ArtFire is constantly looking for new ways to better align the goals of handmade artists and the crafting industry supporting each other. We’re aware a lot of our sellers regularly purchase supplies from brands they trust and rely on for their quality. In order to continue reaching toward that alignment of artisans and craft suppliers, ArtFire has partnered with major craft suppliers to introduce a new section of brand name craft supplies as a supplement to ArtFire’s existing indie supplies.
With an estimated 85,000 new supply items at the launch of the new craft supplies section, that number will grow to around 150,000 items by end of the first quarter of 2013. A lot of high-quality brand names including Clover, American Crafts, and Prima will provide new access for handmade crafters and artisans to the raw materials they work with: textiles, beads, jewelry tools, and more.
Integrating both brand name craft supplies and indie supplies into the ArtFire marketplace will provide the synergy between artisans and the supplies they work with to make ArtFire a more productive place to work and sell on. This new category of supplies will also provide the opportunity for those who regularly buy supplies for their arts & crafts to help support the ArtFire website as a whole: sales from the new commercial supplies section will generate a commission for ArtFire to reinvest in the website itself.
The new supplies section also serves an additional purpose: changes to Google’s search algorithms have ranked domains with brand-name products higher, resulting in more favorable search results for ArtFire as a whole to the benefit of individual sellers.
Adding commercial supplies to ArtFire is one big step in the direction of not only creating a site where handmade artisans can sell their work at very affordable costs on a robust marketplace, but now also purchase a lot of the raw materials from the very partners who will help fund the expansion of the handmade artisan business and grow the ArtFire community.
To forge a better connection between the handmade products and craft supplies on ArtFire, we have also launched a brand new Facebook page and Twitter account for ArtFire Craft Supplies where fans can find crafting tips and DIY tutorials.
You can read more and see it in action at