Making a Living

How to Craft Your Business

Sophie Rochester

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781529393934
• eBook ISBN: 9781529393958
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Featuring Tatty Devine, HemingwayDesign, Craft Scotland and more Making a Living has been carefully crafted to support anyone looking for practical, hands-on advice and inspiring stories to motivate them to make their dream business into a reality.Inspiring stories from jewellery makers to basket weavers, artists to terrarium makers, printmakers to ceramicists, bring bags of real-world advice and inspiration for those wanting to take their first steps into this new artisanal economy.With more time at home than ever before, the restorative distraction of crafts and making has seen a mainstream resurgence. So too has the desire to 'make a living' from creating handmade products to sell, or to sell our creative skills. This new wave of at-home entrepreneurs are using Facebook and Instagram to promote their businesses, Etsy and Not on the High Street to sell their crafts and Paypal and Shopify to manage their payments. Technology-led businesses are transforming the way in which offline maker businesses are operating - and business is booming.From the founder of Yodomo, the online learning platform for arts and crafts, and with chapters on market research, valuing and pricing your work, branding, marketing and sales, as well as accounting fundamentals and legal considerations, this is a step-by-step guide to getting your idea off the ground, either as a side hustle or as your next major career move.

1

Understanding Your Motivations

Making a Living is designed to help makers and craftspeople at any stage of their creative business development. You might be someone who has developed a handmade product and want to sell it for the first time; you might be a craftsperson who has honed your skills over many decades but has never contemplated selling your skills as a new revenue stream, or you might be an established artist who is looking to create a side line of more commercial products to sell alongside bespoke commissions. Whether it’s a new business idea or contemplating a new revenue stream it always pays to stop, reflect and write some things down before setting off on a given pathway.

Personal motivations

Trying to get to the root of the ‘why’ of your plans will help you and your business over the long term, and help act as steer when having to make crucial decisions. The first ‘why’ to consider is your own personal motivations. This is a self-reflection exercise so one that you might want to do on your own and really get to the heart of what it is that really motivates you.

The calming benefits of making and crafting are well documented, and many people come to these creative activities for the first time because they are trying to get away from other stress points in their lives. One major consideration, especially if you’re at the beginning of your maker business journey, is that by turning your creative hobby into a business you can often risk losing your love for it. When you’re setting up you need to keep your eye on the end goal. If you’re organized and set up ways to either automate or outsource the other range of tasks related to your business, then there is no reason why you can’t continue to find time for making and growing the business.

One of the biggest challenges of starting a business is the financial implications, and if you’re in full-time employment, then making the jump from side-hustle to start-up business can be daunting.

Many crafter-makers have told me that the craft they love to spend all their free time practising when working nine to five in an office becomes a chore when they trade it for money. Essentially, once the novelty of selling wears off – and it always does – profit becomes important.

The following seven findings below have emerged from many in-depth interviews that Sarah Marks has conducted with people who do and don’t manage to make a living from running their own business.

Sarah Marks is co-founder of the successful crafts kits business Buttonbag, which has been running for over a decade. She is also a doctoral candidate at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, where her current research explores the true cost of entrepreneurship on business owners. We asked her to share her insight into what crafters and makers realistically pay themselves, and her seven top tips to build a profitable craft business:

Crafters and makers often say they are not motivated by money, but Sarah’s research shows that the people who persist, and extract the most enjoyment from their craft businesses, manage to pay themselves decently, too. This may seem obvious, but it all too often seems to get forgotten in the first excitement of selling your own wares.

The overwhelming evidence suggests that, once your passion or hobby becomes a business, you need to prioritize making money out of it.

The following seven findings below have emerged from many in-depth interviews that Sarah conducted with people who do and don’t manage to make a living from running their own business:

1. Price your labour fairly. Put a monetary value on the labour needed to produce each item. Your retail selling price should be at least double this figure plus double the material cost. Why?

Nobody wants to work for 50p an hour. This holds true, even if you don’t actually ‘need’ the money.

You may at some point want to employ other people to help you. The price of your product should include a living wage for the maker – whoever it is, or for an employee’s help in selling, promoting or delivering your products.

Don’t forget that, if you sell the fruits of your labour substantially below the market rate, it can drive down the price and makes it harder for other artisans (who might have a family to support) to earn a sustainable income.

