Are you feeling as if no matter how much work you sell, it isn’t generating enough income? Are you concerned that you can never produce enough pieces to make a living? Even artists who sell a lot of work find that eventually, they hit a plateau because selling crafts that are hand made one at a time is still trading time for dollars and does limit your income. If you have to produce so much work to make enough money, it may stop being fun and actually feel like work.
So how can you increase your income as a crafter if you’re already selling as many pieces as you can comfortably produce?
You need to find other “profit centers” as my friend Barbara Winter calls multiple income streams. (she says “streams sounds wimpy”.) So what other ways can you bring in income without having to ramp up production?
The best way I know is to leverage your time and knowledge. Let’s look at some opportunities for increasing revenue that will also help get your name out there.
If you produce a product that is based on your signature design, one great way to leverage is to sell kits with all the supplies and instructions so that others can duplicate it but you are still getting paid. I wouldn’t worry about losing sales because the person who would purchase a kit to make a piece like yours is a different customer altogether than the one who would buy a finished piece. Say for example, you are a jewelry designer. You can make a piece once and then sell the instructions, beads, findings, etc as a Make-it-Yourself kit. Or, if you make handbags, for each style you design, make up a pattern that you can sell along with the fabric, buttons, zipper, thread and any other supplies needed to make the bag.
Another very simple way to leverage your revenue from art is to teach both live classes or virtual. It’s very easy to make a video demonstrating “how-to” do your craft and sell either a digital version online or a physical DVD. Again, the client who will pay for your instruction video is not the same client who will buy the finished work.
Go through the craft section at any bookstore and you will see color plates in the “how-to” books featuring different artists’ work. An added source of income is the sale of your pattern or instructions to an author or publisher. Of course, submitting articles or patterns to craft magazines is another great vehicle for selling your design.
Some artists will choose to have two or more different series in their line. One can be a higher end, labor intensive limited edition while the other can be more competitively priced. This works well if you sub out assembly to work-at-home parents who can each have their own cottage industry. You pay them by the piece and it’s a winning scenario for everyone, including the customer who may not purchase your higher end work. Making sure the lines each have a distinct look will help to maintain the prices on the more upscale pieces.
When you offer to do a demo along with a trunk show at a home party or local boutique, you will be able to reach the crafters who will pay you for lessons and kits as well as the collectors who will pay for your work rather than do it themselves. Any exposure you can get will be a marketing step.
If you want to be sure not to miss any of the helpful hints on how to leverage your craft and time, go to the right of this page and click on the “RSS Feed” or “subscribe” button to receive updates via email or you feed-reader.
In many areas, school starts this week. It used to be that the time between Memorial Day and Labor Day were all about popsicles, bicycles and running through sprinklers, right? School seems to start earlier every year.
With all the recent budget cuts, districts are more in need of funds for even basic supplies so expect the doorbell to ring more this fall with kids selling the usual magazine subscriptions, chocolates and wrapping paper. Unfortunately, that revenue won’t cover the arts and sports so groups will still be open to new fundraising ideas.
Whether you’re an artist, crafts person or just good at organizing, this is the perfect opportunity for you to approach the PTA, sports teams or chorus and band leaders with a new fundraising project. Any group in need of funds will be thrilled to have someone else handle the details and have something that doesn’t require the kids going door-to-door.
A craft fair can be a high revenue, low-cost event to operate and is also a convenience for the teachers and parents who don’t have to use their personal days to run around town shopping for gifts. Simply contact the person in charge of the school bulletin to put out a call for entries or send a flyer home with the kids letting parents who are artists or crafts people know that you are organizing a crafts fair and include a booth entry form with your phone number and email address. Ask each participant to donate a specific percentage of her sales to the school, teams or organization. Ideally, each craftsperson will man her own booth or table. If you don’t have a network of artists on your radar, you can approach a local crafts guild to participate. And don’t overlook the obvious. While bake sales went out with poodle skirts, the new gourmet cupcakes and artisan breads command a higher price and are well received. Of course, hand-made soaps and body lotions are also considered crafts so include a good variety.
If your neighborhood school holds a fall festival, you may choose to piggy-back on that event and run the crafts fair simultaneously or you may find it more beneficial to run it as a separate boutique. However you do it, make sure to solicit help from other parents and artists.
Remember, each event is more exposure for your craft so be sure to always have a personal bio and tag with your contact info. Look at each time you show your work as an opportunity to build your mailing list of raving fans. Rather than see this fair as a one-shot time to sell your art, view it as exposure to more repeat collectors who will not only buy from you but tell their friends about your work. Include extra cards with each purchase so that your customers can pass them out to others who admire your work.
Do you have hints you’d like to share with other readers about raising funds with your crafts? As always, we’d love to hear your comments.
