Apothecaries and cures in Early Modern Cluj

This is the title of my latest presentation delivered during the "Cluj/Kolozsvár/Klausenburg – 700" international conference held in Cluj-Napoca by the Sapientia and Babes Bolyai Universities. My presentation attempted to reconstruct the Early Modern history of apothecary shops and pharmacies of Cluj (i.e. between the 16th and the 18th century), identifying traits and developments in the field  (in comparison to the rest of Transylvania and Western Europe) and to verify is there are any novel strategies in marketing and retail employed by pharmacists to boost their sales. Until the article is finished for the collective volume of the conference, fell free to check my presentation on academia.edu HERE.

The full program of the conference is available in Romanian HERE.

One of the documents preserved at the History of Pharmacy Collection in Cluj is an eighteenth-century manuscript, a tariffs project by Tobias Maucksch or Mauksch, the privileged pharmacist of Cluj, owner of the apothecary shop hosting the museum today.

Facebook page header advice

For all those running small, retail businesses through / with the help of a Facebook page, here is my advice: common users have no idea how to use "about" sections, follow links, prompts to actions such as the "contact box". They want all essential data LARGE, visible at all times, plain and simple. So my advice is to create a header image (828 x 315 pixels) containing the following elements: logo, website, contact email, contact phone and an image of the most successful / representative product. Here is what I did for my company and it works (at least there are less comments of the "how can I buy this?" type :) Atelierul de istorie produces and sells objects inspired by the Dacian, Roman and Celtic civilizations, but most customers are interested, for patriotic reasons, of the less known ancestors of the Romanians, the mysterious Dacians. Thus the best sold product is the Dacian hat and the logo is inspired by the ancient Draco, the mythical half wolf half dragon war standard of the Dacians.