It’s going to take me a little while to figure out the appropriate pace of production for the new shop. Yesterday was a sad day — no sales, alas! As Kevin said when I told him, maybe I shouldn’t base any decisions on a random Wednesday in mid-October — that’s clearly right. Yet still, a little disheartening.
I don’t really need new stock, so I’m trying not to buy any more supplies right now, but my hands still want to make things, and thankfully, I have a lot of supplies on hand. All the fabric I bought for mask-sewing, for example; I spent some time watching Dark Matter with Kevin last night and cutting out fabric for cotton tea towels (a little thinner than the linen ones I usually make, so I’ll price them a little less).
I figured I could do a little Halloween stock, so this morning I sewed up samples for Eliana Callan to photograph tomorrow. (I’d originally scheduled her to come this morning, but I think Fridays are better; I’m exhausted at the end of teaching on Wednesday, and mostly want to collapse, and I have Thursday mostly open (school board meeting tonight), so I can finish up projects so they’re ready for her Friday morning.)
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Kev and I did some math together the other night, and figured out that if I can do $1000 / sales monthly, that will basically cover the cost of supplies. It won’t cover my time (or assistants’ time), but it means that if I want to keep doing this as a hobby, it’s not going to totally drain the family budget.
And we can afford to give it a few months to get up and running; most people in the area don’t know it exists yet, so I’m trying to be patient. It’s nice when at least one thing sells every day, though. Helps keep me motivated.
If I can do $2000 / month in sales, that’s a little bit of a profit, enough to pay me something for my time, which would be nice, though of course, it doesn’t come close to my professor salary, which is finally up to something reasonably decent, almost 20 years in.
It feels a little weird to talk about specifics, but that’s how capitalism gets you — the only people who can afford not to talk about money are the people who have so much of it, they don’t have to work. Transparency is good, viva la revolución! I make $80K as a clinical professor now, and it’ll be close to $90K if I get the promotion to full this coming year (10% pay bump with the promotion).
(Slight segue for academic writing & teaching: by comparison, my first teaching job after my MFA was at Salt Lake City Community College, and paid $1100 / class. The University of Utah paid $4000 / class. (This is all in the early 2000s.) Once I had the Ph.D., I typically was paid about $8000 / class (Northwestern, Roosevelt, starting salary at UIC). I currently teach 4 classes / year, but of course, have somewhat more publishing expectations and service responsibilities than I did when I started.)
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$8-10K extra from the small business isn’t going to cover the mortgage, but like most folks these days, Kev and I have definitely been feeling the inflationary pinch — we’ve cut back a lot on eating out (which we didn’t do that much of to begin with), we’re cooking more with beans and rice and even canned fish and meat, and we’re trying not to buy things we don’t actually need generally. (I occasionally succumb; I did spend almost $100 on Halloween fairy garden items for the parkway garden yesterday. But that’s it! No more!) So if I can make $1000 / month profit from the store, that’d go a long way towards giving us a little more breathing space.
If I start making more than that — well, that’s when I start to daydream a little. I’m tentatively thinking (unless sales dry up completely), that I’m going to try to give the Berwyn incubator shop a year, see how it goes, get a feel for the rhythms of sales over the course of a year.
At the end of the year, next September, if it’s going well? I’d love to partner with 3-5 other local artists to rent a storefront, either as part of the Berwyn incubator program (they have two levels above the little booth I have now, will talk about them more sometime soon in another post…).
I’d have to research rent and utility and insurance costs, and I think I’d want to be somewhat careful to curate the shop so it’s a coherent experience. I’m essentially thinking it’ll be focused on beautiful home goods, but all made (or at least curated) by local artists. I love functional art.
If you’re reading this, and you’re someone who’s done a pop-up or fair or other show with me in the past, and this sounds intriguing…well, just keep it in mind, I guess. Or drop me a note to let me know to keep you in mind. It’ll be a while before I know if it’s actually something I’ll try to make happen. I’d be trying to balance so it’s not all people doing the same thing too, although I admit, I do a little of everything…
(And there’s still the thought that if I could combine it with a local makerspace like Carollina Song and I wanted to build, maybe with a cafe and community performance space included, that would be AMAZING, and we could teach classes, and it would be an incredible project to build for my community in my 50s-70s…ah, dreams.)
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That’s the business arm of where this might go. There’s also the pure art arm.
I love crafting and making functional items, but I also love art for art’s sake. I used to make poetry collages, once upon a time, and I’m tempted to start making those again. I don’t plan to give up writing! But I’m starting to think it’s not too arrogant to think I could also be a multimedia artist.
So if doing the shop basically covers my supplies costs when I’m learning, that’s already a win for me. And if I have time next summer to maybe take a multimedia art class or two, and if I can use this practice now and the classes to start making work in a few years that I’m really proud of — well, that’s really exciting to me.
I still love writing, folks. I always will. I was reading an incredible book last night a galley copy of Anya DeNiro‘s _OKPsyche_, which Benjamin Rosenbaum and I are planning to cover on the podcast, and it was SO INCREDIBLY GOOD, I basically couldn’t sleep for a bunch of last night, because I kept thinking about it, and it made me want to write things too, because if Anya can be that brave and beautiful with her work, I feel like I ought to start taking some more chances with my writing too.
But sometimes I can’t stand staring at the screen anymore. Often, my hands hunger to be doing something. And there’s a peacefulness to doing things with my hands — whether it’s sewing or resin work or cooking or knitting or gardening or…almost anything, really. It quiets me down again, when my brain has gotten too loud and chaotic and full.
There’s a rhythm there that I’m searching for. A pendulum swinging, between writing and all the other kinds of making. It’s exciting.
I’m 52, and I have a lot of friends who are thinking about retirement, who are drained by their jobs and just want to rest. I totally get that, especially in this capitalist hellscape that so many of us are drowning in. So I guess I’m grateful, to find something that makes me even more excited to work again.
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(These tea towels ($12 each) should be in the shop tomorrow, but if you want one or two pulled for you, let me know. Very limited supplies, as I’m trying to use up fabric!)
Watercolor Skull Moth Damask, by Rebecca Belfast (2 available): https://www.spoonflower.com/…/10504027-watercolor-skull…
All Hallows’ Eve, by Heather Dutton (2 available):
https://www.spoonflower.com/…/10499359-all-hallows-eve…
Gothic Halloween Monsters, by Lindsey Marsh (1 available):
https://www.spoonflower.com/…/10483305-gothic-halloween…
Creepy Gothic Bats and Spiderweb Chandeliers, by Kristina Hunter (2 available):
https://www.spoonflower.com/…/10483305-gothic-halloween…
Berwyn Sprout Small Business Incubator7129 Cermak Rd, BerwynTuesday – Saturday from 10am-8pmSunday from 10am-5pm
