We are closing after May!
You can apply for future months and we’ll pass the applications on to the new owner if someone takes over!
We want to work with you! We exist to help promote other small businesses and introduce customers to products made by hand or small companies. Indie Gift Box has grown rapidly, and we expect to keep growing! With several thousand website views, and 100 boxes delivered to potential customers every month, we offer a great opportunity for you to showcase your work! See our website stats here.
Artist/Small Business Item Submission Requirements:
- You/your small business must make the items
- You must contribute at least 105 items (5 items to be held back in case of loss/damage when we ship IGB)
- Items must retail for at least $3.00, preferably more
- Packaging must be clear, or simple stickers/hangtags (all items are wrapped in tissue paper for shipping)
- Items must be relatively small, and fit within boxes that are 8x8x2″
By contributing items you will receive:
- A blog post featuring you
- A button on the blog/website sidebar
- Your images featured in the slider on our sidebar
- Promotion via the website and blog
- Your items mailed out to people who will hopefully want to buy from you and/or give you a good review on their own blog!
- Us purchasing the items from you at your discounted price! (Please keep in mind that this is promotion for you, not just a normal wholesale opportunity)
We’d still love to have you! This is a great opportunity for those who have items too large to fit in our boxes, sell custom work, or offer services like graphic design. Please note that we do have minimum requirements for coupons or gift cards, but that we do not purchase or reimburse coupons or gift cards. To track their use, we recommend creating a code that references Indie Gift Box.
Artist/Small Business Coupon Submission Requirements:
- You must be an independent artist or run a small business
- You must contribute at least 105 coupons or gift cards (5 coupons to be held back in case of loss/damage when we ship IGB)
- Coupons must be for a minimum of 25% or $5 (your choice)
By contributing coupons you will receive:
- A button on the blog/website sidebar
- Promotion via the website and blog
- A group-feature blog post with you and any other gift card contributors
- Your gift cards mailed out to people who will hopefully want to buy from you and/or give you a good review on their own blog!
- Note: we do not purchase gift cards or coupons, they are in exchange for promotion only!
How to price your items for Indie Gift Box
We get a lot of questions asking about whether the prices people submit are reasonable or not. The answer is that pricing is completely up to you as an artist! We want this to be mutually beneficial for everyone, and we hope that it won’t cost anyone any out-of-pocket expenses. That said, we have a very limited budget of only $500-$1,000/month so, often, we are only able to cover your actual costs. To help you price your items, we’ve made a little chart which is the formula that many small-businesses use when pricing.
Because this is a promotional opportunity for you, we recommend pricing your items in your quote to us at cost. This will cover your materials and your time, while still providing us with the prices that we need to fill the boxes! It’s a win-win situation. Oh, and then you get promoted too! =]
Why can’t we pay wholesale?
We are asked quite often why we can’t pay wholesale pricing. Though we’d love to, the reason we can’t is because we don’t make wholesale profits. Here’s a simplified version of why this doesn’t work:
- You sell your necklaces for $20 retail
- You sell your necklaces to us for $10 wholesale
- We put them in boxes with other items (we’ll just say two other items that cost $5/each, so $20 total wholesale, or $40 retail value)
- We sell the boxes for $20
- We get paid $20 by the customer (minus Paypal fees)
- The customer gets a box worth $40! =]
- We don’t make any money, and actually end up losing money! =[
Because our boxes are only $20 (plus shipping, which typically really is used entirely for shipping/packaging), we have to keep the cost of the items that we purchase low, while still providing quality items for our customers. We're not making $10 on your necklace because we're not selling at retail price. In many cases, if we paid wholesale pricing we would lose money even before Paypal fees for every box we sold. While we love our jobs, we don't love them that much! =] To keep us from going broke and losing money, we keep our item costs to less than $1,000 each month which means we end up making somewhere around $10/hour for our work.
Submit Application
Everything sound good? Please fill out the form below to be considered as an Indie Gift Box contributor. We are unable to reply to each application, but we will contact each selected applicant within 30 days.
