Sneak peek. I was talking to a visitor to the shop yesterday, who would love to spend her days doing this kind of thing. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes small-scale crafting viable as a business. A few notes:
a) Many of the folks who seem to do a lot of business are doing very repetitive work — they come up with a popular design for a candle, or a soap, etc., and they make that over and over again, in bulk. That’s undoubtedly good for speed of production, and I can see that it could be meditative and pleasing, if you like doing things over and over, precisely. (It would drive me mad, though. This is not my business model.)
b) Many of the others seem to specialize in wedding-related items — preserving bouquets, large orders of custom candles, cookies, etc. for wedding guest favors. Makes sense, since there’s usually a significant price mark-up for anything wedding-related; people just expect to spend more for wedding items, so easier to charge enough to make a decent profit on each item. (This is also too repetitive for me, though I don’t mind doing an occasional wedding bouquet preservation order. I doubt I’d want to do more than a dozen a year, though.)
c) Some of the craft shows do big sales, especially around the holidays, so if you can get into them (they’re usually juried, plus there’s a charge, and the bigger the show, the bigger the charge, typically), that can be profitable. But you have to be able and willing to drive a fair ways to spend every weekend at craft fairs, and it’s tiring doing load-in and load-out. (At 53, I can already tell that unless I hired help, I wouldn’t want to do many of these in a year; it’s just too tiring, and I don’t like driving.)
If you don’t follow one of those three paths, I think it’s pretty hard to make much of a profit. I’m no expert in this! And some people clearly are great at publicity and getting the word out, and some of us are not so much, and there are all kinds of other factors that go into success….but maybe these initial thoughts are helpful.
For me, right now, I’m happy to cover my supplies / rent. I’m learning a lot, and I feel like I’ve improved significantly as an artist in the last year, which makes me really happy (especially when I’m particularly frustrated with my writing, sigh).
I’d love to get to a point where I’m making art I’d want to submit to art shows or galleries, along with the household items — we’ll see! In the meantime, I get to play with flowers every day, and the work itself is oddly calming.
Things I love about what I’m doing now:
- almost every piece is different (nice to feel like I’m creating unique items)
- I get to try and learn something new almost every day (GREAT for ADHD; we are very novelty-motivated)
- I make a lot of small, quick items, which gives me a sense of accomplishment, and also lets me sell things at a lower price point; I like that most folks can actually afford to buy something of mine if they want to. (Paper bookmarks are $3, keychains are $5, coasters are $7.)
