How OldTimeJarsEtc gets a catalog of one-off vintage finds onto Pinterest
OldTimeJarsEtc
OldTimeJarsEtc has made more than 2,700 sales on Etsy since 2021, from a catalog of thousands of one-of-a-kind vintage pieces. The shop runs both of Alura's Pinterest automations, one for new finds and one for older stock, and the pins carry the titles and descriptions it already wrote for Etsy.
A shop where every piece is the only one
OldTimeJarsEtc sells antiques, vintage collectables and retro home decor from Canada, and nearly every listing is a single piece. The catalog runs to almost 2,500 listings: Royal Albert and Susie Cooper tea sets, Millersburg carnival glass, a Sowerby uranium glass pitcher set, Ball and Crown sealer jars, Waterford crystal, mid century vases from Sweden and West Germany, and a row of 1970s and 80s Hot Wheels.
Every piece is sourced, inspected and packed with collector-level care, and the shop holds a 4.94 star rating across more than 1,100 reviews. Most photos show the piece on a silver tray, many in front of a stained glass panel, so the shop is easy to recognize from one listing to the next. Buyers in the U.S. pay no import fees, because the tariff is already in the price.
Nothing to repeat, and always more to list
A shop that makes its own products can pin a best seller again and again. A vintage shop can't. Once a set of Royal Doulton Windermere dinner plates sells, there is no second set, and the next listing is a different maker, a different pattern and a different decade. Every new find needs its own pin, and new finds keep coming.
The older stock has the opposite problem. A green carnival glass bowl listed a while back is still for sale and still worth showing, but pinning a catalog this size one listing at a time, with a title, a description and the right photo for each, competes with sourcing, photographing, listing and packing.
“Everything here is the only one. When a teacup sells, it's gone, and there's always another box of finds waiting to be photographed.”
New finds and old stock each get their own automation
The shop connected its Pinterest account to Alura and switched on both automations in the Pinterest settings. Pin New Listings runs once a day and picks up listings that went live in the past day. It is set to use several of a new listing's photos, and picking more than one photo makes a separate pin from each, so a new find reaches Pinterest from more than one angle.
Smart Pins covers the rest of the catalog. Once a day it fills the Pin Queue about 10 days ahead with pins made from active listings, ranked mostly by Etsy listing views. A photo pinned in the last seven days is never reused, so the queue keeps moving through the shop: a Pyrex mixing bowl set, then a pair of Ball jars, then a Hoselton beaver figurine.
Pins post on the schedule set in the Pin Queue, with pins per day, posting days and time slots. Nothing waits for approval, but any pin can be edited, moved or deleted before it goes out, and every pin links back to its Etsy listing.
The pins use the shop's own words
For the pin text, the shop chose Etsy listing data instead of Optimized for Pinterest with AI. Each pin carries the title and description exactly as they were written for Etsy, in a tall 2:3 format.
Those titles were written for collectors. They lead with the maker and the pattern, then the piece count and the era, like "Vintage Royal Doulton Windermere Dinner Plates - Set Of 8 - ca 1940." The descriptions carry the details a collector checks, such as the Hochemajl enamel technique on a Czech tea set or the Dropped A design on a Ball jar.
“My titles already say who made it, the pattern and roughly when. That's what collectors search for, so I'd rather the pins use my words than new ones.”
The catalog reaches Pinterest piece by piece
When the shop listed a Royal Doulton Windermere service as three separate sets, dinner plates, bread and butter plates and handled soup bowls, each one went to Pinterest as its own pin under the title the shop wrote. A Czech crystal punch bowl with twelve cups followed, and so did a pair of cobalt blue Victorian mantle lusters.
Smart Pins keeps earlier listings going out: "Northwood Carnival Glass Bowl - Orange Rose Pattern, Ruffled Edge." "Shelley Cream and Sugar Set: Floral Design (Pink Rose, Blue Trim)." "Mid Century Swedish Glass Vase, John Orwar Lake (1960s)." The beaver figurine's pin opens the way its Etsy description does: "Discover a rare piece of Canadian heritage with this vintage Hoselton large green acrylic beaver."
Name the maker and the pattern
For other vintage sellers, the advice starts with the listing itself. Write the title for the buyer who already knows what they're looking for, with the maker, the pattern name and the era up front, and put the piece count in when it's a set. Then use the description for what a collector checks next: marks, technique, condition, size. A listing written that way reads the same on Etsy and anywhere it gets shared.
“Write the title for the collector who knows exactly what they want. They search the pattern name, not 'pretty blue plate.' Get that right once and it works everywhere.”
OldTimeJarsEtc received Alura credits as a thank-you for sharing this story.