Silver Enterprise …

We’re in our fourth year of retirement now and although we are kept very busy (the old cliche about not knowing how we managed before we retired is very true) the one challenge we have never set ourselves is running our own business.

Jen has always had an eye for good design and I love art in any form and have had a marketing background so, pooling our ideas together we decided to set up a jewellery making business. If you think that this is going to be a story about how hard it is to break into a market or banks not supporting small businesses, you’d be mistaken. It really is quite easy.

Obviously you have to have some stock that you think will sell and it soon became apparent that reasonably priced beads, wire and all the ingredients to design unique jewellery are available on the internet. A little scouring soon bought us beautiful ethnic beads from of all places, China. Our postman must have wondered what was going on when we started receiving lots of little packets with a Chinese postmark on.

Jen started designing, producing and finishing lots of lovely bracelets, earrings, necklaces and anklets. And I began looking on the web to find how to design our own website. Again, I thought it would be daunting but I found a great little site called Folksy and for £45 a year they supplied a template which was user friendly straight from the start.

We came up with a quirky little name, Yokoloco and for us, it just hit the spot. I’ve always been into photography so producing pictures that would enhance the products wasn’t too difficult for me and uploading them with descriptions became second nature. We now have approximately 100 items for sale and even if I do say so myself, the web site looks every bit as good as I wanted it to.

Since the initial launch, we’ve linked it to a Facebook page and we’ve started another shop on a similar internet market place called Etsy. We’ve bombarded Pinterest with our designs and just about every local Facebook page or For Sale page that we can find. We’re now discovering local fairs and craft fairs to exhibit our wares and we could be selling just about every day of the week if we wanted to. In the first week, we sold 1 set of earrings on the internet and 15 bracelets to people that had read our Facebook page so we’ve got off to a good start. We are looking on the web sites as marathons and not sprints and are affording it the patience it deserves.

The message is, if this is something you’ve always wanted to do, as long as you’re realistic about expectations, the fun you can have in just setting it up is enormous. When people actually buy something that you’ve made yourself, well that’s a bonus and also a supplement to what is laughingly called a pension. Go for it, you’ll be surprised what you can achieve.

This is our website:  Yokoloco