Since I was on such a caning spree the last week or so, I reduced, wrapped, photo’d and updated the little web shop. Next on the list is make sets to send on to the Claychicks!
Here’s what’s new or refilled in the shop:
All of these can be nabbed in the shop – in the last page of the flower canes, roses or bugs and critters category, respectively.
Most of the time I make rose and other flower canes. They’re pretty, they’re typically symmetrical and they’re fast to make up, once you have the know how. I could make flowers all day! Actually, some days I do.
Bug canes are the reverse. I am not a fan of bugs, even the pretty ones, in real life. Like flowers, they’re sort of grown on me since I’ve begun caning. To make insect canes is a lot more work than flowers – there are usually more than two sub canes – sometimes, five or six – and there are usually several steps of reduction and combining. All of those factors make for big canes that can result in a huge pile of waste clay (bug guts anyone?) if you botch steps. So I make a bug for about every fifty or sixty flower canes I do!
This weekend, I made two. And there are a few others in stages – it’s disturbing, I have little bug bodies and antennae and wings on my desk that I had better not swat! – of production. Hanging out with the bug in the picture is the dark toned ‘marigold’ I made this weekend. The light tone one is coming up!
One of the best parts about selling your crafts is meeting nice and like-minded people. I love beads and I am always thrilled to what people do with beads. Particularly my beads!
Cindi of Daytona Luxury Earrings makes lovely earrings for her eBay store from a variety of quality materials. I was thrilled to see she has a whole section of earrings featuring polymer clay beads!
She bought a set of my face beads and then turned them into these lovelies which you can nab here. This is probably the best part of selling beads – other artists think up designs that I would never have thought of and yet work just right.
Here are some of the results of my Victoria Day weekend’s caning project:
There’s a little purple and white posie in there and an unphotographed black rose which went right to restocking my web store!
A seller on Etsy posted that she was looking at doing craft fairs. Her product is unusual and attractive and she was wondering how many she’d need for a show. Other Etsians chimed in with their opinions and I snuck mine in as well. It’s a question I hear a LOT – and one I ask myself every show. One method to work it is this:
Use the 10x the booth fee rule of thumb. I use 10x the booth fee as my guideline for a good show. I usually aim for closer to 15x now but 10x is still ‘good’. So let’s assume this show will cost $40 for the table. That means, we’d like to make $400 from the show. Sounds great.
Make more than twice as much stock as the amount you hope to sell. I have never sold out at a show. I have sold out of specific items but never of everything I brought. At my most profitable shows I sell 20% of what I bring. So in this case, at least $800 (and really, probably closer to $1200) in stock, to make that $400 in sales.
Have your stock reflect a variety of price points. Yes $1000 in stock is easier to make up if you bring 20 $50 items. Most of the shows I do are small community ones. People shop for gifts. Most of my sales are in the $10-20 range. I just don’t sell that many items in the $40+ range. My stock reflects this – I have a lot of impulse items in the $1-$5 category. I have half or more of my stock in the $10-20 range. Then I have a few items in each price point after that – 20 to 30, 30 to 40 and 40+.
There are problems with this method. If you only plan to do one sale a year, you will be left with a lot of stock, even if your show does well. This method works best if you plan on doing sales regularly, for a while, because you can use it flexibly that way – as items sell, you can update your stock, move pieces into other venues and plan for larger shows or smaller ones.
For your purposes a ‘good show’ might only be 8x. Or it may have to be 20x. $40 a table is actually the higher end of the little community and school shows I do here but in some areas it may be the bare minimum. And while I’ve been told that the same 10x (or more) rule applies when your booth fees get into the 100′s or 1000′s of dollars my mind boggles at the amount of my stock that represents.