So, when I first started selling jewelry online it was for Richardson’s Trading Company and that was in 1999. I did design a website for Richardson’s, but it was very basic and didn’t have a shopping cart. The selling was being done on eBay. Richardson’s was a tourist destination and had an amazing following and buyers thought of the store as high end. It was also a pawn shop and lots of the pieces it would take in pawn, that eventually became dead pawn, maybe didn’t meet the expectations of the buyers coming through the doors. So, they had lots of dead pawn that we might call less desirable and that is exactly what we started putting on eBay. Remember, these are the early days of eBay and it was all auctions, and we would start with a low bid and they would just get bid up and up. I was putting up about 75 pieces a week and they were all selling.
I left Richardson’s to go back to the University of New Mexico to finish my degree and started my own online business, WideRuinsTrader.Com to sell Native American art. This would have been around 2002 - 03. I had a website built and incorporated a blog into the website which was (lets say cutting edge) not real common at the time. It worked, I would get lots of questions and conversations on my articles and artist interviews (which was also something new). I was just trying to figure out how to get people interested in my business.
Even though I had good response, it still was nothing like the volume you could generate on eBay. So that is exactly where I would go to sell my items. However, this time I didn’t have an endless supply of dead pawn so I had to figure out what I was going to sell. It wasn’t some deep industry study, but basically came down to who I knew and what I was having them make. During my time at Richardson’s I was also starting to do the buying so had built relationships with some of the artists. When I went out on my own I was buying turquoise, giving those stones to Sunshine Reeves, Leonard Nez, Derrick Gordon, Delbert Gordon, and Andy Cadman, then since I had those relationships those happened to be my interviews on the website, and that is what I was selling.
After I finished school and took a job in public accounting I was asked to come back and build an online presence for Perry Null Trading Company. This would have been around 2006 and things started to change online. You still didn’t count on sales off of the website, but eBay had changed. It still had auctions, but it also had buy it now. Perry Null Trading sold wholesale so you couldn’t really come up with a low starting auction price strategy without upsetting some wholesale customers, who are also your competition online.
That meant I would have to do things different than how I had done them in the past. A memory of Bill Richardson helped me. He once told me, he could sell a 100 bracelets at $100 each, or he could sell one $10,000 rug. Mr. Richardson choose the later and that was the strategy for Perry Null Trading. Instead of the dead pawn, or the inexpensive pair of earrings I cherry picked high end for the eBay items. That strategy worked, kept are wholesalers happy for the most part, and really grew perrynulltrading.com.
I would also be very active in social media, Facebook, and would grow that to over 70,000 followers. This was before Instagram popularity or TikTok. But you definitely understood that social media was going to be a huge part of it.
Why the long introduction to this new topic. Well you need a strategy, a direction, before you pop up a website and start selling. My strategy for the website (business) I am going to build is basically marketing my accounting services, so it is easy. It is more about the stages and the addons, not so much about the product. Although it is to some extent.
For those of you really interested in starting a Native American jewelry (art) business you need to think this through. Start with what you are passionate about, you like antique Native American art? Or, new contemporary artists? Hopi? Zuni? Navajo? is it about the Turquoise? Technique? You need to figure that out because that is going to be the voice of your business going forward. Don’t get me wrong you can sell Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo art on your website, you just need to find the voice that is going to be heard. What’s the voice of perrynulltrading.com and richardsontrading.com today, say compared to a waddellgallery.com?
Figure that out, and for your homework start thinking about a name. Next time we are going to begin making this a reality, or at least moving in the direction of legitimacy.
