Interview with Kandice Seeber of Air & Earth Designs

1.How long have you been making glass beads?

I started making beads in July, 2002 – so that would be 7 years now.

2.Did you start selling right away?

Not right away, but it wasn’t as long as I probably should have waited. After taking my first class, I started by apprenticing with Paulette Insall (who has moved on to painting), and after a couple of months I set up my own studio. I started selling early on in 2003.

3.Is there anything you can share about when you started to sell your beads?

Like many other newbie beadmakers, I took up selling really too early. It was partly due to necessity – we often have to sell in order to make the money needed to keep buying glass and such. But I admit to getting caught up in the idea that I was good enough to sell my work – a lot of people were asking me to. If I had to do it over I would wait a year or so before selling my beads – giving me time to perfect the basic techniques and find my artistic voice.

4. I have often linked to your article about selling on eBay. Thank you! Do you still sell on eBay?

Thanks for linking the article – I am glad you enjoy it!
I do sell on ebay still – but it’s not on a regular basis. I sell larger sets there when I want to kind of let everyone know I am still alive. Ebay is a great venue for getting your name out there, but it is not the ebay we once knew. The market has really changed over the years, and ebay is no longer the main place for beadmakers to sell. There are so many venues out there that are more geared toward the self-representing artists. Ebay gets the most traffic, though, so I keep a presence there.

5. What are your selling venues of choice? How has that changed over the years?

These days I prefer to sell beads on my website Lampwork.net, with the occasional ebay auction for larger sets. I sell tutorials on my other website, Coloraddiction.com, and also on Etsy.

Over the years, I have tried many different venues. Third party venues like Etsy, Artfire, Justbeads, Ebay and such are good for people who haven’t done a lot of online selling or are just starting out, because they help get one’s name out there and are not as much work as having one’s own website. Once I became a little more well-known, my website sales went up and I was able to concentrate on that as opposed to being on several other venues. I find that if I spread myself too thin I can’t keep up with more than just a couple of places.

I really like selling on my website because it eliminates the venue fees and I have more control. I’m kind of a control freak that way. LOL I do all of my own website creation and maintenance, and all of my own online marketing. It’s a lot of hard work, but really worth it.

6. Do you sell anywhere else?

Other than online sales, I have done a few shows here and there. I’d really love to do more shows though – we’ll have to see! I will probably wind up doing local shows to supplement my online sales. I did do the ISGB Gathering in 2008 and that was a blast – I highly recommend it.

7. Your colors are beautiful! How do you come up with such great combinations? Do you experiment a lot or is it natural for you now?

Thank you! Color is my main motivation and inspiration. The way glass transmits light is what drives me as a beadmaker. I have always loved color – it’s a blissful experience for me. It’s color rather than shape or design that gets me excited when making a set of beads.

Color combinations come to me in a variety of ways. Usually though it just comes when I happen to see color scheme in a magazine, in a store, in nature, on TV, in someone’s clothing – anywhere really. I am always thinking to myself, “okay, which glass color would that be and how can I get that combination?”. I even look at the colors of cars going down the street and automatically try to come up with the glass color that matches.

I also tend to spend a lot of time in the studio placing glass rods next to eachother to see what kind of emotional response they give me. I get a lot of ideas that way – spreading five or six rods out and trying to imagine them as a set.

By far the best place for color inspiration for me is a fabric, craft or yarn store. I could spend hours putting colors together in the local yarn store. I fall in love with color combinations every single day of my existence.

8. What advice would you give to someone new, wanting to create an online business?

I tell people all the time that making your art into an online business is very, difficult. It can be really rewarding, but it’s much more of a challenge than I ever thought it would be. You have to seperate your artistic self-worth and the monetary value of your art, otherwise it can be tough on your soul as an artist.

I also tell people that in order to succeed in a business, you have to love what you do. You have to give yourself time to fall in love with it and time for that love to come through in your art. That means giving yourself time to really learn the basic techniques so that your artisic voice is free to come out. Once that happens, your beads will sing with your voice, and more people will see value in that and will buy your work.

If you don’t love what you do, and you’re just in it for the monetary gain, you are less likely to succeed – because your beads will just have no soul. People really want beads that speak to them.

Once you reach that place where you are happy with your work, be prepared to really put a lot of effort into selling. Especially in these economic times – people are less likely to spend a lot on what might be thought of as an “extra”. You will need to go that extra mile in order to stand out in the competition. But don’t give up if it’s what you really love!

9. I know that you have experienced having your beads knocked off and designs sent over seas, as well as having your images stolen and used without permission. How have you dealt with that and what advice can you give to someone who might experience this in the future, or how to prevent it, if possible?

I still struggle with dealing with this. The toughest part is the emotional side – because when you love your art as much as I do, it’s part of your soul. And when people steal it to profit from it, it hurts. However, if you can somehow come to terms with the fact that in this industry it cannot be avoided, you’ll be okay. I’ve had to learn to just let some things go.

The best defense with this kind of thing is just to educate people about it. There will always be unethical companies and people out there, and the more we talk about it the better. Unfortunately these days there’s not a lot that can be done to prevent image theft or design theft. I have tried many many things – even contacting authorities and watermarking my images. There eventually comes a point where the benefits do not outweigh the effort made to try and stop these things, so you have to decide what to do when that happens.

I can’t tell others to not let it get them down, because I myself get down about it all the time. But what I can say is that no matter what, no one can take away your artistic voice.

10. I will be doing a review and holding a contest for your Simple Raised Flower Bead eTutorial on my Lori Greenberg blog…can you tell us a little about the process of writing a tutorial?

Tutorials are fun! Personally, I do my writing last. The first thing I do (well, after deciding which design I am going to turn into a tutorial) is make the bead I am writing about a few times while taking notes about each and every step. I then have my husband photograph each step while I am making the bead. He’s really good at it! I then edit the photos – and this takes the most time out of the whole process.

Lastly I write the tutorial from my notes and do the layout of the tutorial in my publishing program. The whole thing takes a couple of weeks because I tend to work on it intermittently while keeping up with other beadmaking and website sales.

11. Thank you Kandice!  Is there anything else you’d like to leave our readers with?

Mainly what I would like to say to people just starting out is this – There is now a lot of competition out there. Beadmaking is becoming more mainstream, so we all have to work even harder to stand out in the crowd. But if you put a lot of love in your work, have a little talent, and are willing to pound the pavement and learn about marketing and business, you can be successful.

Learn how to market online – there are a lot of free resources out there just by Googling. Learn to balance what you love with what potential customers are looking for.

Above all – be patient! Sales will come, but it does take some time.

You can find Kandice’s web site at www.lampwork.net, her tutorial site with fellow glass bead artist Kimberly Affleck at www.coloraddiction.com and her blog at www.coloraddictionblog.blogspot.com where she writes about glass colors, testing and color in general.  Make sure to see what she’s up to!

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Tagged as: Kandice Seeber