How to Start a Craft Business

Perhaps the question is not “how to start a craft business” but why should you start a craft business?

There are three different ways to go about setting up a craft business.

The simplest way would be to simply do it on a small scale, and be happy that you have a small home business that is capable of earning more per month than what it costs.

This level business is OK – if your financial situation is sound and you do not really need any extra money from a real business.

Then the second way to start a craft business is to expand upon a craft hobby or small business that already exists.

This could be a small business that you have recently purchased, or inherited or could be one of the above types of craft businesses that you now would like to take to up a level or twenty to turn it into a really profitable business.

The third way would be for you to plan a craft business from scratch and build it up from nothing at all. This method gives you the freedom to really be picky in your combination’s of what you really like to do vs what is the most profitable.

If i spent time going through all the different permutations that you could look into here I would need to write up a 600 page report.

For now in this page let me just mention these few points. Firstly I have two complete courses that I have done and both are available online. One targets craft and flea market businesses and goes into a lot of detail on how to get the maximum out of your marketing at home and on a stall on the markets. I have a lot of years experience in doing flea markets and craft markets and they are all potentially great ways to make a living.

Then I wrote a second report (big course) that covers all the online and website side of running a small business.. I have to be honest I believe that the potential gained from doing the website side is so much more powerful that I would never go back to trading weekly on the markets ever again. However having said that if I was still doing a craft that I loved and wanted to make and sell – the markets are still a very good way of getting sales and building up a regular client base.

I will add links at the end of this page for you to go and get a few of the free reports that I have previously written relating to those products that I wrote.

For now though I want to point out a few tips and tricks that you should consider when you are thinking about a way to start a craft business.

I am going to use the example that you start from scratch as this gives me the best way to cover a lot of the tips.

Starting up the idea of starting a craft business

Do a wholesale list

Firstly I suggest that you do research that is legwork. Go to your local craft wholesaler and look very carefully at all the different types of products that they have for sale there. make up a list of everything that they sell.

Then at home put the types of crafts that they offer into a list of which you think you would most like to do.

Do a Craft market walkabout

Go to a few craft markets and make up a very detailed list of these following items.

• How many different types of crafts are selling on that market
• How many of those are the same product
• How they have done their stock – From a type of stock point of view
• How have they done their stock from a display point of view
• How big their stock holding is – Both on the tables and under the tables
• Do they have a few big items on the table – or a lot of small items – or a mixture of both
• Are they selling on low price and bigger turnover or are they holding out for more expensive prices.
• What sort of “catchment” area is that particular craft market. Is it in an upmarket area?

There is possibly more that I have forgotten to mention here ( I am just running all this straight out of my head) But I suspect that you can see the significance of doing this part carefully.

Later in your research – I suggest that once you have chosen a craft and started to get your business going – that you do more research by actually asking the crafters that are on the markets that you will NOT be trading on – a lot of question. It is surprising as to how many crafters will share a lot of information with you, especially if you are also willing to share some of your research with then. I learned a long time ago that I get more knowledge from just asking than by lurking around. Yes you do have to allow that some will lie to you in a big way, but on average you will find happy, helpful and friendly people. Just like you!

Now your craft Business research starts in earnest

Sit down with all your lists and notes and try to get a short list. Do not – at this stage – try to get it all down to only one item. The biggest part of your research is still to come.

Combine your original list from the wholesaler with the craft stalls that seemed to have what you would like to do. Mix in your notes of who actually seemed to be making the most money and try to make some sense from the whole lot of research that you have done.

The very nature of this type of research is that it gets done over a period of time and allows your ideas to fester ( LOL – I meant mature) and while you might be a lot like me and be all excited by every single idea, you will find that what you really feel will work for you is starting to “float to the top”

What you need to do next is by far the most important part of the research for you new craft business

What I am talking about here is the online keyword research that is so vitally necessary these days.

The keyword research will give you such accurate figures that without this knowledge I would tell you to not even try to start your business. There might be no change to what your research has dug up – BUT there could be a single item that you discover that is so important that you could end up doing upwards of 20 times more business by simply paying heed to what you learned from some simple keyword research.

This is unfortunately not something that you learn how to do by reading a single post on a website – Sorry. But if you cannot afford to purchase the training course that I offer – then I suggest that you watch a lot of you-tube videos on how to do keyword research. All (OK – well most of the keyword research tools are free) the keyword research tools are free and they ways to do the research is easy and fairly quick – when you know how.

Doing it the you-tube way will mean that you must check that all the videos that you watch are new and not more than 6 months old.

What you will be looking for when you do your keyword research is the more popular keyword searches for your chosen list of possible craft businesses.

For example – here in South Africa – every month only 22000 people look up the keyword (or keywords close to this one) Candle Making.

22 000 – Now that is a lot if your candles were expensive, but even if your website was in page one number one for all those searches you will still only sell from between 80 and 600 items. That would be if you got every single one of those searchers to visit your website. So let us say that your candles were being bought one by one… You would never get rich. 150 sales @ R50 = R7500 a month

But you could be selling a R120 training course on how to make candles…  now a possible 150 sales @ R120 = R 18 000, a bit better right?

But what if you had a membership website that eventually has over 1000 members all paying you R35 a month to keep being informed of your newest coolest monthly content on your membership site. Now that becomes R35 000 a month, BUT you would still be able to sell more stuff to those members every month. So you could probably add at least another R 5000 or R 10 000.

So do you see that even a small candle making website has great opportunities.

So what now if you ended up in a craft niche that has 10 times that potential – Without me actually going into Google and searching for a better example – let me use T Shirt printing.

Every month in South Africa we get over 110 000 people looking up T Shirt printing. Now remember that this would be covering all aspects of the keyword. So if you didn’t want to print t shirts that were simple and boring promotional t shirts, you would probably be cutting out 80% of the business.

BUT that still leaves about 15 000 potential clients that might be looking for a more crafty t shirt, and perhaps and order of 500 t shirts?

So the power of knowing exactly what sort of person – and best of all – how many searches are done every single month for an exact keyword is staggering. If you made the most beautiful antique wedding dresses you could be getting up to 600 000 broad searches a month for the wedding dresses keyword term every month online.

600 000 – Seriously.

BUT the reality is only 590 local searches in South Africa for “antique wedding dresses”

And 110 000 international searches for the same term.

So let me not try to work out some wonderful way to make wedding dresses for clients in other countries…

BUT – local = 590. Now how much is a wedding dress? OK, I admit I do not have the slightest clue. But I do presume that it is a little expensive.

So let us guess (Ja I know guessing is bad) that you could get 20 wedding dresses sold from those 590 inquiries.

How much money will you make from 20 wedding dresses?

If you know the real answer to this question – Please email me and tell me – I am very curious.

Now “second hand wedding dresses” comes in at only 290 searches locally, and I have a very real suspicion that there is a massively smaller profit in those rather than the new “antique” ones.

All right now I am done, I suspect that I have covered enough of the basics that you will need to get a craft business started.

I still highly suggest that you buy into both of my training products. They are recently revised and re positioned, but the total sum of what I have in those reports will definitely combine to give you all the knowledge that you need for a complete education on getting a craft business fully profitable.

Start with the free stuff if you are the nervous type…

The free reports are most often found on the home page of my websites.

Free report – craft markets – flea markets

Direct to the sales page – Small Business training product

Direct to the sales page – Flea market and craft market training product.

Buy both and I will throw in a few extra bonuses. Send me an email with your purchase details and I will mail you with the details.