Etsy… Everything Wonderful in Life

Extreme Makeover: Treasury Edition

18 Feb 2011 3 Comments

by storibookvintage in building treasuries, EEWIL, EEWIL Etsy Team, eewil team search, Etsy, etsy treasury, etsy.com, treasury Tags: cleopatrakerckhof, eewil, eewil etsy team, facebook, treasury building, treasury curating, treasury tips

Building Treasuries takes a lot of work.  If you want to do it right, and do it beautifully — and all of us do — you end up investing a lot of time. It’s easy to get caught up in searching Etsy for just the right thing to complete your collection.  It’s also easy to get distracted by things you find while searching for just the right thing.  Personally, I end up adding at least ten new items and two or three new shops to my Favorites list each time I build a Treasury.

The time investment is totally worth it and building Treasuries can be a relaxing hobby if you’ve got a bit of free time to indulge yourself.

But… many of us regularly find ourselves with less and less free time due to everyday family duties, keeping up with our Etsy shops (and our brick-and-mortar establishments, if we have those), work obligations… you get the picture, right?

Let me offer a couple of suggestions that might make your Treasury-building life a little easier:

1.  Use multiple tabs.

When I build EEWIL Treasuries, I always have at least three tabs open in Internet Explorer (sorry to Mac fans — I’m not sure if you guys have tabs or if you have to use multiple windows.  The first tab is our EEWIL Facebook page.  The second tab (or sometimes a window) is used for clicking through to members’ shops.  Tab 3 is for building the Treasury.  Multitasking with tabs makes it much easier to search for items and build your Treasury.

2.  Work with what you know.

 Take your inspiration from something you REALLY know well.  It will take you less time to find items, because you’ll know immediately when you’ve found something that fits in your Treasury.  For example, my husband’s birthday is coming up next week.  A few nights ago, I built a Treasury full of things that remind me of my husband and his interests (check it out here).  They weren’t all things that he’d necessarily want for his birthday, but things that made me think of him.  It took about 10 minutes to build, it got my husband’s seal of approval (he said, “Hey, you did good,”  which is a HUGE compliment coming from him!), and I’m planning on using it for EEWIL recruitment purposes. 

3. Pick a color, any color! 

Choose a theme color.  It gives you lots of options, especially when you’re choosing items from EEWIL members’ shops.  Let’s say you chose PINK as your theme color, like I did for this Treasury.  When you head to an EEWIL member’s shop from our Info page on Facebook, you can then enter “pink” in the “This Shop”  search box, like I did in CleopatraKerckhof’s  shop in the screenshot below (click on the image to enlarge it).

Searching for pink items in Cleopatra's shop

4. Curate your Treasuries!

Maybe you don’t have time to build a brand-new Treasury from scratch.  I know I haven’t, at least not lately.  But how about updating or re-vamping some of your older, more popular Treasuries?  Do a Treasury Search for your username, either by searching your shop name through the Treasury search bar or copy-paste this link www.etsy.com/treasury/search/yourshopname into your browser’s address bar and replace “yourshopname” with, well, your shop’s name.  (see screenshots below, click to enlarge).

Searching the Treasury list using the Search Bar

 Once you pull up your Treasury list, find your more popular past Treasuries, and work on re-vamping those.  If you haven’t been back to check on them in awhile, chances are there will be a few items that have sold or that have expired listings.  Replace those items with new ones, contact all of your featured sellers (yes, even the ones that were in the original Treasury — they will appreciate that you featured them again!), and share your Treasury link just like you would for a new one.

5.  Have fun!

Treasury building isn’t meant to add more stress to your life — it’s meant to help you relieve some of it.  Etsyans, by nature, are a creative bunch; we happen to have an exceptionally creative and talented bunch of them in our EEWIL membership.  Those of you that are regularly building Treasuries do a beautiful job.  But… everybody experiences “writer’s block” at some point or another.  So, if you’re struggling to come up with a theme, check out the existing EEWIL Treasuries for some inspiration.  Or, better yet, ask another EEWIL member for help — especially if you’re a fan of their Treasuries. 

We’re all in this together, and if you think about it, helping each other is pretty much the main focus of our group. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, post comments, interact. It’s the best way for us to grow as a community, and when we do that all of us benefit.

Until next time ,

Happy Etsying and lots of EEWIL Love,

Victoria