Our guest blogger today is Sandy Dempsey of the Dreaming Cafe
As artisans and crafters you work in one of the worlds oldest mobile professions. Many of you travel yearly to attend and participate in craft fairs, festivals and outdoor expos.
You may have a website (or you should have) and maybe an Etsy store, but you may also be wondering how to take advantage social media and use Facebook and Twitter to grow your business and make more money.
Here a few quick tips to get you started.
- Collect email and physical addresses from people stopping by your booth or exhibit. Use a guest book or do a giveaway/prize drawing as an incentive for people to give you their personal information.
- Include your website, Facebook page and Twitter ID on ALL of your marketing materials (flyers, brochures, business cards, packaging labels, etc) and encourage people to ‘Follow’ you on Twitter and ‘Like’ your Facebook Fan page or send you a ‘Friend’ request for your Facebook personal page.
- When people engage you via social media, thank them, talk to them and encourage ongoing conversations.
- Use Facebook and Twitter to share where you will be (venue, city, state, booth, etc) in the upcoming months.
- Encourage people to stop by and visit you. Offer them a Fan or Follower only discount or special offer.
- Using the email addresses you have collected to stay in touch. These people have already shown an interest in your work. Share what you are doing, new projects you are working on or share some industry insiders secrets – an enthusiastic, well educated customer is usually your best customer.
Bio: Sandy Dempsey is the founder and creative director of Dreaming Cafe Ventures, LLC, a diverse education and consulting company dedicated to serving the needs of the lifelong learning community with a primary focus in the areas of personal growth and development, creative self-expression, self-employment and social media and technology.
Sandy also writes about, talks about and teaches journaling, creative self-expression, time management and productivity, dream building and goal-setting, using social media and using free or low cost online tools and technology to help start and grow a businesses and make more money.
You can find Sandy blogging at thedreamingcafe.com
Every night from May to Labor Day, crackles, booms and pops echo across the lake as fireworks light up the summer sky above my temporary home.
Because I’ve been self-employed for over three decades, I probably take my freedom more for granted than many of my clients and friends who are corporate refugees, so I’m grateful for this nightly reminder to celebrate independence.
And speaking of celebrating Independence and “bosslessness”, I want to invite you to join me for a celebration of self-employment. My friends Sandy Dempsey and Alice Barry have gathered together a posse to plan the Joyfully Jobless Jamborree. Sandy initially came up with this idea to honor our friend and mentor Barbara Winter, author of best selling “Making a Living without a Job”. The theme of the event is “more time, more fun, more money”. Unlike the typical “pitch-fest” events, this is all about celebration, lifelong learning and the joy of being jobless. I hope to see you there. Read more about the Joyfully Jobless Jamborree here.
Crafting for Relief-Artists can Make a Difference
For decades superstar entertainers have done benefit concerts to raise funds for causes they believed in. I will always remember the 1971 Concert For Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar for the relief of refugees from East Pakistan during the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities and Bangladesh Liberation War. The event drew 40,000 people and was the first benefit concert of this magnitude in world history. It featured Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Badfinger, and Ringo Starr.
The popular summer music festival, Bonnaroo donated $50,000 to Music City flood relief efforts and of course Nashville’s elite songwriters made enormous donations to the flood victims but you don’t have to be a rock-star or billionaire to make a difference.
I’ve heard from artists and crafters who feel called to make a contribution to aid recent disaster victims but think they must have Read the rest of this entry »
As a committed supporter of small business, I don’t frequent big box stores unless I can’t find what I need from an independent shop. On the rare occasion I do patronize discount houses, I am always disheartened (OK, sometimes I’m just plain angry) to see unlicensed knockoffs of hand made designs.
As an artist, making each piece by hand, how can you possibly compete with a copy of your own work made by children in China? Read the rest of this entry »
Chatting with artists and crafts people at a large juried show this past weekend, I heard the same complaint repeatedly. Many of the exhibiting artists said they would like to do less live shows and sell more in galleries and online but they found it difficult to get their work into galleries and even more of a challenge to sell online. They almost all had a website or a page on Etsy, Artfire or another handmade site. The problem was, in a sea of hundreds of thousands of artists with listings on these sites, they weren’t getting noticed or seeing enough traffic to make significant sales.
This complaint is not unique to the craft industry. Many new entrepreneurs seem to have the idea that all they have to do is put up a website (or list their wares on Ebay or Esty) and people will find them and buy their products. Then the surprise comes when they’ve spent money and time to launch the page and no one finds it.
Would you lease a retail space down a back alley accessible only by another back alley that no one uses unless directed by someone on the main street? And set up a gallery there to show your best work? Of course you wouldn’t. But that’s what you’re doing if you put up a webpage and sit around waiting for sales to happen. No one can buy from you if Read the rest of this entry »
Do you check labels when you buy for yourself, your family and friends? I sure want to believe, if you are a crafts person trying to make a living selling handmade, that you support your own industry.
