Here’s the next article in our series from Patrice Lewis on working at home.
Of course it’s another great one!
Tawra

If Your Home Craft Business Fails….
Blame the Boss

Part II:
What to Do When Nobody Wants Your Product

Patrice Lewis
http://patricelewis.com

It’s your dream, isn’t it? To work at home. To not have to answer to anyone but yourself. No commute. Flexible hours. More time with your family. A home business can supply all of that, and more.

We all go into business with stars in our eyes, convinced that we’ll make enough money selling our marvelous product or services to live our dream of being self-employed.

People start a home business for a variety of reasons, many of which revolve around the concepts of independence, self-sufficiency, and increased family togetherness. These are all admirable motivations and when the business succeeds, it’s well worth the difficulties.

However, when a home craft business fails, it can be a crushing blow and a bitter, bitter end to your dreams of self-reliance.

What causes a home business to fail? In the last article, I discussed how poor business practices can contribute to the failure of a home business. In this article, I will discuss what to do when – gasp – nobody wants your product.

What Constitutes a Successful Home Craft Business?
I am working on the assumption that you are starting a home business with the ultimate goal of having that business be a major source of income rather than, say, a weekend hobby that brings in a bit of spare cash.

This is actually a rather nice assumption to work with, since a successful home business may allow you greater freedom to choose where you live. Depending on your business, you might be able to move to a small coastal resort community, a mountain ski town, a prairie homestead, or wherever else you please. It gives you the freedom to choose.

Ultimately, a successful home craft business is one that produces income in excess of expenses. It is this “extra” that constitutes your salary. A craft business that pays for itself – and nothing extra – is NOT a “success” (yet). Keep working at it.

Just something to keep in mind.

Nobody Wants Your Product
Okay, you know the product (or services) you’ll provide. You spend weeks or months creating enough items to sell at an event, or on line, or to a specialty store. You send in the show fee or purchase a website or print up brochures. You put together a handsome booth or mass-mail your promotional material. You travel six hours to get to the show or to make sales calls at stores, dealing with a flat tire and an overheated engine on the way. You have high hopes and great expectations.

And you flop. Nobody wants your product.

What do you mean, flop? That’s so insulting! Don’t those people realize how hard you worked to make the item, how far you traveled to get there, how much time and effort it took to put together the booth? What do you MEAN no one wants my product?

Been there, done that. It hurts. Ouch.

For any craft item, you will undoubtedly be able to sell some of your product. There are millions of people in this country, with millions of different tastes, and there must be someone who wants to buy one or two of your lavender-velvet frammerjammits.

However, assuming your other business practices are sound, your home craft businesses may fail because you can’t sell enough lavender-velvet frammerjammits to meet your business expenses and provide the “extra” that constitutes your salary (and from which you pay your mortgage, food, clothes, etc.).

This is where you need to take a hard, calculated, brutal look at your product, and determine whether or not you can sell enough of it to make a living. This is where you need to determine if your craft will become a business, or remain a hobby.

Fortunately there are some ways to help you make this decision.

Pick Your Venues Carefully
I recall a craft show we attended in which we sold well. All weekend long we sat at our booth, chatting with customers, selling tankards, having an enjoyable time.

Directly across from us was a woman selling ceramic dragons. These weren’t handsome, detailed, realistic dragons, either. Rather, they were cutsy-wootsy pastel dragons at a venue that did not include many children. This was at the height of the “Barney” popularity, the purple dinosaur so roundly hated by adults everywhere. These were the dragon equivalents of Barney, and horrified customers stayed away from the poor woman in droves.

Toward the end of the show, the woman came over and inquired about whether we would be interested in trading. We do occasionally make trades, but we were unable to break it to the woman that our home décor would not be improved by the addition of a pastel pink ceramic dragon.

To put it bluntly, nobody wanted her product.

At another show, the vendor next to us was selling hand-made candles in grotesque shapes - black wax skulls, dark purple wax…uh…female anatomy, that kind of thing. There were many families, with many children, at this show, and they steered as far away from this woman’s booth as possible. The vendor had traveled eight hours to get to this particular event and was highly disappointed that she wasn’t selling well.

