Goodsmiths, an online marketplace for handmade goods, on Monday began to target holiday shoppers with a blitz of a paid marketing campaigns (left) that are expected to reach more than 2.5 million subscribers across three publishing companies.
“We’ve seen it from our competition that holidays are their biggest time of the year,” Goodsmiths co-founder and CEO James Eliason said in a phone interview last month, “so this is really kind of a crucial time for us to kind of tap into the buying spirit of Christmas.”
Des Moines-based Goodsmiths competes with Etsy, a company that recorded its biggest month-over-month increase in sales last year (about 28 percent) between October and November.
“By far this is our largest advertising campaign that we’ve done since we’ve launched, and obviously it ties in with the holiday,” Eliason (right) said.
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With this holiday marketing push in mind, Goodsmiths raised additional capital in September from its original group of angel investors. Though Eliason declined to disclose the amount of money or investor names, he indicated it was larger than the company’s initial raise in April.
Goodsmiths last month announced plans for the December launch of Maker Payments, a mobile app that aims to give users better tools to manage their sales offline, such as at craft fairs.
Currently, if a seller on Goodsmiths sells an item at a craft fair, that seller has to manually update their Goodsmiths store to reflect their current inventory. With Maker Payments, the inventory is updated automatically.
“It’s a totally new product that honestly for us, for Goodsmiths, it’s going to disrupt the craft fairs, art shows, farmers’ markets, all of that,” Eliason said.
The company, which launched its marketplace in April, has seven full-time team members and more than a half-dozen community bloggers. Eliason declined to reveal revenue numbers, but he said he hopes the company will break even by mid-summer of next year.
Goodsmiths recently passed $5 million in user inventory – a number that stood at less than $1 million three months ago.
Credits: Screenshot of marketing campaign courtesy of Goodsmiths. James Eliason photo courtesy of Eliason.
