Anyone sell home-made stuff as a sideline?

Can I have one please mol?

And one for the dog, as winter’s coming.

A bike specific scarf or a normal one?

We have stock you may wish to peruse, I’ll PM you 🙂

Dog scarves – great idea.

+1 for what muddyground said

stalls are variable experiences and not helped by either people who’ll nick your ideas wholesale or just undercut you because they’ve outsourced their ‘crafts’ to indonesia. i keep trying to persuade mrs swiss to do this last but she gets all hung up about exploitation/handmade ethic etc! but if you can sell at local stalls then, if she can make the stuff, some of the bigger fairs are a possibility. but then you have to be able to ‘discount’ and make a ton of stuff. that of course leads you to shops and their ever so generous ‘we’ll take a minimum of 50% of your asking price’ (and that’s before those cheeky wags who want you to be paying their vat as well.

not that i do any of this stuff – i’ve just been sucked into mrs swiss’s textile empire…

i’ll pm you her email addy – tell your other half to feel free to email her any questions

My dad is a potter and while lots of his stuff is sold in high end city galleries( he’s quite famous for his glazes in ceramic world) he hand makes functional stuff for festivals and good markets. He loves meeting people and getting out of the workshop. Bath Christmas market alone would see him shift 30k of stock!! He’s semi retired now so doesn’t do so much. He’s made a good living from it, been his own boss, taken time off when he wants and when the kilns are fully on works naked! Radio 4/planet rock all day, sly knaps or fishing when he feels like it, Van out the back. Turned his back on establishment career in 1967. No regrets and a happy man.

Thanks Swiss.

no worries. pm on its way. a metric shitload of string you say? with me it’s wool. i share your pain….

My dad is a potter and while lots of his stuff is sold in high end city galleries( he’s quite famous for his glazes in ceramic world) he hand makes functional stuff for festivals and good markets. He loves meeting people and getting out of the workshop. Bath Christmas market alone would see him shift 30k of stock!! He’s semi retired now so doesn’t do so much. He’s made a good living from it, been his own boss, taken time off when he wants and when the kilns are fully on works naked! Radio 4/planet rock all day, sly knaps or fishing when he feels like it, Van out the back. Turned his back on establishment career in 1967. No regrets and a happy man.

Great story, sounds like an ideal life your Dad has made for himself.

Great story, sounds like an ideal life your Dad has made for himself.

+1 Fair dues!!

Does he want a trainee for when he wants to retire properly? 🙂

I started calling it string to annoy the Mrs, in reality it’s yarn, made from a variety of different fibres. I like the silk/merino mix best 🙂

He is good at what he does and luckily for him he developed a technique that no one else can do. It’s labor intensive but yields incredible results. In fact he’s done it twice. The first one he got bored of and eventually published in ceramic review, everyone thought he was mad as he couldn’t sell enough of it. Creativly he was unchallenged and needed to be inspired by what his hands made. He says that’s the key to craft/art and making a living; make it really your own and get good at it. Plus avoid craft fairs!

stalls are variable experiences

is an understatement if there ever was. I did one where a big ice storm came in, and for five hours all I did was stand alone in a freezing car park holding my gazebo down. Others you sell nothing, and spend hours “chatting” to some tedious bore who relishes a captive audience. Generally, though, you sell nothing 🙁 unless, like the pottery guy, you are bloody good at what you do or have an idea that nobody can pinch easily. Nothing like spending a whole day standing next to stock that you will sell at a substantial loss if you even try and match the price of the guy who bought wholesale from Portugal or Indonesia. It’s also galling to watch a granny shift 300 knitted, and frankly crappy teddy bears, at £4 each.

You have to work hard [fail here straight away]; be different to everybody else [cup cakes again!] or very, very good at what you do; you have to listen to people; you either have to be good at closing a deal or have a convincing story to tell; but above all you have to be very, very lucky. And don’t knock the husband buying the stuff either – most start up businesses have some kind of ‘sponsor’ that sparks the whole thing off and makes it financially viable.

