best home decorating ideas websites

when we first started making things andselling them we had no clue what we were doing and now we're selling wholesale to west elm which iscrazy so we're gonna take you guys along with us and share what we learned alongthe way this is our incomplete guide to theselling stuff you make this is for anyone who's curious about howhandmade products are sold at craft fairs online or on a bigger scale as we go through all these points we'reactually working on a west elm order that has to be out soon so we're gonna multitask and finish up these texas's so if you're- hahaha!

so if you're watching this you might already have some ideas of what you want to sell but just in case we'll go over a few tips a goodplace to start is with yourself what do you like around your house or you knowjust in case i end up with a bunch of extra product what do you not mindhaving around your house it's actually something we thought about another thingwe did was some online research and find out what's trending and figure out whatwe thought other people would like too and get inspired by the good and baddesigns out there we also thought about the manufacturing side of things whatcan you do in larger batches we started with 3d printing specifically with thisdeer head this one we also did simple

woodworking projects concrete projectsthat are made in a mold so you can batch them in the mold and in generalthings that scale well cuz hopefully you start selling a little and then yousell a lot more and you have to be ready for that increase one last thing youshould consider when choosing something to sell is if it's worth your timefigure out the general price that the item you're making goes for and see ifthat price matches up with what you're willing to sell it for and if it doesn'tgreat move on if it does you're good to go speaking of pricing we got it from one of the houston stores,from san antonio and from austin so we

have a lot of stuff make now we're gonna talk about priceprobably can't read this so price is kind of the price of the trickiest partit was for us so what we did was work backwards for our pop-up shops in westelm we talked to the folks in charge found out what was a good price point toaim for and tried to find something that we can make within that price point ifyou want to sell on etsy you could do research and see what price point sellson etsy etc then calculate the time and materials needed to actually make yourproduct and make sure that you can profitably sell it at that price pointand lastly keep in mind if you want to

sell at wholesale companies are oftengoing to take about half of your price so you'll only make half the profit onthose we actually are local vendors we're delivering our product there's a few different places you cansell stuff when is the internet mm-hmm so there's etsy which is great becauseit's a known platform people trust it and there's a good audience that mightsearch for you but also it's- and it makes things really easy yeah it makes it things easybut there's a lot of people on there and if you direct someone to your etsy pageoh i like this but this one's about the same price and you know they can alsoget lost if it's your own site then you

have them but my but it might be hardfor them to find you. something that applies to both etsy or your own onlinestore is you know it's easy to reach a wider audience than you might in personbut the downside is you have to deal with shipping which can be a pain easieretsy but still kind of a pain.there's also in porson- haha in porpoise there's also in-person thingslike craft fairs or the pop-up shops to do it at west elm. and those are greatbecause you can talk to people it's like a free focus group yeah and it's notjust talking the focus group is if they're buying or not yeah exactly it'sa good test for your prices yeah so

that's really great but the downside isthere's a lot of logistics you have to deal with we'll talk about those more later andalso it can be a really slow day sometimes it's awesome sometimes it'sreally slow it just takes up a lot more of your time and lastly there'swholesale which is really exciting you've made it people are buying yourstuff in bulk the downside is it's usually half the profit so that's wherethe scale that we talked about earlier comes into play if you can batch thingsout and scale then as you scale the price per item goes down but one coolthing is it's usually regular orders and bigger orders so even if you're makingless per item you still may be making

more overall than you would if you onlydid craft fairs for example it's hard to sell stuff if people don'tknow that you're selling stuff so in order to sell you're gonna have to dosome promoting and having an audience is key to that you have to be very activeon socials. start up a facebook and instagram all of that we actuallystarted an instagram just for evan and katelyn and if you scroll all the wayback its cat pictures and products yeah before youtube - yeah and also if you're doing an event like a crafts fair anything push it out on all your socials make afacebook event for it be that annoying person that like tells everyone aroundthem what you got going on yeah only

just be slightly annoying be thatslightly annoying person. is there a san antonio box i can grab yeah you're cute so once you have all of that figured outthere's a bunch of logistics that you also have to figure out one is packagingand shipping what are people gonna receive your product sent is it gonna beboxes is it gonna be bags are you gonna brand them all these things take upextra time and money but we think it looks pretty cool yeah and it makes youlook really professional yeah another thing you're gonna have to deal with are taxes which we're not gonna get into too much just be aware that there's federalincome tax and some states have a state

sales tax as well so just look into itonce you figure out taxes though it's not too hard it's just the figuring themout that's hard haha and then there's a lot of logistics thatare specific to craft fairs so things like signage for your boothwe did an about us sign we did a little business card display pricing display abig chalkboard a frame so again all of this is optional but it makes your shoplook a lot more professional you also need a credit card swiper so that youcan get paid we use paypal here there's also square and they're super easy ipaid myself one business card lastly there's just little things to rememberlike allow for enough set-up time bring

things like duct tape which you willalways need drinks because you're gonna be standing around for like six hoursyou know extra tape scissors we have a full list of all the things we'drecommend on our blog so we'll link to that below and i think that's it i thinkthat's it yeah so as you can see there's a lot thatgoes into it literally a lot but you can totally do it and it's really fun and ihope that you enjoyed this video i know this is a little bit of anon-traditional video for us not having a build in it but if you have anyquestions let us know and we should have a build video or something else coolcoming away soon thank you

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: