In just a few months, a wonderful opportunity for local Amarillo artists and residents will be ending. The Arts in the Sunset that was established by Ann Crouch to give artists reasonably priced places to work & sell art will be closing all individual galleries and ending the First Friday Art Walks that have provided residents of Amarillo & the surrounding areas an art & entertainment filled Friday night each month.
Since the closing of Etsy Wholesale over the summer many small biz owners on both sides, as sellers and buyers, have had to find different ways to connect. There are several other platforms out there for wholesaling your goods, but Etsy Wholesale was a great and easy option, especially for prior Etsy sellers and buyers who enjoyed the ease of ordering on the platform. We’re still offering wholesale via the Hello Small World wholesale site that makes the purchasing process easy or maybe even easier than with Etsy Wholesale, since shipping is automatically calculated instead of having to wait for the shipping to be added to the invoice. But, Etsy Wholesale closing was an important lesson that all small business owners, like ourselves, need to pay attention to and that’s the need to maintain a website for your brand that you control yourself. We luckily already had a website and wholesale cart set up when Etsy Wholesale announced that it would be closing down, but it still came as a shock to us to learn about it so abruptly. These other platforms are definitely helpful, but you never know how long they will last or when the fees might increase.
We’ve been thinking about this even more lately as we are in the holiday retail season. What other platforms do you use for wholesale? Did you use Etsy Wholesale as a buyer or seller? We’d love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on it!