker business to the next level?

Learn a few lessons from Ashley Schenkein. She runs the highly successful Ashley Schenkein Jewelry Design. This maker sells her work at her studio in Denver, in shops across Colorado and California, and on her online store at asjewelrydesign.com. Schenkein amasses thousands of likes on her beautiful and simple jewelry, which sells at competitive price points.

I sat down with Ashley for an interview, and gleaned five tips from her rise from conventional day job to designer extraordinaire.

Continue reading “5 Keys to Building a Really Successful Maker Business: An Interview with Ashley Schenkein Jewelry Design”…

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