We Become an Internet Fad

Well, as an influential artistic poser said, last century, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." This has held true for us, or at least for a pair of our earrings. Last Thursday we started to get many orders for our HTML "Head" Earrings. We had sold a pair or two before, but it became apparent that somewhere on the internet they had been linked to on a high traffic site.

After some sleuthing, we found that they were on the front page of Digg.com. Digg isn't a site I read normally, but is one of those that will bring your site down if you don't have enough bandwidth. The comments about our earrings are hilarious. The post about our earrings has since moved down to the 2nd page of the "7 days" page. Because they were on Digg, they also were linked by many different blogs. Only a few had anything mildly interesting to say, such as these two: Gomeler.com and Clicked. As you can see, I left comments on both, as I did at the end of the Digg posting. Our friend Miss C. also linked to them on Neatorama.

Here I am milling many pairs of the earrings. At this point we only had enough silver to mill earrings for the orders we had, although later that day some more silver showed up from Hoover and Strong.

This is what happens when you work too hard. The mistake on the left is when you use an endmill on a toolpath meant for an engraving tool, and on the right when you set the depth of the engraving tool to .03" rather than .003"

The earrings are somewhat labor intensive to make, in spite of using the CNC mill. I did get into a good workflow with them towards the end of the fad (sold two pairs today, but we can tell the end is near). Now we live in fear of lost packages, returns and all the sundry other hassles that come with people buying items on a whim. It will still probably be worth it. All in all it netted a comparable sum of money as one good day at an outdoor craft market. It certainly is a lesson why Etsy is a good host for our jewelry, had our old jewelry site been linked to, it would have crashed from bandwidth overload in minutes.

So that's what we've been doing the last week, making earrings, mailing earrings and replying to emails.

Henry and Max were great through the whole week, playing peacefully together.

Here they are, waiting for a snack.