Today, the temperature has dropped even more, and it actually feels a little cold outside. The rain is still continuing. This kind of weather is unusual for this time of year, but I guess it is better than the heat!..haha. However, the humidity is high, and it looks like it will be the same tomorrow, so I am a little worried about whether I will be able to attach the panels. If the humidity is too high and I cannot do that work, I may start working on the next batch instead.
Over the past few days, I have added a few items to my website. They are not new products, but they were previously available in my Etsy shop. So, I guess you could say they have “moved” to my website.Actually, these puzzle boxes were originally made with sales in Japan in mind, and they are a little more affordable than my usual boxes. I wanted to make something that could introduce more people to Japanese puzzle boxes, so I chose a simple and easy-to-try 4-step mechanism. The design also uses natural wood rather than traditional Yosegi.
Actually, traditional Yosegi is one of Japan’s officially designated traditional crafts. When selling products in different places within Japan, using traditional Yosegi can attract more attention and there are various things to consider. For that reason, I did not use that kind of design for these boxes. I sold them more as my own original puzzle boxes rather than as traditional Japanese puzzle boxes. Of course, the basic idea comes from the sliding mechanism of traditional Japanese puzzle boxes, but this type of mechanism itself is not something original to one maker, so I do not think that is a problem. I was selling these boxes in Japan for a while, but I have stopped doing that for the time being. At the same time, I was also selling them on Etsy. However, Etsy has quite a lot of fees, so there is not much benefit in selling lower-priced boxes like these there. On top of that, international shipping costs have continued to rise over the past few years. Considering all of these things, I decided to remove these boxes from Etsy for now and sell them only through my own website.
Of course, there are still various fees on my own website, including PayPal fees, but they are much lower than the fees on Etsy. This was about ten years ago, but I remember there was quite a lot of talk when one of Etsy’s most successful sellers closed their shop. Their sales on Etsy were extremely high, far beyond the level of an ordinary individual craftsperson. From what I remember, some of the reasons were concerns about the direction of the marketplace, including reselling, as well as the increasing fees. Originally, Etsy was a place where individual makers could show and sell the things they made themselves. When I started selling there in 2010, that was still very much the case. Etsy placed a lot of importance on whether sellers were actually making their own products, and I was asked several times to submit photos of my workshop and photos showing how I made my puzzle boxes. It does not seem that Etsy does nothing about these problems, but in recent years, the amount of reselling by individuals has become very noticeable. There are also quite a few resellers from Japan. Some of them simply buy products in Japan that are already being sold by shops in Hakone, including products available on Amazon Japan, and then list them again on Etsy. If you are looking for Japanese puzzle boxes on Etsy, I think it is worth checking carefully who the seller is and whether they actually make the products themselves.
Anyway, I got a little off topic, but for all of these reasons, I recently moved some of my products to my own website. I think this will make it easier for me to offer some lower-priced items there in the future. I have not yet decided when I will start selling in Japan again, but I would still like to try different ways of selling here in the future, including the face-to-face sales that I wrote about before.
