Valyn is so excited about this he actually opened an eye!

We’ve finally reached our fist real milestone, $1,000 in donations to animal rescues, charities and shelters!

Our goal has always been to help as many different animals and rescues as possible and we are thrilled to announce that we have finally reached the $1,000 mark in donations. I had hoped that we would reach this number much earlier this year, but with the way things are in the current economy I’m happy we have been able to give as much as we have.

We started Animal Charms specifically to help us raise more money to give to animals in need and we are thrilled that we are starting to be able to have an impact.

As always, as least 10% of every sale is donated to an animal rescue or charity and we tend to focus on the smaller, local, no kill shelters and rescues rather than donating to the larger national organizations. We also offer special coupon code plans for charities to help them get more from us by giving their supporters a discount as well. You can find out more about this program, which we are reworking right now, by emailing me through the contact form of giving us a call at the phone number listed on our contacts page.

If you run a charity and would like us to put you on our donation list, you can send me an email, again through the contact form or you can add your web site to our animal charity directory.

Photo Engraved Pendant

Finally, after a lot of practice and preparation, Diane and I are thrilled to be able to offer photo engraving here at Animal Charms. The process is very simple, we take a photo of your pet, that you send to us, and we load it in to Photoshop for editing. We remove the background information, and trim the photo for the best look. Then a little bit of image magic and we are ready to load it in to our engraving machine. A short time later we have a stunning pet photo engraved on a metal pendant.

Your pendant is then polished up, a curb chain is added, and we package it up for shipping. In most cases we can have your pendant ready to ship to you in less than 48 hours. All of this for less than $50! You get the photo pendant, the 16″ curb chain, and the velour pendant pouch to store your pendant safely, all for less than $50! Sorry, I was channeling my inner Vince there for a second, I love these pendants that much.

Photos

There are some things to keep in mind when sending us a photo. Well lit, high contrast, photos work best. Closeups and photos with a lot of face detail help as well. The pendant here is of Gigi, my sister-in-law’s solid black Schnauzer. If we can make a solid black dog with a black nose and black eyes look this great, image on how great your pet will look on one of our pendants.

The Pendants

Currently we are engraving photos on simple metal pendants that have been rhodium plated. We are testing with solid silver pendants and are considering offering them in gold as well. If there is enough interest we will stock up and offer those as well.

Charity

Don’t forget, part of every single sale we make here is donated to an animal charity, this goes for our new Pets on Pendants jewelry line. 10% of every sale is set aside for an animal rescue or charity. We really appreciate all that those charities do and your purchases help us help them.

Order one today and get a photo of your pet that will last forever.

For our part, we have added another 20 charities to our list, and we have started an animal charity list to help you find the charity you want to help directly. Also, if you have a local charity that we should be helping, please, let us know and we will get them their own coupon code to help them gain even more donations.

Thank you again for all of your support and have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

http://www.facebook.com/AnimalCharms/

Filigree Butterfly Earrings

I’ve been adding a lot of new sterling silver earrings the last few days. From a whole collection of mini critters to a new batch of great looking dangle earrings.

These filigree design butterflies are my favorite of the group, so far. They have a great looking design and have a little faceted bead to give them that classic style look. Look around and see what else we have added.

Diane has also been hard at work on the web site as well. She has added a new feature where the newest items in the store are automatically listed on the home page. It saves you the hassle of searching the site to see what’s new. How cool is she?

Some of the new symbols you will be seeing around the site include which stands for jewelry made in an environmentally responsible manner or with recycled material. We look forward to the day when all of our jewelry has this symbol next to it, but for now I’m thrilled to see jewelry manufacturing take a progressive approach to being more earth friendly.

Another group of symbols you will be seeing around here is are the made in symbols. While we don’t always know exactly where something is made, when we do know we will be adding these symbols to our jewelry. Many of our customers care where they jewelry is made and this is just one way we are trying to help them.

As always, we are trying hard to add new product every week, and look forward to serving you, and generating a little revenue for our animal charities. If you know of an animal charity that we should be helping please let us know about them, or have them contact us. We will give them their own discount coupon where they will get 5% of every sale and our customer will get an additional 5% off their purchase. All of this is on top of the 10% we are already giving.

Whale Pendant

It has been far too long since we have added new jewelry to the Animal Charms website. I apologize for the huge delay but the wait has been worth it. I’ve added several pairs of sterling silver earrings and a few new pendants.

My favorite is this awesome Whale Fetish. It has a lot of great details and features a hidden bail making it perfect for wearing on a leather choker. I’m working on making a selection of leather cords and hope to have those available to everyone by the end of the week. Look for the announcement here.

The good news is that Diane is back home from her Air Force Reserve duty so we are back to full strength here. Over the next couple of weeks she will be adding new product and I will be writing pretty descriptions of what we have to offer. About the descriptions, there is some information that we simply don’t have about some of our product. So until we get an opportunity to order it in and tke measurements and weigh things there will be some missing information. Until we can get that fixed, if you order a new product that we do not have all of the information on we will happily weigh it and measure before shipping it to you or allow you to return it, unused, for a full refund, no questions asked.

This isn’t exactly the best solution, but for a startup early in the process its the best we can do.

Thanks to everyone that has visited so far, and thank you for the orders we have already recieved. We hope to have enough for our first animal charity donation soon. And keep checking back, we’ll be having our ‘Grand Opening’ soon with even more discounts!!

Diane and I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone that visits, everyone that purchases jewelry, and most of all, everyone that helps us help animals in need. One of the biggest reasons we built this site was to be able to give us the opportunity to as many animals as possible and we can’t wait to build our site and store with a sense of community and giving. And we have you to thank for helping us do this.

As you look around the site I hope that you take the time to let us know if anything is broken or could be improved. We still have a lot of work to do before our “official” grand opening on April 1st, so we hope you understand the mess as we get things set up and sorted out.

So, if you have any questions please let us know here on the blog, or on the yet to be completed contact us page. And if you know of a great animal charity that we should consider supporting, please use the Animal Charities page here.

Thank you again for coming to Animal Charms!

Steve -