We get many emails from would-be chime retailers who are interested in selling wind chimes in their shop. For some reason, they think BuyChimes is the manufacturer of the wind chimes we sell. These questions (and our answers) go something like one of these:

I run a small [garden, gift] shop. We love your wind chimes! We would like to sell them. Do you sell wholesale?
To which we invariably reply, “Thank you! I’m sorry, we don’t sell wholesale. We are a retail shop. The manufacturer is…”

Do you sell wholesale?
I’m sorry. No, we don’t. We sell only at retail prices. The manufacturer would be happy to sell them to you at wholesale…

Could you sell us wind chimes so we can sell them in our shop?
That’s a good question. Unfortunately, we are a retail-only shop. You should contact the manufacturer. Here’s their information…

We love your chimes! Can we set up an account with you so we can sell them in our gift shop?
Why, thank you! We like them too! However, we are strictly a Web- and retail-only store. To buy them wholesale, contact…

We state this in fairly plain language on our About us page on the BuyChimes site. Perhaps they don’t read it. Or maybe we need to make it more prominent. Or they think we’d make an exception for them? I can understand if they get taken by our fetching photography and just want to sell them too. We love selling these chimes! So we understand that desire to sell such nice products.

Jeff

BuyChimes.com

I like those advertisements from the old days when they used decorative fonts and an artist’s drawing of the product. The wanted posters of the Old West often had a hand pointing to the reward amount. The pointing hand, I learned recently, is called a manicule (derived from manus, the Latin word for hand).

Sample manicules

Here is some interesting reading (at least I found it interesting; Carolyn thinks I’m a bit off my rocker): Toward a History of the Manicule (or see the pdf version), by William H. Sherman. Basically, he researched that readers from the Renaissance onward would draw a manicule in the margin pointing to the text that they wanted to mark as important. They indicate to take note. This is important. Printers later adopted it as a visual cue for the reader that what follows  is important.

The set of examples (mostly signage) on the  Flicker collection of manicules is growing. One clever woman is even following the beck and call of (nearly every) manicule she sees (Yes manicule)! It seems to be getting more use. I love that. Thank you, Mr. Sherman, for your research on these “pointing hand thingies” and for resurrecting the name for us to use.

We at BuyChimes use the manicule to point out that what follows is important. In fact, it’s probably the most important thing for a wind chime—its sound. And what better device to use?

Jeff
BuyChimes.com