Beaducation Teaches Customers to Get Crafty with Help from Endicia

Beaducation Provides Tips and Tools for Jewelry Makers

Lisa Niven Kelly stumbled upon her passion for jewelry in the summer of 1989, when she and her friends flocked to the local hardware store for seed beads and fishing line to make ankle bracelets. Lisa’s first foray into jewelry making sparked an obsession — throughout college and into adulthood, she loved to experiment with new metalwork and wirework techniques.

Eventually, she was able to quit her day job, stringing together income from selling supplies, tools and handmade glass beads, and teaching other jewelry makers her techniques and designs. As a true pioneer in the beading industry, Lisa traveled all across the United States leading classes and running a small website for her students to buy tools and materials.

After 12 years of touring the country, leaving beads and blossoming friendships in her wake, Lisa decided it was time to plant her roots, start a family and stay closer to home. In 2007, her husband Paul built a website for Lisa to publish online educational videos and sell supplies. The name “Beaducation” stuck, and the business quickly took off.

In Beaducation’s early days, Lisa would manually create the shipping label for each supply order. “My team grew naturally alongside my business, and soon we were spending half the day making shipping labels,” explained Lisa. “I started looking for a solution that would automate much of the shipping process, so we could spend more time doing what we loved — helping our customers make special jewelry pieces.”

Endicia’s Automated Solution Saves Time

Soon after building Beaducation, Lisa and her team adopted Endicia as their shipping software.

Fast forward to today, Beaducation’s shipping lead Jenn Wilson and the rest of the team ship 600 to 700 packages a week, exclusively using the U.S. Postal Service^®. The company ships small and medium-sized packages, striving to get every order out the door in 1-3 business days. With 100 percent of its packages going out via USPS^®, the company uses Endicia for all of its shipments. “With Endicia, we’re able to create more than 200 labels in a half-hour period,” said Jenn.

Endicia’s Pay-on-Use Returns™ is especially valuable to the company’s shipping strategy. The Pay-on-Use Returns service allows businesses to create return labels with postage that is only deducted if and when the label is scanned in the mail stream. If a customer receives a product by mistake or something is damaged in transit, the Beaducation team can then send over a PDF return label via email for the customer to print at home.

The Beaducation team also relies on Endicia Parcel Insurance™ to provide coverage for lost or damaged goods.

Not only does Beaducation send packages all over the U.S., but the company ships roughly 5 percent of its orders overseas, with shipments regularly going out to Australia, Europe and Canada. Jenn appreciates that Endicia flags any current international bans, chooses the correct customs forms, pre-fills the information and prints everything on one integrated label for each shipment.

“We aim to provide our fellow jewelry making enthusiasts with a seamless shipping experience. And bottom line, it wouldn’t be possible without Endicia,” said Jenn. “I can guarantee that if we weren’t using Endicia, customers wouldn’t be regularly commenting on how fast and customer-friendly our shipping is!”