More listings won't increase your sales. So what will?

The advice you always hear is "just add more listings." So you do. You spend your evenings photographing, writing titles, filling tags, and the number at the bottom of the month barely moves.

Listing it is not the same as selling it

A listing files your work away in a drawer with a few million others and waits for someone to walk past and trip over it. That's hoping, with extra admin.

I learned this the expensive way. Years back I ordered a batch of beautiful Liberty fabric, convinced the name alone would shift it. I described the fabric, the weight, the print, the quality, and I left the listing to do all the selling on its own. It sat on my shelves for months until I marked it right down. I'd told people what it was. I never showed them what they could make with it.

Then the opposite happened, and this is the part that still makes me laugh.

Once I'd started launching properly, some of the worst copy I have ever written went up on those product pages. Genuinely bad. Nobody cared, because they were buying from the photographs, or buying a fabric they'd already had once and wanted again, or buying off the back of a sample that had landed on their doormat a fortnight earlier. The product had sold itself long before anybody read a word of the description.

That was when it landed for me. The wanting had been doing the work the whole time, and the listing was only ever the place where the money changed hands.

The makers who sell out have a small, warm group of people who knew the collection was coming and had already decided to buy before it ever went live.

You build the want, and then you get to pick the day