Running A Crafty Business Is A Learning Experience Too

Not sure I agree with Miles Davis ...
 

When I entered college planning to major in journalism, my mom insisted I aim for a minor in business as well because it offered more employment opportunities than journalism would.

I tried, but oh, the prerequisite classes for business were excruciatingly boring to me. And by the end of my sophomore year, I had abandoned them for the exceedingly useful classes in religion that had become my passion. (Note: I attended an entirely secular public university. My religion classes were focused primarily on analyzing Old Testament texts in a more literary way than a religious class would.)

But it worked out fine since I got hired by The Associated Press straight out of college and earned a good living for the 15 years I stayed with them. (The only other job offer I got at the time was for a tiny, rural newspaper, where a staffer told me in utter seriousness that it was great because all the reporters qualified for food stamps.)

Fast forward eight years, and now I'm running a small crafty business and boy do I wish I'd stuck with those boring accounting and econ classes to get to the more advanced business classes!

Although I'm not sure that business administration or marketing classes would necessarily have saved me from this week's business learning experience.



The exciting news is we had our first international sale! Woohoo!

On Thursday, I shipped one of my lovely fabric flower brooches off to Cork, Ireland, a place I've never been but hope to visit someday.

Imagine my surprise, though, when I learned that instead of over-estimating my international postage rates in my product listings, shipping cost me $12, 50 percent more than the $8 I had charged my customer. Oops!

It's not a mistake, it's a learning experience!

I'm definitely happy to have learned this lesson while shipping a light-weight brooch rather than one of Scott's wood pieces!

And now I'm busily updating all my product listings on Etsy to properly reflect the higher international shipping costs. I'd much rather refund excess shipping charges than pay them out of my own pocket!

Our shop policy is to refund shipping charge overages that are greater than $1. But if I underestimate shipping expenses, we don't ask our customers for more money.

Now that that's off my chest, I'm going to go back to celebrating having had my first international sale! :)

 

Working Wednesday: Post-Holiday Planning

It may be almost a week until Christmas, but I'm already thinking about next year.

Scott and I are cautiously optimistic that 2013 will see our business become self sufficient and ideally even profitable. :-) Of course, I expect that most of our Foster's Beauties income will get reinvested in supplies and materials for awhile more, but things are definitely looking potentially rosy.

Meanwhile, I have been slowly listing more of Scott's Chai Variations in our Etsy store -- take a look! Those are truly works of art that he created. I keep getting comments from folks who think they look like intricate pottery and are simply floored when they realize they are wood.

Here are a few of the newest listings:

This is the second (but still unique!) Blonde Chai Variations (SF111).

Chai Variations II, featuring the beautiful red-brown colors in bubinga as its main wood, complemented with maple, Oregon black walnut and wenge.

And of course you've seen Rhythms of the Heart in previous postings, but it's officially listed now! :)

(I love the little diamond created in the feature ring where the woods meet up to point down. There's got to be a name for that, but I have no idea what it is.)

What are your creative or business plans for 2013? I'm currently trying to figure out how much inventory we need to have completed by September if we want to do craft fairs once or twice a month for the last quarter of the year. I'm terrified of registering (and paying!) for, say, six shows over a 12 week period, and doing tremendously well in the first or second and running out of inventory. (I should get so lucky, right?) But how do you figure out how much inventory you need to have on hand to commit to multiple shows?

Meanwhile, although our online sales have been slow throughout December, I'm delighted that we've finally achieved one of my goals, which has been to break 1,000 pageviews in our shop during a calendar month. As I write this, we've had 1,193 so far in December, the first time we've broken past 850/month since we opened our Etsy shop. Woohoo! While views aren't nearly as good as sales, you can't sell anything if people aren't seeing your work!

Vertical or Horizontal?

I made a bow board for our craft fair display to try to get some of our work higher off the table.

To do so, I bought a 22x34 inch frame at Michael's, covered the plexiglass with a dark purple crushed velvet and used black grosgrain ribbon to have something to attach my brooches and clips to. (I firmly believe that purple is as much a neutral as beige, black and white. :)

But I can't decide if I prefer the look of the bow board vertical or horizontal. What do you think?

 

I had intended to use it vertically, both for the additional height and to use the minimal amount of table space for it. But I think I prefer the horizontal look of the bottom photo.

Meanwhile, Scott is working on a spinning display tower for my dragonfly magnets!

