Made-in-Manitoba craft sale emerges from online bazaar

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/09/2015 (3861 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fa-la-la-la-la… wha’?

According to a survey conducted earlier this month by CreditCards.com, one in seven North Americans will have a fair chunk of his or her Christmas shopping wrapped up by the end of September.

During an interview with CNN, a CreditCards.com senior analyst said, “We love to complain about stores putting up holiday displays earlier and earlier each year but the truth is that millions of (people) start holiday shopping long before the first Christmas tree appears.”

If you’re the type who has already made a list — and checked it twice — you might be interested in visiting the Etsy: Made in Canada pop-up bazaar, which runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today at Neeginan Centre, 181 Higgins Ave. The event showcases close to 70 vendors selling jewelry, home decor, sock monkeys and everything in between, and is being staged in conjunction with similar goings-on from coast to coast.

“There are 33 markets in 33 different cities, all happening on the same day,” says Jennifer Cloutier of Etsy Markets MB, the organization behind the Winnipeg sale. “And I guarantee some of the people going will definitely be doing some holiday shopping.”

Etsy, described as a “crafty cross between Amazon and eBay,” is an e-commerce site that promotes handmade goods such as artwork, clothing and toys. Of the roughly 2,000 Manitobans who are registered Etsy “store owners,” 130 applied to be in today’s sale. That number was whittled down to 68 by Cloutier and her associates.

“It is a juried event and the vendors who make it are chosen for a number of reasons,” Cloutier explains. “We wanted to showcase different skill levels, we wanted to include a few rural sellers, but most importantly we wanted to make sure we’d have a wide variety of goods available so that shoppers aren’t looking at the same type of stuff all day.”

Since all Etsy transactions are performed online, Cloutier says today’s get-together will offer sellers a rare opportunity to meet their customers in person.

“It really is a great way to get instant feedback,” she goes on, noting more than 3,000 Winnipeggers attended the inaugural Etsy: Made in Canada sale last September. “Somebody might take a look at something you’re featuring online and pass you by and you’ll never know why. But when your stuff is right in front of you — and the customer is there, too — you have the ability to engage in conversation and interact.”

Last week we sat down with three vendors who will be on hand at today’s market. Here’s a look at what they’ll have available.

 

North City Growlers

Two Septembers ago, Daivin Macdonald was driving along California’s Pacific Coast Highway with his wife, Leah, and their one-year-old daughter when he spotted a sign advertising the Cambria Beer Company, a family-owned brewery in Cambria, Calif.

After popping inside and sampling a few craft beers, Macdonald noticed a series of large, brown bottles on a shelf behind the bar. He asked the owner what they were used for. He was told they were growlers — reusable bottles a person could take to a brewery and get filled with whatever beers were on tap at the time.

“My wife and I immediately thought, ‘Cool,’ and wished there was something like that in Manitoba.”

When they got back to Winnipeg, the Macdonalds started doing a little digging. After spotting some “really cool beer growlers” online, they asked themselves, “Why not create a home-based business that made personalized growlers?” If a fellow were getting married, for example, they could produce growlers for each of his groomsmen as a keepsake. Or if a person were a huge puck-head, they could fashion ones reading “Go Jets Go.”

As luck would have it, last summer Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries announced it would be introducing growler bars at select Liquor Mart locations, commencing in October 2014. The Macdonalds launched their Etsy shop — North City Growlers — that same month.

“I have a sandblaster at home — I do all the designing — so if you get in touch with me and say you want such-and-such on your bottle, we’ll make it work,” Macdonald says, noting his most interesting request to date came from a woman who, because her husband is a Star Wars nut, wanted a growler with an image of Yoda on its side.

Macdonald markets three types of growlers — glass, ceramic and stainless steel. Since bottles brought to Manitoba Liquor Marts must be see-through or have a “fill window” — a large percentage of Macdonald’s sales are to beer-lovers from outside the province.

“I wish I had started one of those maps you stick pins in because I’ve literally shipped all over — Puerto Rico, Hawaii, England, Norway… it’s always crazy to see where these things are going next.”

 

Prairie Peasant

 

Good news for eggheads who don’t know what to do with their old Trivial Pursuit games, now that their chums refuse to take them on, ever again.

Laura Dyck is the owner of Prairie Peasant, an Etsy biz that sells one-of-a-kind books fashioned out of “unlikely materials.” Perhaps the most eye-catching items in Dyck’s cache are blank journals and diaries made out of classic board games, such as Monopoly, Scrabble or (“How many rings make up one arm of the Michelin Man?”) Trivial Pursuit. (Four)

“I used to be part of a calligraphers’ guild and learned how to bind books through them,” Dyck explains, showing off a just-completed project made out of a Risk board she recently lucked into at a second-hand store. “I started off making travel journals using maps as covers and just kind of went from there.”

Dyck “opened” her Etsy shop on April 29, 2008. She filled her first order four days later, from a lady in Ottawa. Dyck has since packaged books and shipped them to folks all over the globe, including Australia, Japan and Europe.

“That happens a lot,” Dyck says, when she is asked if passers-by ever do a double-take when she displays her tomes at craft events similar to today’s Etsy sale. “Sometimes they’re puzzled and say, ‘Is this what I think it is?’ I explain the front and back covers used to be a game, then I flip through the pages to show them it’s something they can write in, if they so choose.”

 

Joyful House Designs

Sisters-in-law Bethany Speers and Melodie McMahon have a lot in common. Both ladies were born and raised in Niverville, both have two children roughly the same ages and both love to sew.

They’re also the co-owners of Joyful House Designs, an Etsy shop that sells funky, “pleather” pillows that resemble letters of the alphabet, whales & ampersands (see what we did there).

“We came up with this idea in February and started selling our pillows on Etsy in March,” McMahon says. “(Today) will be our first show and we’ve been on the edge of our seat waiting for it to start because this will be the first time we’ll be face-to-face with our customers.”

Although no records seem to exist, it’s a safe bet Speers and McMahon are the only people on the planet who have ever marketed a pillow shaped like the Keystone Province.

“Manitoba definitely has a unique shape and we’d been toying around with that idea so just before Canada Day we figured, ‘Why not?’ ” says McMahon, agreeing with a scribe’s assertion that a head rest mimicking Saskatchewan would be a tough sell.

A couple of weeks ago, the duo was asked if they could create a cushion modelled after a pug. (Their top-seller to date has been a cat-shaped pillow.)

“It took us four tries to get it just right,” McMahon says. “It was a lot of work and I’m not so sure we want to be doing that one, again.”

 

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca