Selling at a craft market gives you firsthand experience with customers’ reactions to your products. What do they think of the quality of your work? Are your prices considered to be high or low? Are they looking for work similar to yours but perhaps in slightly different sizes, styles, or colors?
Make prototypes using your existing facilities as much as possible, even if this means working on the top of the kitchen table in the beginning. Once you have discovered what is going to sell, you can start building up a stock of products, set up an adequate workshop, buy raw materials in bulk, and follow the other production techniques of a craft business as outlined in chapters 9 and 10. Don’t put the cart before the horse and invest time, money, and effort in building up a stock of goods for which there is no market.
Try to find your own particular niche in the market. Look at what is selling in stores and at craft markets. Look at the quality and the prices. Concentrate on products that are in demand and that you can offer in a better design, quality, or price.
Say you are producing wooden toys and there are a lot of similar products in stores but they are almost all relatively large softwood toys. You may find a comfortable niche in the market by producing small, brightly painted hardwood toys for under $10.
Be careful to exhibit and offer for sale only your best work. Nothing travels faster than bad news, and you don’t want your reputation to be based on premature work. If you are making production line crafts, one of the main skills you will develop is the ability to produce rapidly at a high standard of quality. But do not try to produce work quickly in the beginning.
Be prepared to follow the market and produce work for which there is a strong demand. The market for crafts is growing very quickly for those who are producing the right quality crafts. You will succeed if your work is of consistently high quality, if you follow the market to know what is selling, and if you know where to sell. Chapters 4 to 8 show you how to market your work.
4
Before You Sell...
a. Wholesale or Retail?
Once you have identified and produced a marketable product, choosing your market is the most important decision you will make. Unless you can find markets, your work won’t be sold, and while you may enjoy making crafts, you won’t make any money and you won’t be in business for long.
In marketing your work, you leave the ranks of the amateurs and become a true professional. This important transition is marked by a change in attitude toward your work. In the beginning, the objects you made were worthwhile because “you” made them, and you were naturally very proud of the fact. At the same time, you hoped that others would also find your work attractive. You might have shown the work to your craft instructor, a friend, or a fellow craftworker.
As a professional, you retain this basic pride in your work, but at the same time you come to regard the product less as an extension of yourself and more as an object in the marketplace. It is a beautiful object, to be sure, the result of your painstaking efforts, but you now come to see it as a high-quality, well-priced, marketable product.
Your task now is to take this product and sell it!
There are three basic ways you can go about selling your work. You can wholesale to shops, sell in stores on consignment, or retail your products directly to the public from your own studio, at craft fairs, through the mail, or on the Internet. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. They are not mutually exclusive, and most successful craftworkers use a variety of wholesale and retail marketing channels.
1. Wholesaling
If you sell your work outright to stores, you get on average about half the final selling price. This is because most stores will mark up your goods by 100 percent; that is, they will sell your work at double the price you sell to them. This may seem excessive, but you must remember that retailers have big expenses, including high rents and taxes. If they are to be successful, they must be in a good location and spend money on advertising. No matter what they do, a certain amount of merchandise is always going to remain unsold and they have to absorb the loss.
It is possible to sell to shops on a strictly cash basis, but, as we shall see in a later chapter, this can hurt your sales if your competitors or other craftworkers are selling their goods on credit. In most cases, it will be necessary to offer your work on credit if you have any substantial amount of dealings with shops.
2. Consignment
It is possible to deal with some stores on a consignment basis. In this arrangement, the store does not actually purchase your work but agrees to put it on display and sell it for you. If you deal with a shop on this basis, you should get a higher proportion of the final selling price, between 60 percent and 70 percent, because the risk is yours, not theirs. If you deal on a consignment basis, you should have a written agreement with the shop (see the section on contracts in chapter 10).
You may be obliged to sell to shops on consignment at the beginning of your career. If your work is unknown, store owners may be unwilling to run the risk of outright purchase. However, as soon as your work becomes accepted in the marketplace, you should insist on a straight sale in dealing with most shops.
You may be obliged to sell to shops on consignment at the beginning of your career.
Consignment is an unwieldy arrangement at best, as you never know exactly how much work you have sold until the retailer sends you your payment at the end of the month. Also, the retailer has less incentive to promote your work if he or she is looking at keeping only 30 percent or 40 percent of the price rather than the customary 50 percent retail markup, and is facing no loss if the piece doesn’t sell.
Moreover, consignment involves considerably more paperwork than a straight sale. In addition to a written agreement with the consignee, you need to keep detailed records of how much of your stock is in the hands of the consignee at the end of each month.
3. Retailing
If you sell directly to the public, you receive all of the final selling price yourself. You make a profit as the producer of the goods and you make a profit again as the seller. However, before you start counting your profit, you have to reckon with selling expenses.
If you are selling at a craft market, the net income from sales can be relatively high. Sales from your own studio can also be more profitable than selling to stores. If you have your own separate retail outlet, you will have retail selling expenses, but you may still make more profit per sale than you would wholesaling.
Retailing all your work at craft markets will mean that you must spend substantial periods of time away from the workshop. This is seen as a plus by those who like traveling and/or meeting people. Even if you are not particularly fond of retail shows — and not all craftspeople are — it is still a good thing to meet your customers in person from time to time and get a first-hand idea of their reaction to your products.
Retailing your own work usually means going to shows or selling to the public out of your own studio. There are, however, a couple of other options. You can retail your work through the mail, something we consider in the following chapter when we look at the various selling channels in more detail. You can also take advantage of opportunities to sell your work on the Internet, a subject we explore in detail in Chapter 7.
4. Which is best for you?
The type of product you make and the quantities you produce will be the most important factors in determining whether you sell the bulk of your work to shops or directly to the public. If you are producing unique, one-of-a-kind items, it may be possible to sell all your work directly to customers, either through markets, from your own studio,