Again, nobody wanted her product.

Don’t get me wrong: cherubic ceramic dragons or skull candles have their markets. But these particular venues were not the most optimum place to sell.

And therein lays the secret: these vendors had chosen the wrong markets to sell their products.

The Market
If it appears that nobody wants your product, it could be you’re trying to sell in the wrong market.

At our very first show, back in 1993, it poured for three days solid (naturally, it was an outdoor show). Yet in one four-hour break in the weather, we made $1500. In four hours. This gave us the incentive to continue struggling to build our business, to seek out additional markets in which to sell our product, to keep the hope alive that this business would succeed.

If we had started doing shows of the home’n’garden type, for instance, we would quickly have lost heart and have gone out of business because those types of shows are not suitable for our product. However, we didn’t choose our first show at random. We were familiar with the type of people attending this type of event. We knew what they liked to purchase, and we knew the price range they liked to purchase in. In other words, we had researched the market. (I will expand this topic – researching the market – in the next article.)

However, we had to learn the hard way, through rough experience, what sorts of other markets worked for us, and what didn’t. We tried and tried and tried to sell our tankards at ordinary craft shows. We sometimes traveled for hours, to different states even, to attend craft shows. We paid hundreds of dollars in booth fees to attend enormous holiday craft shows. And we lost our shirts.

In retrospect, we know why our sales were so poor at these venues. Our tankards have a masculine appeal. It is mostly women who attend craft shows. Also, most craft show items are priced very modestly. Our tankards were too expensive.

So we branched into themed events – Oktoberfests, Renaissance Faires, brewer’s festivals, that kind of thing – and our sales shot up. Makes sense, doesn’t it, to market wooden steins at something like Oktoberfests? Duh.

Sensible Business Practices
How can you tell if your product is a hot enough item to sell well? One tried and true method is test marketing. For all I know, the makers of the skull
candles and ceramic dragons were test marketing their products.

How well a product succeeds depends on several factors, including marketing ploys (remember Pet Rocks?), uniqueness, attractiveness, and price. While it’s possible to make a living making jewelry or painted country crafts, just be aware that lots and lots and lots of other people make them too. Yours must stand out. (Of course, to be fair, lots and lots and lots of people like to buy those types of items too, so your market is pretty good.)

Your product must be enough in demand – or you must be capable of creating a demand (remember Pet Rocks?) – that you can earn a sufficient income to work at home.

So take a look at your particular product and do the market research to see (a) how many others are making something similar or identical; and (b) if you can find the markets to sell enough of your product so that your monetary needs are provided for.

The whole idea behind having a business is being able to compete in the marketplace. If you make country crafts, for example, you only have to spend two minutes online to realize that there are literally millions of other people making country crafts. Your product must stand out in some way – either because of its uniqueness, its quality, its price, or its clever marketing.

Don’t go into debt to test-marketing your product. If you fail, you will still owe the money. If you don’t go into debt and your product fails, at least you’re only out a little money. Don’t acquire the trappings of success before you’re successful.

The Ugly Truth
Just because you like something, and enjoy making it, does not guarantee that enough people will share your interest. That’s the brutal, unpleasant, ugly truth about a home craft business. Enough people must share your interest that you can sell enough of your product to make a living.

It might be a reality that no one wants your product, period. Facing reality is part of business, and part of being an intelligent business person. Lavender-velvet frammerjammits just may not be a hot market item, and the sooner you face that, the less money and time you’ll waste.

However, just because nobody wants your product this year does not mean that the same will be true next year. Markets can be fickle. Stuff we make this year and can’t give away, we can’t make fast enough the following year. Be flexible.

The good news is that there is almost always someone who wants your product. The bad news is that there may not be enough “someones” to provide you with enough income to meet your financial needs. In this case, you can keep things as a hobby and just enjoy it.

