A blog about crafts, art, selling both and other things that strike my fancy.
Selling Tips is sort of a mixed bag of posts about selling crafts online, selling crafts in person and general ideas about marketing and selling hand-made items. Many of the posts stem from things I see artists and crafters doing successfully and things that I think they are doing wrong or at least somewhat ineffectively.
My hope is to encourage people selling their handmade items to never forget that they are not competing with the Walmarts of the world. People do not buy handmade items because they are looking for bargains – they are looking for special things that aren’t being sold by the container ship-full. They value the time and skill it took to create the item and value the fact that hands rather than machines made it.
Underselling, under-pricing and other things crafters do to shoot themselves in the foot will be discussed as well as ideas on marketing their items in a world of Dollar Stores, Chinese imports and other lesser-quality items. More-so than any other part of Blog About Crafts, this section is one where I hope creative folks will come by and share their experiences to encourage others. It’s fine and good for me to say, “Don’t do this” or “Don’t do that” but it’s far more powerful to learn about someone who subscribes to an idea and has found it works.
A recent post on a painter’s blog got me thinking about how we define what is art and what is craft. He obviously felt that art was superior to craft and he bemoaned the insult of arts and crafts shows which delegate his booth to be near someone selling painted light bulbs or other functional items.
I would like to see the end of that discussion and start a new one that would benefit all people who are making and selling their arts and crafts.