Archive for the ‘5- Minute Fixes’ Category

Deja Vuesday: Is your resale shop boring your visitors?

Posted in 5- Minute Fixes, Shopkeeping talk, tagged advertising, resale shopkeeping, success, web, word of mouth on January 17, 2012|

After all, some Auntie Kate messages are, ahem, Too Good to be Threw!

Click the image for more Deja Vuesday posts that are too good to be threw from TGtbT.com

This Deja Vu post is the one I personally refer consignment, resale, and thrift consultees when discussing how to build traffic through their doors. Often, they don’t realize what a great opportunity (more…)

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Edit your world

Posted in 5- Minute Fixes, Shopkeeping talk, tagged advertising, resale shopkeeping, web on January 12, 2012| 3 Comments »

Perhaps you’ve noticed the consignment, resale, thrift shop exterior photos on my Pinterest board called

Favorite Consignment, Resale, Thrift Shops

I’ve had a good time finding and posting all these for you.

I’ve had an even better time imagining how much more focused some of these photos could be without the extraneous stuff in them. After all, we can’t always change the real world… but with pixels, we can edit them!

Here’s an example. I’m using Photowipe which is free and easy, but I’m sure there are scads of other programs out there.

HowToConsign.com Sponsor Selective Seconds in Indiana

Nice photo, but the blue pavement painting distracts our attention from Vena’s shop, Selective Seconds in Indiana.

So I “erased” the handicapped signs (and the car to the left), just to focus on the shop. All I had to do was “draw” with my mouse over the areas I wished weren’t there. Result:

HowToConsign.com finds YOUR fututre customers for you

Neat, huh? And the pavement reflects the shop so nicely. If you really look, the “blotch” of the car is there, but who’s lookin’? We’re admiring the shopfront!

Now, I can get a little OCD. This is such a nice photo that I’d like to see it be usable year-round, so let’s downplay that Valentine’s Day lettering in the right-hand window. Erase, erase!

Turning your Cluttered Closets into Cash: that's the WIIFM at HowToConsign.com

And it’s done! If you look carefully, the window display’s a bit blurry, but it’s still bright and colorful. Pretty good for an amateur, with a free program, in less than 5 minutes.

So if you have photos that are pretty good, but you’d like to erase some things from them, try Photowipe. Warning: Large ugly things like ex-spouses are not easily done away with, no matter how much we wish they were!

Now for a final tweak, let’s make sure this photo really motivates people to remember the shop. I take the final photo over to Picnik (you’ve heard me rave about this before) and add a little WIIFM to the picture.

UPDATE July 2012: Google bought and killed picnik.com (way to go, Google.), but an almost-identical program is now available at ribbet.com and there’s also picmonkey.com

Selective Seconds Resale in Indiana, a HowToConsign.com Sponsor

This might be a little more than you’d really want to add to a photo, but I wanted to show you that you can have different colors, different sizes, even angled text. Total time, using Photowipe and Picnik, less than 10 minutes. Click the picture to go to the live link to Vena’s shop.