Get Friendly with Fellow Vendors
This might be tough, but very useful: get some honest feedback. Fellow vendors are excellent sources for this.

Gather opinions about what’s wrong with the product you’ve got. Ask people to be brutally honest. Is your product too cheap? To expensive? Is the quality too poor? Are the colors or shapes wrong? Are your sales techniques offensive? Is your product offensive? Is your booth poorly arranged or set up?

Whatever feedback you receive, the trick is to (a) listen, and (b) don’t be offended. Get your ego out of the way. Learn. Be flexible. It’s likely that people aren’t giving you feedback to hurt your feelings. They’re giving you feedback out of a genuine desire to help. All vendors have been there, done that. Most vendors like to help newbies.

In a broad sense, all this advice also applies to those providing services. Be flexible. Adjust to meet the market.

Feedback from other vendors can distinguish between whether your product is bad, or whether the venue itself is bad. If your product bombs but so does everyone else’s, then it’s probably not you.

We recently did an event of the sort of show that normally results in excellent sales. We lost our shirts. However, so did everyone else. It was just one of those “you win some, you lose some” events that happen to all merchants at one time or another.

As an aside, when talking with fellow vendors, keep in mind that their comments may sometimes need interpretation. Few vendors will come right out and state how much money they’re making, but after awhile you become adept at noting their level of despair. “We’re doing terrible” doesn’t need much interpretation. “Eh, we did okay” can probably be translated into “We had fabulous sales!”

Friendly vendors are also happy to tell you about other events that might be suitable for your product.

Check your Prices
Do a realistic check of your pricing from both ends. Too expensive is obvious. But, surprisingly, sometimes you don’t sell well if your product is too cheap, because then it’s perceived as being of poor quality.

An example of too cheap? One time, in a silly mood, we made something we called a “barrel purse.” It was literally two wooden half-circle barrel halves hinged together and hung with a leather strap. It weighed around ten pounds. If you wanted to access the inside and weren’t holding it right, it slapped open and dropped all the contents on the floor. It was stupid, silly, absurd, and we priced it at something like $5 and kept it as a gimmicky thing. We toted that barrel purse to no less than ten different shows over a period of six months and hung it from a center pole of our booth so no one could miss it. Of course, it never sold. Who would buy something so stupid?

Then one day at a show, in a moment of levity, we added a zero to the price tag so that it read $50 rather than $5. We sold it within half an hour.

Don’t get me wrong – we told the customer everything that was wrong with it. It didn’t matter – she loved it, had no qualms about paying the price, and walked out ten pounds heavier and fifty dollars lighter. My husband and I couldn’t believe it.

People expect to pay for quality (even if the item is absurd). Whatever else you could say about that barrel purse, you couldn’t deny that it was hand-crafted, high-quality, and made of solid wood.

Many years ago, in another moment of levity (we have a lot of those), we took an ordinary tankard, cut it up at funny angles, twisted the pieces around, and glued it back together. The result was a crooked tankard that looked drunk. We put it on display at a show for a ridiculously low price, something like $5. People mostly ignored it.

Then we put it on prominent display and upped the price to $45. Within minutes we had two people literally arguing over who would buy it. We settled the argument by promising one of the customers that we would make him another one jut like it, which we did. We have made crooked tankards ever since, and they have become one of our best sellers.

As a Last Resort…
If all else fails and you find that it’s true that nobody wants your product… make something else.

Your skills remain, even if a specific product doesn’t work out. Perhaps you can modify your existing product to fit into new venues (more on this in a future article).

Some would say there is no such thing as a bad product, only bad marketing. I won’t go that far (pink ceramic dragons, remember?), but far more home craft businesses fail due to marketing errors than to product unpopularity.

Everything has a buyer. It’s your job to find him.

Patrice Lewis is co-founder of Don Lewis Designs (www.donlewisdesigns.com).
She and her husband have been in business for fourteen years.
The Lewis’s live on forty acres in north Idaho with their two homeschooled children,
assorted livestock, and a shop which overflows into the house with depressing regularity.