Need a special gift or garden and yard product that’s more than just a nice looking work of art, but a useful item for your whole neighborhood. A craft that last for years with very little maintenance and easy to install? Tools-and-Things.com offers the birdhouse, feeder, butterfly house that you are looking for.
Sold all over the USA since 1996 and local NC since 1991 these products speak for themselves. Well made by Azor Israel in his small workshop in Raleigh NC, Azor make these woodworks one by one and there’s not one that’s exactly alike, very unique craftsmanship. After offering his products at crafts shows and consignment shops,
Azor decided to open an online storefront in May of 2000 and had no online experience in selling or promoting anything in this new medium and it was going nowhere, but fast. Azor did’nt have the time to make his products and travel around to show to show and everone that was hired for these shows had to be paid and sometimes after he paid the cost of the shows, his help, and overhead it was hardly enough to purchase new material to reinvest for new products.
Plus the consignment shops was charging way over the normal 20 to 25% but like 40 to 60% commissions and they were selling, but they where the only one making a profit. I told Azor (Judy Israel)to pull all his crafts from the consignment shops and just keep making his products, “birdhouses and bird feeders” and we went to work on our website.
Azor and I put into action what we had learned, from May of 2000 about selling on line in August of 2000 and we started getting orders, not a lot of orders but two or three every couple of weeks. Azor would go to our local State Farmers Market here in Raleigh NC and he would sell a moderate amount of his birdhouses, but he was still making his product as usual and coming up with new ones.
Azor keept this up until September 11th 2001, (the darkest day in our Nation’s history)after we got over the initial shock 911, selling at the local State Farmers Market went down hill. I think it was do to our Nation was still in shock and things was just slow and most people was a bit unsure about the economy.
Azor keept on building his product, working on his website and taking classes on internet marketing and other classes, and one day in the Spring of 2003 a store owner came to his crafts display, and the store owner and his wife started to sit products from the display off to the side and when they were finished, they had set over $900.00 in birdhouses and butterfly houses out for purchase.
The next few days was great, we had sold over $2,000 worth of products and each day from then on we sold at least one birdhouse from the market or online at the web store. Azor was glad that I had told him to keep making his products.
We started get people calling us asking if they could reorder and custom order different styles and colors, telling us how they just love our products, and how well they held-up. In Apirl, May and June of 2005 we got orders for 3265 items most from the internet store.
You would think this was great, but not quite!
Remember Azor builds his crafts one by one and at that time he refused to let anyone help but me and two of our children and that was limited to painting and sealing. Azor had to do something to aleast atempt to deliver these orders.
After getting about 650 items finished and shipped, Azor asked three of his friends to help part time until he could catch-up, and that helped but before we could get the other orders completed a lot of them was asking for their money back.
Well this was the last time this happened, Azor put in place a first come first served policy, better know as ( if your porduct is not instock made and ready to ship with in 24hrs then you can order it on back order and he will let you know when you can exspect shipment and orders over 90 days out, will have a smaller up-front deposit.
Now Azor has three employees that only work, from March the 10th until July the 3rd of each year.Things are going well a this time and we are back to running smooth again and we are keeping all our customers happy.
You can see most of our best selling products at:
TOOLS-AND-THINGS.COM
We all are very proud of Azor Israel not just for the great work he do, but he is very fair with all who is come to know him. Judy Israel
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