Hi, I'm Arianne, founder of Aeolidia. We create effective Shopify sites and email marketing for thoughtful, independent brands. Our newsletter shares advanced, need-to-know ecommerce strategies. Not on the list yet? Join here.
Scammers are sending emails pretending to be me again, with my logo, photo, and a fake Gmail address. My team and I will always email you from our @aeolidia.com emails. Don't let anyone suspicious in your Shopify admin.
Hi Reader,
We walked the home and gift trade shows in New York last week, and I wanted to share a bit about what we saw and heard. It's always so fun to browse all the booths, and I always end up with a running shopping list in my head (a few personal favorites: Son of a Sailor's Float glass jewelry, Leaf and Loom's artistic trays, and whaaaat is this amazing walrus mount from Cody Foster?).
We got to see a bunch of beloved clients in person:
Nice to see the wholesale team at Sugar Paper, who we've been working with for over a decade!
Rachel and me in the Maptote booth - we love helping with their site and SEO
We also found some new brands and discovered some new trends. We saw lots of products that looked like food. There was a whole supermarket of food-shaped handbags, and many clever food-shaped and scented candles. We also saw rainbows galore: products in an array of color options, sorted in rainbow order, and just so much color everywhere. We also saw lots of wild and wacky sock options, including socks with seashells dangling from the ankles.
I really loved these wooden art trays from Leaf + Loom
It was great to connect with folks that we work with, see some favorite brands in person, and see all that is new.
I hadn't been to the trade shows since 2023. Here's what felt different to me:
Shoppe Object
Shoppe was much bigger! It seems to get bigger every year. It was two stories, with six big sections. I like the new location with the food court, but it was a bummer they didn't have the shuttle going back and forth between the two shows. Even though the show was bigger, it was still super well curated, and every booth was interesting and gorgeous in its own way. This show just has a great vibe. I heard from exhibitors that they do well at it and the show staff treat them well.
NY NOW
This show has gone through a lot of changes over the last few years. I'm interested to see what's next. Since 2023, this show has become much, much smaller. It's still in the huge Javits building, but occupies one medium-sized area on one floor now. Many years ago, this show had some great stuff and some junky-seeming stuff, and some suppliers and service providers. This time, it seemed much better curated, with no tacky mass-produced factory Santas in sight. The publishers still have a strong presence here, and jewelry also had a strong showing. I talked to a friend of mine who's closely connected to the new owners, and it sounds like the changes are going to be very positive. It has only been a few weeks or months under new ownership, so we'll have to wait and see.
Everyone I asked at the trade show said that being in person is crucial to their wholesale strategy, and Faire isn't a replacement for building and maintaining relationships.
If you were walking or exhibiting at either of these shows, I'd love your input to include in an upcoming blog post:
What has been your experience with the shows?
Why do you go to in-person trade shows?
What has the return on investment been like for you?
Please email me back with answers to any or all of these questions. I'd love to include you and link back to your shop from our site (P.S. getting links from other sites is really good for your SEO and AI search visibility, wink wink!).
Q&A
Here's a reader question about email marketing, from Rosa, as answered by Helen, Director of Ecommerce Strategy on our team: Q: Can I reengage the couple of thousand past purchasers who haven't subscribed to our mailing list with a "want to hear from us?" email or two?
A: Yes, but not all at once. Re-engaging past customers is best done as a winback flow. Winback flows typically send to any lapsed customer, not just those who are subscribed (but never to those who are unsubscribed).
You may send emails as a follow-up to a past purchase according to most interpretations of spam laws, but check your local laws to be sure. In this purchase follow-up email, you can include a call to subscribe to your newsletter. However, that should not be the main topic of the email. To avoid spam complaints, it is a good idea to clearly state you are reaching out because they are a past customer, not a subscriber. Of course, only include that messaging for recipients who are not subscribed.
Under no circumstances should you send a campaign to multiple contacts who have not opted in to your newsletter. These emails are likely to have high unsubscribe rates and be marked as spam. This can damage your sender reputation and make it harder to land in the inbox of subscribers who DO want to hear from you. The importance of using a flow is that it never sends in batches, but rather sends individual emails at the right moment in the customer journey.
Question: Answered
Our team includes experts in branding, design, development, email & SMS/text marketing, search engine optimization, copywriting, conversion optimization, ecommerce strategy, business growth, and more. Have a question for us? Email back, and I'll consult one of our experts and share one weekly response over email.
AI-referred traffic to Shopify stores tripled year over year, with shoppers increasingly skipping the search bar entirely. Keep in mind that we're tripling a very tiny number at the moment.
You can only book a room at this hotel by mailing them a letter. Super impractical, but I love the idea that we can bypass digital communication and still run a business people enjoy.