An artist friend just showed me something she bought for her garden that I knew to be a knock-off of a local crafter. I couldn’t hold my tongue. This is a woman who has been complaining that she can’t get the price she believes her work should command and that she doesn’t know how she’ll make it as an artist if people are “too cheap” to pay what her work is worth. So, I called her on it. I asked where she bought the piece (although I could guess) and if she knew where it was made. She said she hadn’t checked the label. I asked if she knew that it was a copy of a US crafter and she said she did but couldn’t afford his work because (get this- “I’m just a struggling artist” ) and that even if she could, it was for “outside after all.” I was livid and laid into her, as only a good friend should do: “If you aren’t willing to pay the extra for made-in- America, how can you expect people to pay for your work rather than buy a similar piece made in China?” For the record, I’m not talking behind anyone’s back here. I told her she was going to be the subject of my public rant. I said I wouldn’t use her name but I have to admit it’s tempting.
If you’re in the industry, you likely know the difference between a knock-off and a licensed piece made with the artist’s permission for which the artist receives a royalty. One is stealing, one isn’t. Who are you going to support?
So, the next time you are exhibiting at a trade show or crafts fair and you’re worried about making enough to cover your booth fees and travel costs, plus net a profit, ask yourself how often you buy the knockoff because you’re “just an artist and can’t afford” the higher priced handmade version. There’s no question that it’s tough to find certain items made domestically and that when you do they are often pricey. But so are those designer brands that you think are made here. Look at the label of your $200. handbag. Or the sweatshirt you picked up in our nations capital or, better yet-anything decorated with our starts and stripes, including an American flag. If you’re having trouble making it as a crafter, ask yourself if you are supporting your fellow artists. Yes, you may pay more than if you buy the same item made oversees but the answer is to buy two pieces made by hand rather than four made in China. I’ll hop off my soapbox now, but…please, please support your own.
Last week, I put out a call for people who love to sew but hate to market. I was thrilled at the overwhelming response from readers and astonished at what some had to say. Many of the emails I received were from people looking for a “work-from-home JOB”. Why would someone who for a long time went by the name “self-employment muse.” want to “hire” you?
If you’ve been following me for awhile, you know that my mission is to help people create meaningful self employment, that I once had a payroll of over one hundred. While I loved knowing that my business was enabling people to earn a living, it broke my heart when the business could no longer support that many employees. I am committed to empowering people to be responsible for their own livelihood and not be at the mercy of a boss.
It’s my conviction that the creation of small businesses will be the cure for a sick economy; that the only real security is self employment. When I put out that call last week for people who love to sew but hate to market, it was in response to all of you who say you are looking for a way to make a living doing what you love. You love to create but not sell. I LOVE marketing, letting people know about cool products, especially handmade items. So, what I’m looking for are people who want to be self employed, want to have their own business and be their boss. I don’t sew but I have a product that I know will sell if you, the crafters, supply it. It’s my goal to create a tribe of entrepreneurs who love what they do and have control of their own time, income and environment.
If it’s a job you’re looking for, I’m not your gal. But, if you’re seeking inspiration and guidance to be your own boss, to join a tribe of inspired entrepreneurs, let’s talk. You have the equipment since you already sew. You can do all the sewing yourself or create your own community, your sewing circle. And we’ll all be making a difference, making income doing what we love. That’s what inspired livelihood is all about.
Recently, inspiration for a product has been so noisy, so constant, it wakes me from a sound sleep. The timing couldn’t be worse since I have a number of plates spinning and deadlines looming but when an idea wants attention so desperately that it keeps jumping around in front of your face, it can no longer be ignored. So, a few nights ago, I woke up at 3AM and doodled down the design, made notes on sourcing materials and marketing the product.
Because any business I create must meet certain criteria that support my core values, I’ve been considering how this project will impact lives. My design is handcrafted and labor intensive so it makes sense to outsource the production. My first thought was to teach women in a developing country to make the product, enabling them to earn a fair wage and support their families. Then I thought about the unemployment rates in our own country and all the women who’d benefit by the opportunity to work from home.
I thought of Detroit and all the families whose incomes were dependent on the auto industry. Having spent years in home furnishings, I know what outsourcing overseas has done to the Carolinas and the affect it’s had on entire communities. So, wouldn’t it make sense to use this idea to create livelihood for families in our own country? I’m going to start here but I need your help. Who do you know who loves to sew and would love to work from home on their own schedule? Let’s see how many women we can help create their own livelihood. Is this you or someone you know? Let’s do this together. I’d love to hear from you.
