Inspired by Sears-Roebuck

Etsy is a great place for selling some of my products, but it’s not my only avenue for sales.  Due to prohibitive shipping costs, I’ve stopped listing many of my items on Etsy, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped making them.  Now how to let my in-person customers, co-workers, friends and acquaintances know what is currently in stock?

I came up with the idea of creating a catalogue. Since I’m in no position to be having anything professionally printed and bound, DIY was the only option.  Of course, simply creating the catalogue in a word processor and printing it out at home was the easiest option, but I wanted something more durable than just printed papers stapled together.  Then I remembered this stack of mini photo albums left over from when my son was a baby.  I saw them in a store while I was pregnant and they were on clearance for 50 cents each.  Well, with those perfect covers, how could I pass them up?  The plan was to make mini digital scrapbooks for everyone in the family with an update each month for the first year. I made it to ten months, and even that was only for grandparents.

First I removed the front and back covers and recycled them.  The front cover was replaced with an image I created in Photoshop; The rear cover, with a plain piece of cardstock.

I just realized I used the non-Canadian spelling for “catalogue” on the front cover.  Oh, well!

You will have to create a text file that contains all your descriptions.  I created mine in Word, setting the page size to 4”x 6”, and inserting a page break after each description so there would only be one per page.  In the interest of saving paper, I printed the descriptions 4 pages per sheet on letter-sized paper.  Getting the pages to print out that way took some finagling of my printer settings. Heavy use of the “print preview” feature was made!  You will probably need to select borderless printing, but every printer is different.  If printing 4-pages to a sheet proves too difficult, you can always just print out one page per sheet and use the remainder for scrap.  Everything will need to be trimmed down anyway.

After trimming,  I inserted each description into the album, with a picture of the product on the facing page.  Easy peasy!  Total cost per album is around $3, so I don’t plan on handing these out to every Joe Shmoe I meet on the street.  It’s just something I’ll carry around with me to show people when they inquire.  Select individuals may be trusted to take one home overnight. ;)

The great thing is that I can always add new products to the end of the album, and remove current products when they are out of stock.  It’s not set in stone (or ink, to be more accurate) like a printed and bound catalogue.

To give people something to take home with them, I’ll be creating price lists, which will  be printed on plain paper (in tri-fold brochure format), containing mini-descriptions of each product, but no photos.