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Animal rescue is a cause close to my heart. I'm one of those (maybe annoying?) people who can't walk past a dog on the street without petting it (after asking the owner first, of course!).
Which made it very hard when I was visiting India a few years ago - there are lots of street dogs, and they are hungry, and sick, and in pretty bad shape in general, so it's really not a good idea to pet them. I had to physically put my hands in my pocket to keep myself from petting them.
As always, I digress. I got a request for donations for gift bag items for a fundraiser for The Amanda Foundation, an animal rescue group run by an actress in Beverly Hills. (Yes, their zip code is actually 90210, which cracked me up.)
For the charity donations I've done in the past, it's been one item for a raffle or auction, usually something custom, that I make for the winner. I've never done the swag bag donation. Because for a long time, I couldn't really come up with anything that was both cool and cost-effective for my little business.
But now that I know how to work my cool little disc cutter (see previous posts) I realized that pet collar charms are potentially a great idea for gift bag items. If I can stand to make lots of them at once. I wasn't sure how that would go, so I figured I'd try it out.
So I got to work this weekend. My goal was to keep the cost down, so I finally had a use for those little scrap bits of copper and nickel silver that are too small for pet tags or keychains. And I am a ziploc bag hoarder (and you jewelry-makers out there know how those bags add up when you're buying tiny little supplies!).
It wasn't so bad! It took me about a full workday to get everything made and nicely packaged:
- Cut out discs
- Drill holes in discs for keyring
- Stamp discs with design or short words
- Clean charms
- Oxidize them
- File and polish them (this was the longest!)
- Put on the split rings (thanks Metallica for making this go faster!)
- Punch holes in biz cards and cut yarn for tying
- Tie charm to biz card
- Put each card in bag, and add sticker to bag
- Package all for shipping to the foundation, with nice cover letter
The original request was for 100 items, but since I make each charm by hand, I asked the foundation if they'd be ok with 50, and they were. (Yay for me for knowing my limits!). I'm really, really glad I didn't commit to 100.
The packaging was pretty time consuming, but I wanted the items to look nice and for the charms to stay with my business card/web address. I've heard lots of stories about people getting sample packs or gift bags where the items had become separated from the cards so they had no idea where or how to get more of something they liked.
Anyway, I took a few pictures of the items. There was something neat about seeing all those tiny little charms in a big pile together, and realizing I made them myself :D
So the package will go in tomorrow's mail and the fundraiser is June 18. Here's to hoping it brings some business, both to my shop and to 1000Markets as a whole. Yippee!!
