Using My Inventory

Today I made a decision to start using some of my ebay/etsy inventory around my house. I have some of my own collections that these things fit into. See a picture of my tins. A few of these tins are listed and others are my collection that I started before I ever did ebay. Today I added the ones from my inventory. 

Lets face it. A lot of the things I gravitate toward and buy for resale are items that I like and appreciate in my own life. Why not display them when I can instead of sittin' um on a shelf surrounded by a bunch of other 'stuff'. Some aren't even listed yet. They are in the piles of death and despair.

I know the word curated is vastly overused but I guess that's kind of what I'm doing! It will help me feel like my home is not such a mess or that I live in a thrift shop. And now that I'm writing this post I just realized I can even use a picture of the display of these items in my listing. At least on etsy where buyers don't assume they get everything in the picture!

Do you use any of the things you have for sale in your store?

What's Been Selling and Scavenger Books

Things were really slow this past week though I did see an increase in Etsy sales.

I sold:

A Wool Throw on Etsy for $19.99 plus shipping. Paid $3 for it but didn't realize until I got home that it had two large holes. I was still able to get a pretty good price for it though as a cutter.

I also sold another red bandana on ebay. Paid a buck or less and sold it on sale for $15.99 plus shipping. It has a cool sort of aztec pattern that was unusual. 

I sold another bandana on etsy. An Oshkosh BGosh. Probably paid a buck. Sold for 19.99 plus shipping. 

Edited to Add: As I promised Margaret (check out her blog!) in the comments I wanted to make a note about bandanas that have the elephant logo at the edge. Neither of my bandanas have one. Apparently if the trunk of the elephant is down vs. up the bandana is older and more valuable.  Check out this list of sold on ebay.

Below is a picture. It's probably kind of hard to see the trunk here but you can see where to look for the elephant if you look at bandanas. 

And lastly I sold some vintage Ray Ban Clip on Sunglasses. Paid $1 and they sold overnight for $29.99 plus shipping to Hong Kong. Glasses and sunglasses are a new thing for me to look for. I like them because they are small and light and easy to take pictures of. Goes the same for bandanas. 

Lastly I frequently think about my childhood and how it relates to my scavenger ways. This week my thoughts went back to books I read (I was a very avid reader) that had scavenger type characters. I've listed three below that I remembered LOVING. Do you remember any scavenger type characters in books or movies that you loved? If you or your children haven't read the books I mention they are both really good! (if I remember correctly) 

1. The Boxcar Children books. Especially when they first move into the boxcar and are setting up house.

2. From the Mixed - Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Two runaway kids live in a museum. 

3. The Little House on the Prairie series

Added by commenters

4. The Borrowers

Scavenger Tips #5

Tip #1

Chicos is a higher end chain store that sells women's (sizes up to 22) clothing and accessories. I've had some pretty good success selling their items.  My tip of the day is to look for Chicos clothing in the plus size clothing section of thrift stores. Even the small sizes of Chicos clothes show up there. Chicos uses a sizing system of sizes 1, 2, 3 etc instead of 8, 10, 12 etc. The people who work at the thrift stores frequently put these items in the plus size section of the store because the size on the tag looks plus size. They assume 1 is a 1X instead of 8/10 that it actually is.

Are there any items you regularly find in the wrong department? Please share!

Tip #2

I love to use good soap without chemicals and artificial fragrance but I can't always afford to pay good soap prices. In the last couple of years I haven't had to pay retail prices for my soap because I often find it in thrift stores brand new! Last week I found four bars of Sunrise Showers Soap for $1.60 total. This would have been over $16 if purchased full retail. I saved $15 on soap.

I haven't tried this yet but it is a future project that I want to try. You can make your own soft soap out of bar soap. All you really need is soap and glycerin. I purchased the glycerin but need to get busy with the grating.



This way you can choose what goes into your soft soap. I'm going to use one of my bars of recently purchased Sunrise Showers Soap. Have you tried making your own soft soap?

In the world of reselling. Today I had a sale on Bonanza. I average about one sale a month there. The buyer sent me a message "I hope this is legit and you aren't going to screw me". Nice, hey. I'd like to just cancel the sale but it's $40. Would you respond to the message or just ignore it?

What Has Been Selling Lately

Recent sales are definitely reflecting the upcoming change in season. Do you have your fall and winter items listed? Back to school, football season, halloween, thanksgiving, christmas.

A Green Bay Packers Coffee Urn

Jansport Backpack

School Days Cross Stitch

Packer Jersey

Vintage Snowpants

Updates

Surgery Update

Today I went to see my surgeon for my post op visit. Everything is good and I feel like I'm almost back to 100%! Pretty amazing. I've had surgery before that took weeks to recover from. The medical assistant asked me if I needed her to write me a work release. It felt so good to know that I don't have to do that because I am self employed as a reseller! I don't answer to anyone but myself. Yeah!!

Bag Sale

After the doctor visit I went to one of my favorite thrift stores. It's a small store that raises money for the local lutheran school. They were having a bag sale on all clothes and shoes (that included hats) for $2 a bag. I filled six bags. I got a bunch of cool vintage hats, vintage jackets and tshirts. I also bought a bunch of other stuff that wasn't included in the bag sale. My total was about $45 dollars. I had so much that I had to check out and load my purchases and then go back in to shop some more. It's a great time for me to get a lot of new inventory as I just got an offer from ebay a couple of days ago to list free for a week. Since I'm almost to the end of my free listings for my store subscription the offer came at a good time.

Vintage Hat

Here is one of the hats I purchased today.  It's a hat that was produced when the DOW first passed 10,000.  Here is an interesting article about the hat with a picture of Rudolph Giuliani wearing one.  I couldn't find another like it for sale or sold so I priced it at $49.99. That might be kind of high but without any other hats to compare it to it was a little hard to know where to start. If it doesn't sell I'll bring it down a bit.

Sales have been kind of slow the last couple of weeks but with the surgery slowing me down a little I'm sure I didn't list as much as usual which translates to slower sales. 

Thanks for all of the well wishes. Like I said I'm feeling fine. It really didn't set me back at all. 

Scavenger Tip #4

Last week Wednesday I had a very unexpected expense. I had to have an emergency appendectomy. Fortunately I have health insurance through Obamacare. So one of my scavenger tips for the day is please if you do not have health insurance look at how you can obtain some. Without it I'd be thousands of dollars in debt today from last weeks totally unplanned event. As a self employed person I'm so glad that I can obtain health insurance. Although it is an expense I'd rather not have to have, I'm glad now that I didn't just assume I could go without if I tried to stay healthy. No-one can forestall certain health events like appendicitis.

My second scavenger tip of the day is to save cardboard rolls that come inside bubble wrap, tape or other types of things. I use these as a sort of box when shipping small breakables. I just tape the item into the roll (tape over each open end) and then put the roll into a polymailer. It weighs less than most boxes and costs nothing. I hate just throwing out the rolls. You can also use them as packing material if weight isn't an issue.