Art print advice: how I ship my art on Etsy

hi everybody I have been a professional artist working full-time selling at my prints and original paintings on Etsy for about four and a half years now and I'm quickly approaching my 1,000 sale on Etsy and I wanted to create a video today to share with you how I package and ship my prints prints are a big seller of mine on Etsy and during the last four and a half years I can really about count on one hand the customers that have come back to me with all of those sales that have received a damaged print maybe four or five at the very most so I'm pretty confident in the way that I ship my prints and I thought that you might want to take a look so that if you are just starting out on Etsy or maybe you've been doing it for a while and you're looking for a better method of shipping your prints that hopefully this video will be helpful to you so enough chitchat we'll go ahead and get started and I'll show you my shipping station and exactly the process that I use to ship my prints so let's head over there now okay so this is my shipping station this is what it looks like and this is where I prepare my prints for shipping and we'll start over here on the right hand side and the first thing that I have is a good paper cutter I bought mine on Amazon and I made sure that I got a good one I was using a really cheap one to begin with and I was so frustrated with it because I couldn't get a clean edge and it just did not do a very good job I was buying blades all the time so I finally did have to splurge and get a really good one and I recommend that you do that right off the bat because if you don't you're going to end up splurging for a good one anyway I can guarantee it especially if you do it often enough and I use mine several times a day I have this for several years and it works beautifully the kind that I have is a Carl and it cuts paper up to size of 15 inches and let's see 12 inches wide that is the the width and then the height of this obviously you can cut something that's longer you just have to slide it through but this is the overall size of the cutting area this is a great cutter I can't recommend it enough so if you print from home then you'll print your print out and then you'll bring it over here to the cutter and you'll cut it down to size so moving over here I am going to share with you a tip that I have for backing board I use this type of it's like a rigid it's like a rigid mat board except it's a it's just a backing board it's acid-free this is an 11 by 14 size I get mine off of ebay sometimes I go to clear bags calm sometimes I find better prices there even though their shipping is pretty high they will have a sale every once in a while so keep your eye out on that or search for coupons but most the time I buy my backing board off of ebay and so I have mine just it's been pre-cut 11 by 14 now one tip that I have for backing board if you have a place like Hobby Lobby or Michaels sometimes they will use their discarded matte board and they will bundle it up and sell it and I just just actually found this I haven't even opened it yet from Hobby Lobby and there's about 20 11 by 14 Matt in here and I paid 10 bucks for about 20 of them and that is a really good price because the cheapest 11 by 14 Matt that I have found it ends up coming out to about a dollar 23 for me to ship one eleven by fourteen print with the backing board just the backing board costs me a dollar twenty three on average by itself so obviously if you can find it like this it's you know it comes out to about fifty cents I can't find these all the time but when I do I stock up on these so that I highly recommend I think it's a great great deal um but either way you go if you can't find anything like this at your local Hobby Lobby or Michaels on eBay a great place to go for backing board so I have my eleven by fourteen backing board here and the next thing that I have are these sleeves these are rigid plastic sleeves and they have glue on the back you just pull the strip of glue off and then you slide your print in you slide your backing board in and then you can fold it over now I have one here that I've got about ready to go out then I will show you I've got my Black Panther here and I've got it in one of these plastic sleeves I get these off of ebay also on eBay is a great place to get packing material I recommend that you go there first so I've got my Black Panther here in the sleeve I have the backing board on the back I have my business card in here as well and then when I have everything in then I just close it up I take the little strip off and I close it up it's important to have something like this protecting your artwork because if you don't and it gets wet from the weather you never know what the weather is going to be like where you're shipping it to if you don't have something like this your print could easily get damaged and plus it just looks professional when you have backing board I know a lot of people they take their prints and they put them in the sleeve and then they just tape the print to like a larger size backing board I've not had a problem doing it this way this works really really well for me and plus I think this looks like how you would see a print for sale at an Art Fair and so I try to keep up so just so that it looks consistent to when I do sell at art fairs one thing that I don't have ready for this yet is and I just do this for all of my prints that I sell I include a ham written