Making your Craft Make a Difference
The two most common complaints I hear from crafters trying to make a living at their art are:
They can’t possibly produce enough work by hand to make a living and they can’t compete with the imports and knockoffs. My feeling on the issue of copie-cats is that you aren’t competing with knockoffs. You either market to the discriminating collector who values handmade and is willing to pay you for the time or you license and get paid for someone to mass produce your designs.
There is another option though, and it answers the “must have more meaning” criteria that so many of us feel is integral to inspired livelihood. Rather than struggle to produce enough product to make a living or seek a licensing agreement to have your work mass produced overseas, what if you were to find a group of people who are either stay at home moms who love crafts and want to do something to keep busy and make a little spending money without leaving their children OR find a group of people in an underdeveloped country who have no industry, training or marketable skills? Either way, train those people to make your craft according to your designs and techniques, furnish them with the supplies and outsource. If you love to travel, you can tie in a third element . You’ll be visiting a different culture to source and train the crafters (joyful and deductible), you’ll be bringing satisfying gainful employment to people in need and you’ll have enough handmade inventory to make a living.
Are you already outsourcing your work to stay at home crafters either in your community or around the world? Feel free to comment. We’d all love to hear what you’re doing or what you’d like to be doing to make your craft more meaningful and profitable.
