I want to sell my handcrafted jewelry at craft shows. Any advice?
I make gemstone and wire jewelry. I would like to sell them at craft shows, but I’m having trouble on where to start. I have done a few small ones (under $25 fees) but I haven’t had more than a handful of sales. My product has improved since those attempts. Now I live in a big city area and I don’t know how to find out about craft shows in the area. Is there a resource crafters use to keep tabs on events happening in their area? Do you have any tips or suggestions on how to make my shows a success? (To see some of my product, please check my online gallery:
http://asukouenn.deviantart.com/gallery/#Jewelry .
I’m not trying to make sales at this time or promote myself, I am just looking for honest feedback and advice.) Thanks a lot.
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1. Check with your local craft shop, they should know of anything happening in the area.
2. Check at your local library, they may have a handle on more independent type shows.
Hello there,
Craft shows can be tricky. Some are just rotten shows. Lots of people, but no one buying. However, there are good shows. I have not done the circuit in a long time, so I am out of touch of schedules. I found arts and crafts shows were better than straight crafts shows for jewelry, especially if you are doing handcrafted jewelry with an artistic flair. At tpp,many crafts shows, cheap junk is all that sells. You need to taget the right crowd for your product. The arts and crafts shows draw a different crowd. I did a summer tour. Hit arts festivals along the coast of Michigan mostly. Harbor towns. Lots of nice festivals and good money. i did not do a winter tour, because I was in college at the time. Those that did, when south, either Florida or the southwest. Try searching on-line for arts festivals. A lot of good ones are juried. That means you need to work up a porfolio of photos displaying your most artistic works. Good photography is the key to getting in. Well that and good writing skills for the applications. However, I did nore non-juried shows than juried art shows. The problem with non-juried ones, is they tend to let everyone one in. So you are competing for sales with folks resaling cheap Asian made stuff.
Display is important. If your set up looks too hap hazard or too much like a garage sale, you won’t sell good jewelry. I had a few long camping tables. Had black velvet throws made for them. Got some old stage curtains to have the throws mad (a cheap way to get velvet tablecloths) I used the regular display trays for rings and bracelets. The kind that stack into the carrying case. Had black velvet inserts for them. For earrings, I made some stand up displays. Cut a piece of celutex siding into 2 x 4 sections. Mada an easel to stand them on. Covered them in black velvet. Worked great for earrings and inexpensive necklaces.
I and my partner always took some tools along so we could do some work at our set up. Just to show people we did our own work. Finding designs that sell is tricky. Just have to experiement with ideas. When you come up with something that seems to sell, you can expand it with variations. That tends to give a theme or central idea to tie your display together. I always carried a couple very showing big buck items for the center of the display. Every now and then those sold. Then I and to get to work and come up with a replacement.
I had a couple itmes that I always figured woudl pay the expenses for every show. For us, pinkie rings sold well. We sold simple sterling bands for $1 (silver was much cheaper then). We would sell a lot of those. We priced those in the same manner we did other stuff (percent markup of materials). Actually we were a little above our normal mark up at $1. They sold so well and we hated making them that we raised the price to $1.50. Then $2 and finally $5. We sold hundreds of them at each show. The pinkie rings sales would cover all our expenses for every show. Anything else we sold was our priofit. Later, I worked up an inexpensive earring design that sold almost as well as the pinie rings. Then we had two stables to rely on.
Once you start doing a few of the arts shows, you will get to meet and know other displaying artiists and can learn of other shows. There gets to be a lot of familar faces setting up at the art shows.
Don’t price your work as if it were junk. Don’t price it as if you were the most expensive jeweler in the country. Either extreme kills sales. Yes, pricing too low kills sales. People think it is junk and do not buy.
Be prepared to do a little trading. Other artists will be interested in your work and want to trade some of their work for it. Fine. you are going to have hand thrown mugs, paintings and yuu name it available for Christmas gifts! I liked to do those trades. The artists would wear our jewelry at the shows. Talk about our work if anyone complimented them on the jewelry. I thought is was good advertising.
If you want a follow up on anything, post more imformaton or shoot me a message (link in my profile)
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Later
I want to wish you the best of luck. I really like the style of your jewelry.
I’m a craft-show attendee. I use http://www.craftlister.com/ when I’m looking for future shows. The host also puts up quite a bit of advice for crafters. I won’t bore you by retyping it here – but go ahead and look to see what he suggests.
There’s a bunch of info on several pages of my site that deal with doing art/craft as a business, doing shows, venues, and making money in other ways with it (my whole site is primarily about polymer clay but most art/craft businesses would be similar in their needs, etc):
http://glassattic.com/polymer/business.htm
http://glassattic.com/polymer/shows.htm
and perhaps also:
http://glassattic.com/polymer/teaching.htm
http://glassattic.com/polymer/photography.htm (photographing work for sale & other reasons)
Good luck!