If you have, or wish to have, a home craft business, sooner or later you will want to do a craft show. Craft shows can range from the tiny (small-town celebration, six booths, outdoors) to the enormous (large city, 500 booths, convention center).
Read MoreIf you fantasize about starting your own home craft business, I’m willing to bet a lot of your dream revolves around such things as giving up the commute, being able to call your own shots, setting your own hours, and spending more time with your family.
Usually, a person’s dreams and plans like these come after a person looks at someone who already has an established and successful home craft business.“Look at these people! Aren’t they lucky! They don’t have to drive through the snow to get to an office! All they have to do is walk across the driveway, and they’re at work!”
The trouble with this vision is that the wanna-be entrepreneur is only seeing a snapshot of the business owner’s current success, and they assume it sprang – boing! – effortlessly into being, sort of like those nifty mushrooms that grow overnight on your lawn. No preparation, no planning, just boing.
Not.
Read MoreWhen running a craft business, there are two basic divisions in sales type: retail (selling directly to the customer) and wholesale (selling to a middleman, who sells to the customer). It’s entirely possible to do both, of course. But, the common element in both types of sales is marketing. How else can you earn money if you don’t market your products to people who want to buy them?
Read MoreCentral Wisconsin will be the location of an exceptional fired arts retreat where artists will create works of ceramic art with the former publisher of The Crafts Report, Michael Harbridge. Each person will make a minimum of eight large projects that will be Raku-fired in outdoor and indoor electric and gas kilns, shapes fashioned with clay methods, airbrushed, horsehair-fired, and much more.
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As a child, David Ellsworth was always the “maker” who charmed and delighted playmates by producing typical Baby Boomer toys: bows and arrows, rifles, pistols, swords, tomahawks, and blowguns – all fashioned from wood and...
Read MoreElsa Mikus spent decades in the corporate world, working in what she describes as a “dizzying array of jobs, ranging from file clerk to software tester.” However, it’s her most recent incarnation as an artisan that has brought her the most success and the greatest fulfillment.
“I was always making something from the time I was a kid – first doll clothes, and then graduating to making all of my own clothes in high school,” says Mikus, who runs Tempest in a Teapot with longtime friend and business partner, Barbara C. Ryan. “In 1985, I discovered tole/decorative/folk art painting and got hooked on it after my first craft show in 1989. I also made primitive dolls for a couple of years.”
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Free eBook: Bruce Baker Guide to Handcrafted Success. Click photo above.
Expert advice from Bruce Baker, who has run more than 500 workshops.
