Copy that, rhett. I hear you about one piece versus 50. However, I had another thought about that you might want to consider.
You obviously want to make the most $ per hour (I hope). Let’s say you make a widget that will retail for $30 at the craft show. You have $4 in materials in it, and 20 minutes labor (because you made them in bulk, or a production run, you saved a lot of time on setups). So now you have 50 widgets. That means:
• You spent about $200 on materials ($4×50) and 1000 minutes (or about 16.5 hours) on these 50 widgets.
• Let’s say you sold all 50 during the local three day show, and you were there 8 hours each day, 24 hours. So you now have about 40 hours work into building and selling these – a regular work week.
The gross sales will be $1,500 ($30×50). Net sales is $1,300 ($1500-$200 materials).
So you’ve made about $32.50 an hour for your trouble. Nice (dreamtime: if you did this for a whole year, that would be over $67,000 a year!). I don’t know if that is clear of taxes – that’s up to you. Even so, that would be about $20 an hour – still nice.
Let’s contrast that to a big piece you’ve made. I see you recently made a A&C glider chair. Let’s assume:
• You have $150 in materials in it.
• You have 40 hours of labor into it. I assume that’s fairly accurate once you take glue curing time and finishing time into account.
IF you sell that at a craft show, you’d want, what, $600-$800 for it? That would leave you a net sale of $450 – $650, or about $11.25 to $16.25 an hour – IF you made the sale. I don’t see a lot of high end items like these going at craft shows – unless it’s a really upscale show, at a big venue in say, Dallas or Los Angeles, where people have money for this kinda thing. Not to be a wet blanket, I’m just pointing out an observation.
So you see, the money IS in the “widgets”, at least for local craft shows. If you wanted to make the same money, $32.50 per hour, for the chair, you’d have to sell it for something like $1,450. That’s a tough sell, unless you have a product that is extremely high quality (like Kevin Rodel). I’d like to know how many a year he sells! Maybe quite a few, since he has a good reputation.
It’s got to be kept in mind that local craft shows are a much different breed then huge high-end shows in high-money venues. I think a lot of the buying is impulse-based, though I’m sure that some people go in thinking, “I hope I can find a good cutting board for mom”, or “I’d like to get a nice bracelet for that dinner party”.
So what you want is obviously, an item that has a high price/production cost ratio and something women will impulse buy. In the widget example, that ratio is 78:1 (net sale per hour of labor). I don’t include time at the show, because that would be a constant for anything you sell.
You also want an item very likely to sell :)
-- Have a blessed day!
