New Categories, Improve Item Descriptions & Helpful Links in Etsy Listings

NightBlooming is has three new categories, improved item descriptions, and helpful links that make it easier for you to find what you want on Etsy.

NightBlooming on Etsy benefits from the work I'm doing on the new nightbloominggarden.com! I've been taking new images, methods of organization, and item descriptions and using it to enhance NightBlooming's Etsy store.

Three New Categories
When you visit NightBlooming on Etsy you'll find these additions:

• Samples & Sampler Kits- Before, this section only had the kits, but now all samples live here.
• Oil Blend of the Month- Our Signature Oil Blends are immensely popular, and now they have their very own section.
• Essential Oil Misters- Our most recent product addition, now these have a home!

Improved Item descriptions
After a decade on Etsy, my item descriptions were more what I thought they were vs what was actually on the page. A great example is Panacea's Hair Salve: before the update the description didn't contain how the salve smelled, that it contained protein,  or how long it was expected to last. Now, all descriptions are more accurate (and hopefully more helpful!)

Item Links
One thing that worried me about moving all samples to their own category was that people wouldn't see them if they clicked on where that sample used to live (Etsy doesn't let you sort an item into more than one category). To help users find items, I've added in links to different sizes as well as to any kits that product might be included in.


I hope you love the new listings and categories! Keep an eye out for future upgrades, including gift wrapping just in time for the holiday season!

only 17 days left!

nightbloominggarden.com

launches October 31st. Check it out to sign up for updates and special offers!

Nightbloominggarden.com launches Oct 31st!

So very excited to have a date to announce to all of you :)  The new nightbloominggarden.com will have so many things I've wanted for a long time and, most importantly, all these things will be in one place. Right now I have a storefront and a blog on two separate sites and nothing to unify them.

Some of the big benefits will include:

• Site newsletter: You can have things pushed right to your inbox, like special offers, sales, and updates). If you want to sign up in advance, you can head over there and do so now!
• Better Blog: Wordpress gives me much more flexibility and a more professional format. This also means that this blog will redirect there after Oct 31 in case you forget to update your bookmarks.
• Ingredients Index: Each product will have a full ingredients list, and each ingredient will go to its specific entry in the Ingredients Index, where the full explanation of what that ingredient is and what it does resides. 
• Articles, FAQs and experiments: In addition to the blog, I'll be posting some of the longer posts and experiments I've done in the past to serve as additional resources to customers. It will be an easy place to point people to for those looking for knowledge on everything from damaged hair to henna to honeybees.
• Cleaner listings: Etsy, in an understandable effort to not want its listings to look like Ebay with 144pt purple Comic Sans text really locks down it's functionality. Because of this I have some very, VERY long listings. The new listings will have layered information, so the base listing is clean, but additional information like detailed ingredients, will only be a click away.
• Checkout through Etsy: For the moment I don't have the time to manage two storefronts (although that's the eventual goal), so having checkout through etsy means that it supports credit cards, PayPal, Guest checkout, and automatic currency conversion are. This also lets me keep all my stats in one place.
• Recommended / paired products: Etsy doesn't allow for targeted recommendations, but the new site will, making it easier to explore products you might like.
• Press / About / Testimonials: These are all things that are either buried or non-existent on Etsy. If you feature NightBlooming on your blog, YouTube channel, or other platform, you'll see it appear in a special area of the site. When people say good things about NightBlooming, it'll be right in its own section, not buried in a morass of 8,000 specific product reviews. 

More information and site previews will come soon! We're still working on developing features like a permanent discount for those that register on the site, too, so stay tuned!

•  

New Color Instructions for Herbal Hair Colors

So excited to get these back from the print shop! Now every NightBlooming herbal hair color and conditioner (even the sample packs!) will come with a full-color trifold that details mixing, application, rinsing, troubleshooting, and more!

Also, just a reminder that I'm closing up shop after orders are packed on Thursday, December 22 until the new year. If you're thinking of ordering, do it soon!

USPS Holiday Shipping Reminder & Exciting Renovations!

As the busy holiday season approaches, make sure you're ordering well enough in advance by keeping an eye on these USPS holiday shipping deadlines. 

Need an order delivered by December 24? Here's how and when you should ship.

Domestic

•	First Class Package Service: Dec 20
•	Priority Mail: Dec 21
•	Priority Mail Express: Dec 22

International

•	First Class International Package Service: Dec 1
•	Priority Mail International: Dec 1
•	Priority Mail Express International: Dec 8 This means you can safely wait for our December Signature Oil blend (spoiler, it's hot cocoa themed) to place your pre-holidays order. End of Year Vacation Many of my long-term customers know that I often take the end of the year off, and this year is no exception! NightBlooming will be closed for the holidays starting December 23 and will reopen Monday, Jan 5th. The long break is, in part, due to a serious renovation of my craft room! Right now, I have an old dining room table, a corner closet organizer, a drafting table, and a nightstand making up the surfaces of the room.  The new layout is all Ikea kitchen cabinets and concrete-gray counter tops. This means that: I will have LOTS more storage space the countner tops are all consistent height, making it more comfortable to work at and also improving workflow the counter tops will be, well, counter tops, making cleanup from things like spilled oils much easier. You can check out the interactive version here! Everyting will have to be assembled, given an additional coat or two of poly (because the oils and essential oils I work with can be brutal on surfaces), and I'd like to get the trim stained espresso, too, before all that cabinetry is in place.  Since the store won't be open you can follow along with the upgrades as they happen by following on Twitter or Instagram!

Last of the Eyes of Tamara Yemini Henna & New Filling Machine

Powder Filling Machine

The liquid filling machine made such a difference that I invested in a powder filling machine, too!  It weighs powder out of the hopper and then beeps. I hold the bag up to the chute and it dispenses the henna into the baggie.

There was a bit of a learning curve. I speak and read exactly 0 Chinese. But still, once everything was figured out it proved MUCH more efficient than the old "scoop, weigh, scoop, weigh, scoop, weigh" method I was doing with a spoon and a kitchen scale.

It enabled me to bag and label 5.5 kilos of our Eyes of Tamara Yemini henna in just over an hour and a half, which is twice as fast as the only way!

Eyes of Tamara- Not Much Left

This also lead to a realization that I'm running out of it. As of this post I have 55 100g bags and 43 10g sample packets.  That's it. I'm unable to import more because of the political situation in Yemen, so if you love this henna, you'll want to snap it up now.

Behind the scenes with product photoshoots!

So how do these pictures all come to be?  

Where does something like this come from?

Purpose

The very first thing I do when setting up a product shot is to create a purpose for the shot. The easy top-level purpose is to, of course, show a customer or potential customer what a product looks like. But it's more than that. The photographs have to stand in for all the things a customer cannot do. They cannot smell a product, or touch it, or hold it in their hand and gauge the size.

For the Miruvor Long Hair Tea pictures above, the pictures show what the customer can expect. They see the initial package and label, the tea bag, they can see the herbs that are in it, and they can see the color that the rinse brews up. It makes it easy to imagine wrapping your hands around that big glass cuppa and taking a drink.

This helps build confidence, because you, as a customer, then have a sense of security in knowing what you're getting when you click Add to Cart.

Another example of purpose is in showcasing ingredients.  Here are the ingredients for our Selkie Herbal Detangler:

Distilled water, Marshmallow root, slippery elm & fenugreek seed herbal infusion, Aloe vera gel, Apple cider vinegar, Argan Oil, Borage Oil, Camelina Oil, Vitamin E Oil, and the essential oils of Catnip, Cedarwood, Lavender, Lime, Petitgrain, and Sage

But that doesn't really say the same thing as this:

Here you experience these ingredients in a totally different way. You can picture them coming together, imagine the feel and the  aroma of fresh herbs and crisp water. It reaches out in a way that a bulleted list simply cannot.

Setup & Design

 Once the purpose is achieved, setup begins. That Selkie ingredient picture? Took two and a half hours to compose. Filling all those little vials, the droppers, gathering and arranging the herbs, finding good vessels for the water and the fenugreek are all tiny areas of detail that have to come together.  Then it builds into a composition, where visual motion, framing, angle and a bunch of other photographic and artistic principles come together.