The ultimate artisan scarf has to be a long beard matted and wrapped around the neck when require.

Just one moment, these scarves from Welsh Wales, can your wife weave something as complex as an image? Something sheepy? You know what I mean…

I see a big market, fools and their money come to mind 💡

muddyground, you’ve missed out the thieving feckers…

have you considered home grown?
A few seeds, the right kind of light source and a discreet sales operation – sorted

I’m just in the process of shutting down a website for a client who made handmade knitted things for kids, her main problem was that she hadn’t done the maths – profit/time taken to make. She was selling a jumper at £39 that took her ten hours to make so even before costs she it was earning less than £4 an hour, she’d be better off stacking shelves at Tesco. The problem is most of they clothes we buy are made on countries where they can pay ****-all an hour so pricing them with british labour costs makes them look really expensive.

Doesn’t bunnyhop from off here make knitted bags or similar?

http://emmyjane-design.blogspot.co.uk/

What,about beer?
Apart from the obvious 18+ rule

can your wife weave something as complex as an image?

Hehe.. yes, in theory she can.. she apparently needs more shafts to do this well though.

We have done maths though. She can weave a scarf in an hour if it’s chunky.

bunnyhop’s actually a curtain maker, and a very good one at that (I have some of her curtains in my house and will be ordering more)

She was selling a jumper at £39 that took her ten hours to make so even before costs she it was earning less than £4 an hour, she’d be better off stacking shelves at Tesco.

if entrepreneurs applied that kind of simple maths to cottage-enterprise they wouldn’t ever start a business.

if entrepreneurs applied that kind of simple maths to cottage-enterprise they wouldn’t ever start a business.

True, but surely to be a ‘business’ by definition it has to make money and the maths has to add up, or else its just a hobby that pays for itself (not necessarily a bad thing if its only a side line/start-up).

Interesting, father-in-law has a house full of water colours from years of painting. He has just started doing a couple of craft fairs with little success.

Will take a look at the sites about to see if they could help him shift them – they are too nice to throw away but he needs to clear some space!

True, but surely to be a ‘business’ by definition it has to make money and the maths has to add up, or else its just a hobby that pays for itself (not necessarily a bad thing if its only a side line/start-up).

A non profit making business isn’t necessarily a hobby that pays for itself. My wife runs a business that generates little or no profit but pays the wages of her and my daughter. It’s certainly not a hobby.

A non profit making business isn’t necessarily a hobby that pays for itself. My wife runs a business that generates little or no profit but pays the wages of her and my daughter. It’s certainly not a hobby.

Semantics – profit/wages

Until 2 years ago I used to sell jams (rhubarb and ginger, bilberry, apple and blackberry, gooseberry, etc) / preserves (seasonal and various) / curd (lemon, lime, orange and mandarin) / honey / eggs. All home grown (or picked) and hand made by me, including honey as I had a few hives back then.

It was going well until the summer before last when trade just fell off a cliff. Still got a few hens and sell to friends what I don’t eat myself. I asked people who stopped buying why and although they loved what I made, it was basically cheaper to buy in the supermarket.

I charged what I could but in the end I couldn’t compete – £2.50 for 480g of good jam couldn’t compete against £1.20 for 480g of OK jam in Tesco. Eggs too, £1 for 6 brill eggs against £1.50 for 12 watery ones.

Shame as I really thought it would work out, but thats how it goes.

Can you sew in reflective thread of some sort? Much cooler that a Sam brown belt

20 quid is too cheap to be worth the hassle. Get it up to 30ish or so.

Oh.. hand woven Sam Browne belt.. like it

Not quite ‘home made’ but a mates son (still at school) and his two school mates started a yoof clothing brand about 18 months ago. They buy in the garments and do their own printing/embroidery.
They only sell off their web site and do all their marketing through Facebook and Twitter – its very impressive.
They turned over £32k in August alone… Seriously!

jesus!