2. Price your products high. Crafter-makers who earn a living are usually at the high end of the market. Many have found they need to double, if not triple, their initial prices to make their business sustainable. They are often surprised by how easily customers accept higher prices. Their experience suggests that consumers cognitively ascribe greater value to higher-priced products.

3. Demonstrate the value of your products. Successful entrepreneurs find ways to demonstrate the inherent value in their wares or services that justify the asking price. They do not rely on low prices to build market share.

4. Set a monthly minimum income goal. Successful entrepreneurs usually have an income goal in mind, that is often based on the minimum wage they would accept in salaried work. They work out how many products they need to sell per week to meet that goal, after all fixed costs – platform fees, market stall, monthly website costs. This sober realization frequently leads them to develop higher end services/products. Set a realistic path towards your income goal and track your progress.

5. Think seasonally. It is normal to make 60–90 per cent of your sales in the last three months of the year. No one crafts in the summer. This is especially true if your products are mostly bought as gifts for other people.

6. Target people with disposable income. Profitable crafter-makers get their services or products in front of people who have money to spend, and the inclination to spend it. This doesn’t just mean the wealthy – think about timing, gift-buyers and holidaymakers. This is where crafts fairs, Etsy, the internet and the wholesale market kick in, helping you reach people beyond your own location.

7. Wholesale or retail? If you are interested in wholesale, you need to price your product high enough at the outset to be able to still make a profit yourself. Wholesale normally means you sell your product to a shop at 30–50 per cent below the retail price. Major chains will expect to buy something for around £7 that they sell at £20. Don’t expect socially minded organizations such as public galleries, museum shops and charities to offer better terms; their retail arms have been set up to subsidize their main mission – not the other way round.

Sarah Marks’ findings clearly demonstrate that there are careful considerations to make on how you might run your business as you’re starting out. It’s really important to reflect on your own personal lifestyle choices, as how you decide to proceed will depend on your own personal situation, your finances and, importantly, your own approach to risk.

The hobby

The link between crafts and wellbeing is well documented, and making with your hands has strong links to improved mood. One common perception is that by leaving your full-time job and turning your hobby into a business, you will suddenly have much more time for making and a freer lifestyle. In this instance, it’s really important to keep in mind that running a full-time business will not necessarily mean more time for making or crafting, and that in order to run your business successfully much more of your time will need to be spent on content creation, digital marketing, business development, raising finance and more.

Keeping your full-time job and selling crafts or handmade items simply as a hobby might actually equate to exactly the same amount of time left for creativity, so it’s important to really understand the extent of that other work before you hand in your notice.

Exercise

1. Ask yourself the difficult questions and get to the ‘why’ of you wanting to sell your work or skills commercially as opposed to just making and crafting as a hobby.

2. Are you seeking validation for your work?

3. Are there other ways to get your work validated other than turning your hobby into a business?

4. Are you drawn to the lifestyle of being a maker or craftsperson?

The side-hustle

Having a side-hustle at work used to be something that was kept a little bit under the radar from employers, but today many more companies are actively encouraging side-hustles and consider it an asset if employees can think entrepreneurially. This is evidenced in intrapreneurship programmes, with the most famous example being that in the early days Google would actively encourage employees to pursue their side projects ‘to inspire innovation in participating employees and ultimately increase company potential’.

Changes in the way that we work mean that running two, three or more different careers simultaneously is becoming more and more commonplace, and these portfolio careers create time and space to run businesses on the side and watch them grow, before having to give up other paid employment.

One major consideration for crafts and making businesses is the cyclical nature of sales across the year. For many businesses, sales of finished goods, kits and learning workshops centre around Christmas, and, as Sarah Marks’ research above demonstrates, many businesses find that 60–90 per cen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding Your Motivations
• 2 Getting Started
• 3 Understanding Your Customers
• 4 Selling Online
• 5 Selling in Physical Spaces
• 6 Selling Your Skills
• 7 Developing Your Brand and Marketing
• 8 Managing Your Accounts and Tax
• 9 Customer Relations
• 10 Scaling Your Crafts or Maker Business
• 11 Creating a Team
• 12 Legal Requirements and Intellectual Property
• 13 How to be a Responsible Business
• 14 Wellbeing and Resilience
• Annexe: A guide to becoming more environmentally conscious in your craft practice
• Copyright