How Donnashomeaccents rewrote its titles to lead with what each piece is

Donnashomeaccents is a home decor shop with a strong Christmas streak. There are cone trees covered in gold metallic fabric and studded with vintage buttons, hoop ornaments made from vintage quilt fabric and edged in gold scalloped trim, and rope bowls with an embroidered cardinal in the middle. There are garlands of fabric yo-yos, aprons for the dish soap bottle, and a recycled cookie tin with an embroidered gingerbread girl on the lid.

Next to the handmade pieces sit vintage finds: porcelain Santas from The International Santa Claus Collection, still in their boxes, a ceramic gingerbread cake stand, costume brooches. Some pieces are both. A 13-inch vintage vinyl doll that needed saving came back as a Halloween witch with a cape and a broom. The shop has been on Etsy since 2008, offers a 30-day money back guarantee, and works by a simple rule: communication is the best policy.

A shop like this collects names. A painted skillet that says "Gobble Til You Wobble" becomes the Gobble Til You Wobble skillet. A pink embroidered bag was the My Sewing Room Craft Bag. The porcelain Santas carried the collection name, the year and a code.

Those names were accurate. What they didn't do was tell a shopper what the thing was, how big it was or what it was made of. Someone searching Etsy for Thanksgiving wall decor or a vintage Santa figurine reads the first few words of a title and moves on.

Fixing that by hand is a long job when a shop has hundreds of active listings across every season, each with a title, a description, a full set of tags and photos that need alt text.

Donnashomeaccents works in Alura's listing optimizer, one listing at a time. In the editor, Start optimization runs AI on whatever is ticked in the optimization settings. Here that is the title, the description, the tags and the alt text for the photos. The AI works from the existing listing and drafts a title that opens with the product and follows with the size, the material and the detail that sets the piece apart.

Nothing reaches Etsy until the shop clicks Publish changes, and that is the moment to check. The AI works from the photos and the old text, and it can miss a detail. On the little green cone tree it wrote pearl bows, and the shop changed the title to pearl white bows before publishing. Most of the new wording across the shop came from the AI. The hand edits are small: a word put right, a different photo moved to the front.

Tags get the same treatment. The gold button tree and the painted tree candle holder used to share almost the same set: christmas topper, tree topper, christmas decor, holiday decor. Now the gold tree has tags like cone christmas tree, gold christmas tree and christmas tabletop, and the candle holder has tree candle holder, christmas mantel and holiday candle decor. Each one describes its own piece.

Descriptions changed in a way worth noticing. On many of the handmade listings, the description now opens with a paragraph written for a shopper: what the piece is, its size, where it might sit in a home. Underneath, the maker's own note is still there. "This is a small 10 inch cone that I covered with ruffled vintage green lame." "This is a vintage vinyl plastic doll that needed saving."

A few of the rewrites, all live on the shop now. The phrase painted on the skillet is still in its description, but the title opens with what the piece is and how big it is. The Santa from France is now a porcelain figurine in its original 1993 box, with the collection name kept in the description and the code dropped. The sewing bag title now mentions the color, the lining and the zipper, and the lighted wreath now says it is wrapped in red yarn and 12 inches across.

Name the thing first. For anything that hangs on a wall or sits on a shelf, put the size in the title too, because that is what a shopper checks before clicking. Then keep room on the listing for how the piece was made. Vintage fabric and a rescued doll are part of what people are buying.