Bulunmaz.
Turkish family manufacturer of professional jewelry tools, in business since 1916, entering US marketplaces for the first time.
A 110-year-old manufacturer meeting the US market for the first time.
Bulunmaz is a family-owned manufacturer of professional diamond jewelry tools based in Istanbul, in business since 1916. They produce diamond burs, flywheels, and micromotors used by professional goldsmiths and jewelers across Turkey and parts of Europe, with strong reputation and repeat business in their traditional market. What they had not yet done was enter US marketplaces, where the buying dynamics, listing conventions, and buyer vocabulary are entirely different from their existing distribution channels.
The engagement started as a paid research project to answer one question before spending on a launch: does US marketplace demand actually exist for these products, and if so, on which platforms, at what pricing, against which competitors? The research became the foundation, and turned a one-off project into an ongoing operational role.
Manufacturer language doesn't survive translation to buyer search.
Two problems surfaced immediately in the research phase.
First, the client's flagship hand-tool family is internally called "background tools," a term used across their website and internal documentation. Testing on eBay US returned zero competitor listings and zero buyer activity for that term. It's factory language, not market language. Every title had to be rebuilt around vocabulary professional US jewelers actually search for: diamond bur jewelry, bright cut, matte, texturing, goldsmith, micromotor.
Second, the abrasive grades were labeled internally as Thin, Regular, and Thick, which turned out to be a translation artifact from Turkish (where the same word covers both "thin" and "fine," both "thick" and "coarse"). The correct US trade terms are Fine, Medium, Coarse. Beyond that, testing showed that "grit" in the title returns almost exclusively dental and lapidary results, both documented false-positive categories, so grit vocabulary had to move out of titles entirely and into variation dropdowns.
Both discoveries would have been invisible without the pre-launch research. Both would have made every listing invisible if we had gone live on manufacturer terminology.
Research first, then structure, then production.
The engagement followed the four-phase method: research, structure, production, documentation.
Research phase. Competitor analysis across eBay, Etsy, Amazon, and Alibaba with real sellers and links. Product selection from the client's catalogue based on tested US buyer demand rather than internal sales priorities. Per-family keyword research grounded in actual search vocabulary. Marketplace mapping showing where each product does and does not belong, with false-positive risk documented per category.
Structure phase. Shared Google Drive with eight numbered folders (SOP documentation, listings creation, listings tracking, product photos, templates, branding, analysis, company documents). Central color-coded tracking sheet as single source of truth, with one row per listing, dropdown-controlled status and category, titles checked against marketplace character limits, keywords and variation structure per product.
Production phase. Branded HTML description templates with inline CSS (black header, amber accent, "Why Buy From Bulunmaz" trust block), reusable across the whole product family. Product photography standardized in Canva with consistent framing and background. Lifestyle images generated under strict accuracy rules, guided by reference frames from the manufacturer's own videos.
Documentation phase. Every decision recorded with rationale next to it. Which products excluded and why. Which keywords rejected and why. Which compliance questions still open (for example, an Extended Producer Responsibility research thread for potential EU expansion, documented country by country with primary sources flagged).
A marketplace launch built on verified ground, with a system the client owns.
The initial paid research became the foundation for an ongoing hourly retainer. The eBay Business store setup is under way, listings for seven background tools plus STD/ECO flywheels with variant dropdowns are structured and ready for production.
More importantly, the tracking system, folder structure, SOPs, and templates all live on the client's own Drive. Cemal (the client contact) can open the tracker at any time to see exactly what's ready, what's blocked, and what decisions were made. When Phase 2 opens Etsy and Amazon, the same infrastructure carries over. Nothing lives in my head. The client can hand this operation to an internal team or another freelancer without dependency on me.
Tools & Platforms
- eBay Business
- eBay SEO
- Google Drive
- Canva
- HTML/CSS
- Tracking Sheets
- Helium 10
- eRank
- Competitor Research Tools