Crafting for Cash
by Joanne K. Hill

Struggling to make ends meet? Torn between an outside job and your family’s needs? Love to travel, but just can’t fit it into the budget? Try crafting for cash. Since time began men and women have used creativity to make and sell ingenuity.

Today, selling handmade craft items can support a hobby, finance a cross-country tour, or it can be a lucrative career. With high prices in the marketplace, more people are looking seriously at the craft business as a way to help support families.
Most craft businesses are homebred, cutting down overhead expenses and allowing for more family togetherness.

In addition to having a parent around, children of crafters have other advantages. They learn early how to work cooperatively and productively. Mathematics isn’t just a subject in school, it’s making change and showing a profit.

And the marketplace is more varied today. Today’s crafter has a wide array to sell through: there are shopping mall shows, fairs and festivals, retail and wholesale outlets, catalogs, interior decorators.

Some persons, like myself, have stopped making things to sell and have gone into associated lines, such as show promotion, instruction, pattern making, writing how-to books, being a sales representative for others, selling supplies, running retail shops specializing in handcrafted items. Like many others, our family has a tradition of crafting for cash.

From a great-grandmother who did alterations to our four daughters who have done almost everything from florals to making furniture, my family always used their creativity as something to fall back on during hard times.

When confined to bed for two months with baby number two on the way, I sat on the edge of the bed sewing potholders on a portable sewing machine beside the bed. Cash from the sale of them helped us through the post-Korean war recession.

How does one cash in on this expanding market?

For many it “just happens.”

“Oh, that’s lovely,” someone says. “Would you consider selling it?” Voila, you’re in business! Not quite.

It takes a lot of “someones” to pay for what you make in order to say you’re in business. Then you must show a profit at least 2 years out of every 5 or Uncle Sam comes knocking on your door to say you are only a hobbyist, making your expenses nondeductible. He’s right. If you can’t claim some profit in a 5-year period, you are treating your business like a hobby.

To be profitable, crafting takes business thinking and planning. Developing a good business sense begins by getting rid of the “starving artist” concept and focusing on the basics of good marketing.

We need only to look around us to realize that anything can be sold. (Some readers may remember the pet rock craze.) It’s a matter of to whom, when, where and for how much.

Most crafters start through shows. But finding the right promoter and the best marketplace in the most lucrative area is no small feat. It takes research, planning, organizing and networking. And that “how much” shouldn't be guessed at.

Surprisingly few crafters know what their profit margin is (of if they even have one). Their “guess-timates” for selling prices can (and often do) cost them money.

Please remember this: The basic formula is: costs (both supplies and labor) plus a margin of profit equals minimum selling price.

Smart crafters don’t let their businesses start on a whim and bounce along from crisis to crisis. They begin with a personal inventory of their own business savvy and continues with good business sense.

Before starting Crafter’s Link, a marketing newsletter, I once published, I reviewed past personal experience. Through the development of a community crisis intervention service, I’d gained skills in organization, planning, promotion, networking, management and financing. Added to this was some bookkeeping and secretarial skills developed through a variety of jobs and helping in my husband’s business. Looking at my skills from a business viewpoint, I could see the strength and weaknesses and proceed accordingly.

Doing what you like to do best and getting paid for it is pure happiness. Crafting for cash can do that for you too.