So if you take about 5 steps back from this:

The Forest Glade Dark Hair Rinse picture above looks like this:

I'm using a lightbox and color-balanced lighting.  

The Camera

My pictures are all shot with a Cannon G11:

On average, I shoot 15-20 pictures per end photo.  When I reshot the hair rinses and teas, there were over 150 images shot for three products and all their variations.

Photo Editing

Then I load all those pictures onto my computer. I use Photoshop as my image editing program.

Images selected (often from 4 or 5 very similar ones), cropped, color-balanced, and touched up. The goal is to present the product in its most true form, never visually alter it beyond what a customer should expect to see in person (see every fast food burger ad ever).

Now that isn't to say I don't take ANY artistic liberties.

Our honey bees are pretty tame, but they're not QUITE that docile (or cooperative).

Editing images is a very, very time-consuming process. At the end I add the NightBlooming watermark and save the images out.  Then the final images are updated in the store: 

Shooting my products is one of those aspects that lets me flex my photography and visual design skills, and it's a ton of work, but it's actually also a very fun, very creative process.

Using Quality Oils

One of the things NightBlooming goes through a lot of is oils. You'll find them in our Signature Oil of the Month, our hair salves, natural oil samples, Triple Moon Oil, Selkie Detangler, and Thriae Scalp Scrub.

But seeing something simple like "Avocado oil" on the ingredients list doesn't really tell the whole story, and here is where NightBlooming products stand out from many others you'll find.

The oils we use are of very high quality, and although this applies to all our oils, we'll use avocado as our example.  Why is avocado oil so good?

This deep golden oil is an edible oil pressed from the fruit of the Persea americana (avocado). It is used for lubrication and in cosmetics where it is valued for its regenerative and moisturizing properties. Rich in nutrients, amino acids, and essential fatty acids, this nutritional oil is excellent for enhancing hair health. It supplies vitamins A, B, D, and E to nourish both hair follicles and the scalp. Vitamin E also acts as a protective antioxidant. It has natural humectant properties, adding and locking in moisture. The monounsaturated fatty acids will give hair a glossy shine and silky texture. The amino acids will promote the growth of new hair cells.

Below is the oil that we use (left) and something that I've seen in many competitor's products (right).

The Mountain Rose Herbs avocado, what we use, is a dark, rich color.  It is cold-pressed, organic, and hexane free, which means that those vitamins, mono-saturated fatty acids, and amino acids stay intact. The less expensive avocado oil is not organic, and it's processing has destroyed many of the important compounds that make this oil beneficial.

 You can see this in the color.  The oil we use (on the left) is a deep, rich color. When rubbed between your fingers it is thicker and silkier. By contrast, the less expensive oil (on the right) is so pale in a dropper that it is nearly clear.

There are a lot of confusing terms out there when it comes to oils, but quality and process do matter. A bottle of avocado oil from the cooking aisle will be a pale yellow color, but a higher-quality, expeller-pressed version of avocado is a rich green color that has many more of its critical fatty acids intact. Lower-grade oils are often extracted with chemicals or heat, both of which can damage the more delicate compounds found in the oil. When looking for a quality oil, there are several terms that are helpful to familiarize yourself with:

• Expeller-pressed— The basic idea behind expeller-pressed oil is to force oil out of something, most often a nut, seed, or vegetable, with only mechanical strength. In more ancient times, this was done by with mallets or crank-style apparatuses, but today it is accomplished with hydraulics that allow for oil to be expelled in much greater quantities. These quantities, however, are still smaller than those achieved by heat or chemicals, making these oils more expensive but of higher quality. 
• Cold-pressed—Very similar to expeller-pressed, except that the oil is expressed under temperature-controlled conditions. During the expeller-pressing process, heat is generated through friction as the machine’s plates press and rotate against the nut or vegetable being crushed, and cold-pressing seeks to minimize this. Cold pressing is most seen with very delicate oils whose composition is adversely affected by heat, such as grapeseed or olive oil. 
• Organic—Organic oils are made from nuts, seeds, or vegetables that have not been treated with pesticides or herbicides that are not approved by the USDA Department of Organic Agriculture (or similar governing body in other nations). It is nearly impossible to remove all traces of pesticides and herbicides before processing, so trace amounts may end up in the resulting oil. 
• Non-GMO—Means that the oil has come from a source plant that has not been genetically modified. Although it’s common enough to see labels certifying oils as free from GMOs, those labels are not actually produced by the government. Rather, certification is a process conducted by private companies. In order to be certified as GMO-free, less than one percent of a food’s ingredients can be genetically modified. 
• Hexane-free—Hexane is sometimes applied to nuts and vegetables before extraction because it yields higher returns in expeller-pressing. Most oil manufacturers try to minimize or eliminate the hexane residue that could make it into the finished product but can rarely guarantee purity in the resulting oil. Even in trace amounts, the compound can cause sleepiness, nausea, and headaches. Chronic hexane inhalation, which can occur when the oil is heated, may also result in cramping and muscle weakness or deterioration. Thankfully, these effects often go away after exposure ends, but they are nevertheless off-putting to many people. 
• Refined vs. Unrefined—Refined oils have gone through processing to reduce flavor and odor. Unrefined oils are less processed and are often higher quality, but they go rancid more quickly. Using the refined version of an oil may also let you enjoy oils that you find you dislike the smell of in their unrefined form. 
• Therapeutic grade / aromatherapy grade / medicinal grade—While most commonly seen applied to essential oils, these terms have begun to creep into carrier oils as well. No governmental agency or generally accepted organization “grades” or “certifies” oils or essential oils with these terms, and there is no formally approved grading standard used consistently throughout the essential oil or carrier oil industry. At best these terms are confusing marketing terms, at worst deliberately misleading to justify charging more for a product that is not of certifiable higher quality. If you come across a company that uses any of these terms, look for other key indicators of their essential oil quality and attempt to assess their particular intent is behind their use of the term. 

In the above picture we poured both the Mountain Rose Herbs and NOW avocado oil into one jar. Notice how the MRH oil is heavier, fattier and stays at the bottom, while the NOW oil is lighter and stays at the top. The lack of fatty acids in the NOW oil is what causes this division. 

You can always trust that NightBlooming uses the highest quality oils. We will happily invest in our products to give you unrefined, expeller/cold pressed, organic, non-GMO, hexane-free oils so that you can use them with confidence. 

NightBloomingGarden.com

You can now shop our natural and hair-friendly wares at www.nightbloominggarden.com , http://nightblooming.patternbyetsy.com ,  or www.etsy.com/shop/NightBlooming

You now have another great way to shop and purchase from NightBlooming! Today Etsy rolled out something called Pattern by Etsy.

What this allowed me to do was accomplish one of the Big Store Goals, which was a site that was not technically on etsy.com. So without further ado:

www.nightbloominggarden.com

So, why? Aren't you doing just fine with us on Etsy?

While all my current customers are obviously very Etsy-savvy, sometimes people don't get over that initial hurdle. "I don't have an Etsy account," is enough to turn people off because, seriously, if you don't already have an account someplace do you really want to register for one? This lets people skirt that hurdle, but still enjoy NightBlooming products.

Why this and not a homebrew site?

The main hangup with building my own site was not the building, but the amount of double-work involved. Etsy has made a lot of great improvements with stats, order tracking, and shipping labels. Having my own site would mean returning to doing all those things in a totally different way, and also maintaining inventory in a way that would track it across two sites. (Meaning if I had 25 packets of Genasi on hand, I'd have to track that and reduce it manually depending on how much sold on which site.)

For shipping labels, I'd have to print the orders made on Etsy one way, the ones on a stand-alone site another. If someone placed an order on one site, it wouldn't show in their order history on the other. With this method all my inventory, customer order tracking, shipping labels, and things that make my life much, much easier stays in one database.