note and I usually print out or have on hand several previous works of mine and depending on what a person has purchased is usually which one that I get now if someone for example if somebody purchases one of my bird prints then I'll include a small [Music] print of maybe another bird or something like that and then I will put a handwritten note on the back of it and I'll put that in with my print if they if they buy more than one print then what I've started doing is including an extra print for them I'll put in something again depending on what they purchased if they purchased one of my landscapes then I'll make sure and put in another landscape or just something that I think that they might like in addition to what it is that they purchased so this is a really good practice I think that this helps bring customers back it personalizes your relationship with them so that they know that when they are buying something from you you're the one that is preparing it by hand for them so when you send them a handwritten note thanking them for purchasing from you I think that is a really nice added touch so I highly recommend that so when I do that then I will put that in with my print I'll put it in the sleeve and I'll have it ready to go one thing that also that I wanted to mention if you're just starting out and you really don't have a lot of money to to print out extra prints which when I started I didn't I didn't have any extra money to be able to do that I didn't have that as a luxury what you can you can still send something personalized and what i did was i received from Shutterfly from Snapfish those places where you can you know get prints a hundred prints for a dollar or something like that I will upload my prints onto those sites and then I will just get you know regular prints from there and that is exactly what I did here with some of these and I still have some this is from my yoga series and it you know it's a regular just a regular print it's got the semi glossy finish on it this still is a nice gesture and it costs very little but it still is very meaningful to your customer so if you can't afford to give them an extra print you can still give them something that is personalized that says thank you for for them purchasing something from you even though on the back here I have it it reads Snapfish comm but you can add something special under that usually they allow you to write your own little whatever it is that you want to put under there sometimes I'll put copyright Ellen Brennaman studio or thank you for your purchase whatever but most the time I just write over this so they don't even really pay attention to that but anyway that's another added tip if you don't have the ability to print out something small to give to your customer so once I have that done then I take my I take my print and I use these envelopes right here they're white and they have tape on them and when I'm ready I just go ahead and I put my print inside this is pretty rigid here it's quite rigid it is it has a slick outer coating so it's a bit resistant to water droplets it's not waterproof but it provides a little bit of extra protection and I just let my prints in there and then I print my shipping label out from Etsy and I put it on top of here and use packaging tape on shipping tape that I get this is what I use I use the Scotch brand shipping and packaging tape this works better than anything else that I've tried and I have tried a lot of different type of tape this is the best I have found because if the piece of tape like if the end of it gets on to the rest of it you know where you're constantly searching so that you know you pull it up and then you end up pulling up a piece and then it splits in half and that is so frustrating so this does not do that this stays put when you tear it off and it's thick enough where it's not going to fold on to itself with those cheap tapes I end up wasting more than I end up using so I use the Scotch shipping tape it works really really good so I put that on here and then when I am done with that before it's ready to go out I use one of these sharpie markers and I write on here do not bend and I usually put it twice on the front and when I turn it over I usually put it twice on the back they you know the post office is pretty good about being careful with things but you always want to remind them that there's something fragile inside and that you do not want it bent so please make sure that you do that before I forget these envelopes that I have again eBay look for them on eBay these are great envelopes to have I have these for my these are for my 8 by 10 prints I believe this is a 9 by 12 or 8 and a half by 12 I'm not sure and then I've got smaller ones here too this is for my 5 by 7 prints and then I have some for my 11 by 14 prints which I keep underneath my table so anyway this is my shipping station I'm going to swing around here slowly trying to look at all of my junk and this is where I do my printing the printer that I have on the right as you can see I'm partial to Canon printers both of these are Canon printers the printer that I have on the right I use to ship out or I'm sorry to print out my shipping labels I work on a spirit animal series so if I have a customer that requests the animal symbolism that I write I'll print that out on there my left one I use that's also a can and it's a pro 100 I use that for my larger size prints this is a great printer I have not had any issues with this printer I love it it prints out vivid colors and I just I can't say enough things about it professional photographers use it this gives me and I believe a 13 up to a 13 inch sighs piece of paper which is fantastic um and coming over here let me see lower here I'll show you the paper that I use this is the paper that I use it is a it's made by Lex jet premium archival matte 13 by 19 inches that is the size of the paper and there are 50 sheets in here and you can get this on Lex jets website so I guess the last thing that I wanted to show you I'm not doing any of these in order so I'm sorry about that the last thing that you would need to get is a good scale because you're going to want to measure your prints once you've been doing this for a while you'll have an idea of exactly what the weight is you won't need to use it as often but this is a great scale AWS this is a postal scale what I like about this scale is that if I have something that's heavier I can always flip it up and I can lean if it's a package if it's a larger size print and I place it over top and I can't read it then I will put it up on its side and I'll be able to read it so that works out really well too I love this particular scale and so but it really there are several postal scales and I hear they all pretty much work the same but I happen to really like this one so anyway I think that is about it so I'm going to pause this so that you can see my face before I sign off so hang on just a second okay so before I go I wanted to share one more thing with you that I didn't think to mention before when I was showing you my printer for the first three years or so I printed out my 8 by 10 prints and smaller on one printer and I out sourced or my 11 by 14 prints I also for a couple of years offered 16 by 20 prints which I also outsource and what I mean by that is I did not have the ability nor the funds to get a good printer so I wanted to still be able to offer larger sized prints because a lot of my customers were asking for them and since I couldn't afford one myself I had to search for someone to do that for me the best way to do that if you live in a larger town is to find someone local there's usually larger towns will have printers that you can go to and they will print really high quality prints for you they can be costly but they're worth it in order to offer your customers what it is that they want excuse me so that is one method if you don't have anybody local like I didn't have anybody really that provided the kind of quality of prints that I wanted so I outsource to a printer that I found online and I was able to get some samples from them I really liked they had several different types of paper to choose from and even though it is like I said more expensive because you have to pay them to ship those prints back to you if you sign them and then send them off to your customer it's worthwhile to get a several made at a time if you can afford to do that I couldn't afford to do that initially you know having inventory is it's a blessing and a curse if you have a lot of things to offer your customers in in the way of prints like for example I have for my spirit animal series alone I have over 80 available to offer to my customers I can't afford to have several sizes of each of those in inventory sitting here in my studio because I never know what's going to sell so it is cost-effective for me to print on demand and again if you are able to do that and have an outsourced printer then whenever you have someone who orders something then you can just order one at a time as you get more successful and if you know what your customer base is going to want to buy then you can have several of those on hand or purchase several at once but it's just it was more cost effective for me to print on demand so when an order comes in then I print that one thing I still have a lot of inventory from art fairs that are just sitting and you don't want to tie up your money in inventory it just is not a cost-effective way to do business unless you know for sure that you're going to sell those things in a timely manner so that's another tip that I can think of that I wanted to share with you and there was something else but I can't remember what that was so maybe I will put that in another video anyway so I don't want to make this any longer but hopefully you have a better understanding of at least how I ship things out and it like I said if you have any questions please feel free to leave your question in the comment section below and I will respond as soon as I am able I plan on doing more of these this is sort of my 2017 is my year of giving back because I learned a lot from youtubers who are willing to share their methods of doing things and so this is going to be my year of giving back to the community and hopefully paying it forward a little bit so if you like this video I would appreciate a thumbs up and please subscribe to my channel so that you see more videos like this when they become available so thanks a lot for your time everybody and thanks for watching and I will see you next time bye

Channel: Ellen Brenneman Studio

Views: 68,176

Keywords: etsy, packaging art prints, how to prepare art prints, shipping art prints, preparing art prints, etsy success, art prints diy, art prints from home, selling art online, shipping art, art business success, art business tips, art business advice

Id: FPi1Inh0XK0

Length: 22min 22sec (1342 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 05 2017