Creative Handmade Artisans: Tricks and Tips for Treasuries

Tricks and Tips for Treasuries

(Adapted and expanded from my blog at www.suziesarmoire.blogspot.com)

I’ve been asked on occasion to explain how someone gets a Treasury or Treasury West on Etsy. Before I explain how to get one, I will back-up and try to explain Etsy Treasuries for those that have never done or seen one before. A Treasury is a user created gallery of 12 items (+4 alternates which you can fill in if you want) that are listed on Etsy. The buyers and sellers of Etsy get to make the choices, not the "Powers That Be" at Etsy. We get to be creative and promote handmade and vintage items to the online community. Some people list things they would like to buy, some pick items from friends or team members, some choose items that match a theme, and some people even search on keywords for items from total strangers that fit their theme.

However you pick the items to list, it is fun to create them, fun to look at them, and even more fun to share them. I highly recommend playing around with Etsy’s Poster Sketch tool before you make your first Treasury. This will get you comfortable with how to enter items and move them around. Plus it gives you a place to create and store your idea until you are able to “snag” a live Treasury. (Side Note: there are 16 slots on the Poster Sketch, but only 12 slots appear to other users when viewing a Treasury; the remaining 4 slots along the right are called alternates.)

Once I made my first Treasury, I immediately thought of another idea, and then another, and...I had to start writing a list! It's not complicated to get a Treasury once you know the secrets of using sites like Craftopolis (http://www.craftopolis.com/index.php?com=tc) for their countdown clock. See, Etsy only opens up Main Treasury when the number of live Treasuries drops below 333. And the magic number on Treasury West is 222. So you can't just go and create one whenever you feel like it. You have to wait until the exact moment the number of current Treasuries drops below the magic number. The next time Etsy refreshes the screen, the chance is gone. There's still some amount of suspense involved.

You check the countdown clock throughout the day. Or you just happen to get lucky and sit down at the computer and see that it's opening soon, which is a big rush if you don't have your Poster Sketch filled in--hurry, hurry, pick some items. What was my next theme again? Where's my list? (For me, "soon" can be in an hour or two, because sometimes it takes me that long to find 12-16 items to include! We all know how easy it is to get lost looking at handmade items on Etsy.)
Then you sit there, looking at the bottom of the Treasury screen, waiting for the box to pop up so you can enter the (hopefully creative) title you thought of for your next Treasury. It's a little like waiting for an online auction to end. This is where the adrenaline rush really kicks in. "Did I get it? Am I too slow? Did I blink and miss the box?"

The Number One misconception about getting a Treasury is that you should constantly refresh the Treasury list on Etsy. This is a big no-no! Etsy automatically refreshes the page for you. You just need to sit and wait for the title box to open at the bottom of the page. The trick that I use is to open the Etsy Treasury list in one browser window, click on page 1, and make sure I sort the list so that the ones about to expire are at the top of the list. Sometimes I will count back to find which one is number 333 (or 222), click on it, and see just what time it’s scheduled to expire.

One thing you have to watch out for is people deleting their old Treasuries. This will decrease the amount of time until the Treasury slots are open again, which is why you can check the countdown clocks, come back to Etsy when you thought spots where going to open, and see that there are hundreds of new Treasuries, and the time to the magic number has jumped to 25 hours.

Once I have my window open and sorted, I scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen. This is where the title box will appear when the numbers are right. So that I’m not a total loser and staring at the screen for hours on end, I will open another browser window and slide it over to the right of my laptop screen, just enough so that I can see when the Treasury title box opens up in the left window. Then I do all my email reading, web surfing, or even filling up my poster sketch in this second window, making sure not to cover the Treasury screen. (Side Note: I also have multiple tabs open, so I can search Etsy in one tab, and fill up my poster sketch in another. Call it multi-tasking or ADD, but it is how I work.) Once I see the title box appear on the left screen, I immediately click in it and type in my title.

Then you have to make sure you type the title correctly, because you can't fix it later. A moment of hesitation...You click the button! Did it work? Yes!

Then the watching and waiting pays off. It's time to enter the beautiful items and share your choices with the Rest of the World. Remember to share the link to your new Treasury with friends and team mates. Remind them to leave a comment, and to click on each item (Etsy has some special formula for ranking which Treasuries are “Hot,” and the number of clicks and comments works into it.) The only downside to making a Treasury is that your creation only last for 2-3 days, until it also expires and decreases the number of live Treasuries. But, hey, that just means it's time to make the next one!