There are some things that Pattern is lacking. It it still isn't easy for me to do customer rewards (I keep envisioning a buy 10 get 1 free on packets of herbal hair colors, for example), I don't get to control every aspect of my own branding, and I can't house my blog on the same site. But we'll figure out customer rewards yet, and the rest of the trade-offs are manageable.

 Give it a whirl! I'm eager to know about your experience.

Bathed in Dragonsblood & Flowershop Violence

Also titled:
I have the best customers in the entire world.

I've been having a bit of a crappy week.  One of our cats ingested part of a 9 inch cable tie and we only narrowly avoided needing surgery for her. The weather is crappy and I'm sick of winter. I overbrewed my tea. I lost one of my gloves.

Today I had not one, but two notes from customers that actually made me laugh and made my day a better place to exist in. This is by far not the first time this has happened, but it was exactly what I needed. 

First up is this review on our Dragonsblood Oil Blend:

"Makes my hair soft and smooth, great for damp bunning. Smells soooo nice I've been using it on my skin. A nice light, comforting incense scent, plus I just feel badass because I walk around bathed in dragons blood and yes I am a dork."

And then this convo about March's Frostfall Flowers blend.

"Nooooooooo! You add this absolutely perfect blend a week after I place an order! D:<

Mostly just kidding. I wanted to let you know that I'm really excited to see this blend. I love flower scents that smell like actual flowers rather than a vague perfume-y haze, and Frostfall sounds perfect. If you ever make a blend titled "A Violent Blow to the Face with a Flower Shop," I'll be the first in line.

Your birthday free sample program is what motivated me to finally stop window shopping and place my first order. I'm going to force myself to wait until May so I can really figure out which [salve] sample is working the best for my hair type, but I'll also be counting down the days."

Lovely customer, your wish is my command.

I'm sorry my handwriting sucks so much! I do try XD

One "Violent Blow to the Face with a Flower Shop" has been dispatched to you. If you read this, I hope the lack of surprise doesn't diminish your happiness any when it arrives. It's a blend of Evening Primrose Oil, Sunflower Oil, Meadowfoam Oil, and the essential oils of China Rose, Lavender, Ylang Ylang, German Chamomile, Neroli, Geranium, and Jasmine.  It does indeed feel like you're being wonderfully assaulted by flowers. 


Thank you, to all my customers, for making me laugh, for making my day better with your convos and reviews, and for making this the best job in the entire world. <3

Year End Fun with Charts 2015 Edition

When I looked back at this year, there was a lot more changes that happened than I had anticipated, and a few that I had anticipated that didn't happen.

Let's talk about you!

Honestly, you, my lovely customers, make this store.  You make it fun, you make it an adventure, and your support is second to none.  

This first map shows orders.

While this second one shows views.

It's really exciting to see these maps expand every year, as more and more customers find their way here, many of them by recommendations from you!

What Sold

Some of that was (another) shift in business focus. You can see last year's charts here, and they help show the percentages of various types of items sold in my shop and how that's evolved over the past 7 years that  NightBlooming has been open.  Our products have continued to expand, but as I'm still just one person, that expansion always results in the contraction of other sales areas.

Hair colors continued to climb as our top products, and that also is indicative of a larger shift in the store: more herbal products and fewer hair accessories.  It isn't that I don't love making hair accessories, but they are much more time-consuming and user-specific.  For example, someone might pass on a stick or request a custom order of one because it's half an inch too short.  With a pot of salve, it's a bit more one size fits all.  Focusing more on herbal products let me actually do more with the time I have because it's more productive across a larger scope.

Our sales were down a bit (by about 200 orders), but that is in part because I turned down all custom orders this year.  On the plus side, you can see how much more even sales were compared to the spikes from the year before.

2014

2015

Still not sure why August is my lowest month, but it always is.  The most important thing here is that this felt more sustainable.  I was busy, sometimes really busy, but I never felt so overwhelmed I didn't think I could handle it, which was the tune of almost all of 2014.  I feel that NightBlooming is in a much more solid, sustainable place to continue to grow from!

What was Favorited?

A lot of this data is similar to the charts above:

Hair colors come in strong, but they're all trailing Selkie.  With the attention on the Fund campaign, Selkie brought together customers new and old and really let us make some huge improvements to efficiency. Moondust Dry Shampoo and our Hair Salve Trinity Pack both stick around in the top 10 listing favorites for the store. 

Overall, NightBlooming was down a little bit in favorites, views, and sales compared to last year, but the pace last year and the year before that were simply unsustainable for one person who has a real, full-time day job, and is trying to break into a third career.  

What Changed?

Labels, Photography & Branding

We made some exciting upgrades this year!  While implementing these changes has caused a small dip in overall production, I think the investment is setting NightBlooming up to ramp up even past where it was before. 

We continued to update our branding and photographs, making more of our products harmonize with high-quality, professionally printed labels.  The labels are really a massive unsung hero in freeing up time.  I used to print them on full sized label sheets on our home printer and then cut out each and every one by hand.

Now, the labels are professional designed (being married to a talented graphic artist doesn't hurt!) and printed at a print shop on pre-cut labels.

The end result is that I get to peel and stick.  There is a decent cost associated with it, but I feel that the higher quality labels are well worth it.  They look better, feel better, and are oil and water resistant, so the label isn't ruined if a single drop of oil escapes.

Calculated Shipping & New Shipping Labels

If there's one thing that might have had the biggest impact on making my time more productive, this is it.  I haven't charted out the exact time savings, but a decent guesstimate is that the simple act of getting the most adorable printer in the known world, using calculated shipping, and using Etsy's automated "yes please send the tracking number so I don't have to hand-enter it and screw it up" probably saves me at least 3-5 hours a week.  That's 3-5 hours that I'm able to use to stay on top of current stock and working on new projects.

We were even able to get NightBlooming avatar stickers printed to pretty up the new labels!

Filling Machine

This little thing is a godsend.  I really cannot stress what a massive, massive quality of life change this machine has been for me. And that is thanks to you!  So many of our loyal customers were our first backers on the Selkie Campaign and helped spread the word.  

There's a short video here that shows how much time the filling machine takes off of filling bottles of Triple Moon Oil, and I'd wager the time savings for salve are even more.  I sincerely am able to be so much more efficient with this astounding little contraption, so thank you for making the Selkie Campaign a resounding success!

Selkie Became Reality

Selkie was one of those products I wanted to do forever, but the experimentation, front-end work, and front-end cost were huge compared to other products.  When Etsy reached out to me to participate in the pilot of their Fund campaign, my first thought was "Perfect, I can finally finish that henna book!"  Alas, that was not to be.  The cost of printing it four color was insanely prohibitive and Etsy demanded that Fund could only back a physical product.  So the henna book got shelved, and Selkie stepped to the forefront!

As you can read on Racked, we were one of the first stores to reach our goal and even surpassed it, allowing me to make environmentally (and shipping cost friendly) refill pouches!

We Purchased our Biggest Supply Order Ever

When a customer reached out to me and told me that her sister could help me get Yemini henna, organically grown and amazing in dye content, I was excited.  With some trepidation she then told me that the community it came from was quite poor, and they couldn't afford the cost and production to put it into sealed bags with foil.  Which was perfect!  One of the things I hated about that route was all the wasted packaging from all the packets of henna I'd open when making our herbal hair colors. A couple months of correspondence and a few thousand dollars later, and I'd made the largest supply purchase in NightBlooming history- 64 kilos of some of the best henna I've ever had the pleasure of using.  You'll find it in our color blends, but you can also get it pure and unblended here.

Monthly Custom Oil Blends & Signature Oil Subscriptions Launched

When looking at the natural oil samples and Custom Oil Blends we offered I kept feeling like there had to be more, that, for some reason, customers weren't really connecting with the possibilities. After asking around, the resounding response was "I love the idea, I'm just not sure.  Can you do it for me?"  Well, sure! And so each month I introduced a Custom Oil Blend of the Month, and you loved it. So much so that the next step was to introduce our Signature Oil Subscription!

So it was an exciting year, and I couldn't have done it without you!  I have a lot of new and exciting things coming up, but this is the looking back post.  We'll do another one for looking forward that'll contain all stuff you can expect in the future!