Gearing Up For Our First Craft Show

Sorry about missing last week’s Working Wednesday post! Life has been a bit hectic and stressful, for reasons I can’t go into here, but I promise to try to be more reliable in the future!

Our first craft show is coming up in just about a month, and we’re realizing there’s a lot more to having a successful show than having lots of great products to sell.

I’ve been soaking up the wisdom of the Craft Fairs...It’s A Living team on Etsy, and making my list of things to remember to bring along.

Although many folks say they rarely are asked for bags, they recommended we have them anyway for those who want them. I had already bought a custom-made stamp for our logo, so Ellie and I got busy stamping onto the small bags that will fit our work. (We’ll be getting some larger bags for Scott’s woodworking pieces!)

 Don’t they look great?

We also need to figure out our display. It’s an indoor show (which is good, considering it’s generally cold and wet in Portland in December!),  and we only have a 6-foot table. Although we have some items to use for display, including a cake stand with three different-level surfaces that I intend to use for Scott’s bowls, we haven’t entirely figured out the best ways to display other items. We will definitely be practicing our display setup at home to try to get the best looking table we can manage.

In the meantime, Ellie and I are busy making gift boxes out of scrapbook paper for my dragonfly magnets and maybe even some of the fabric flowers. And I have a new batch of dragonflies in holiday colors that are in process. Can’t have too many of those, right? 

If you've sold at craft fairs, we'd love any advice you might care to share. Just leave us a comment! Thanks!

T-shirts, Baseball Caps & Labels, Oh My!

Wheeee! Look what came in today's mail!

All from VistaPrint via a Living Social deal that made it super inexpensive. (I think it was $15 for $70 in merchandise.)

So now Scott and I both have t-shirts to wear if we do a craft show, and all three of us have baseball caps since Ellie had been saying she needed a sun hat around the time I was pondering buying them.

And the stickers/labels will be used either when shipping or they might look good on bags if/when we do those craft shows. (I'm planning to apply for several this fall that will be held in the run up to Christmas.)

Ok, you can't really see the logo on the cap, but you have to agree that the model is super cute. :)

Time Flies When You're Being Crafty

How has it been an entire month since I posted here?!

Finding the balance between crafting, blogging, and listing additional items on Etsy is challenging.  It's definitely a learning experience!

Scott is working on a set of variations on Chai. You remember Chai, right?

Here's a reminder:

Scott is mixing things up with the various woods (Chai is made of Oregon black walnut, bubinga, maple and wenge.) and adding additional ones to the mix. All in all, it makes for a lot of little pieces of wood to cut up and glue together repeatedly.

Here are some photos from the process:

 

Meanwhile, I've been trying to catch up with a backlog of items that need to be listed on Etsy for sale. If you go visit Foster's Beauties, you'll see a number of new hair clips and brooches that I've added recently. 

I'm still working at mastering writing the listings. It's harder than I expected! I'm also reading many of the forums that Etsy has created for its sellers, and the common wisdom says that the ideal minimum number of items to have for sale is 100. We've got a ways to go to hit that goal!

How do we figure out how much of our time to spend creating versus time spent on the business end of things? Trial and error, I guess.

We'll figure it out eventually.

Meanwhile, here are some of my latest brooches, which I hope will be listed for sale on Etsy soon.  :)

My monitor makes the middle row and center one in the bottom row look like they're blue, but they're actually a royal purple. The green ones and purple ones all have Czech glass buttons for their centers. And all 8 have brooch backs that combine a pinback and an alligator clip.

Happy crafting!

Mail Call

I think my favorite part of having a crafty business (at least until we actually make any money) is getting supplies in the mail.

I get a lot of my supplies from sellers on eBay or Etsy, and they come from around the world. Today's mail brought some glitter ribbon from Hong Kong. A few days ago, I got a couple hundred 20mm rhinestones shipped to me from Puerto Rico.

It's just so much more fun when there's more than bills in the mail! :)

Open For Business

Well, it's official -- Foster's Beauties is now open for business on Etsy. Yay!

I have to admit, there is a lot to learn, more than I expected, for getting this going. I had most of the photography already done, but I still spent about four hours getting listings drafted and then posted. I'm assuming that I will get more efficient at it the more listings I do, but wow, that was my whole evening last night AND 90 minutes this morning! Whew!