Handmade Business Basics: No.1 - Your Product

OK, so you've made a few pieces for friends and family and, guess what, they love them. Your product feedback is overwhelmingly positive. People say you've got talent. So, with your obvious skill and these popular designs, you've got the semblings of a business, right?

Er, well no actually. I'll let you in on a secret - your family and friends don't buy because your products are great (no matter what they say!). Customers from your social network are 'soft targets'. They have other reasons to buy from you. They know you from Adam and are emotionally attached to you in some way. In the real world folks will not and are not. Look at it this way, you've invested probably between hundreds and thousands of hours making those sales. Why? Because, you've spent a long time building what sales people call a rapport. So, your friends have extra reasons to buy from you, other than that your jewellery/ craft is fantastic. In fact, they'll be looking for reasons to buy. Some will even feel obliged to buy something.

To stand a chance at this business, you need to get cold customers to love your handmade product. So, let's look at product as the first element of what marketing folks call the four p's - product, price, place, promotion.

Your handcrafted product is the first ingredient in your offer. It's no more or less important than the other three already mentioned. And, actually, you don't have to start with product. Plenty of businesses have been engineered the other way around, starting with price for example and designing the product, promotion and distribution around meeting a price positioning. Low cost airline, EasyJet is a good example of this approach. For them, price is everything, so the product (no frills air travel), promotion (mainly online and through 'free' PR) and distribution (direct internet sales) have all been designed to support low prices. It might be logical for you to do the same.

When thinking about your business, you need to understand how your product is going to pay. Are you going to produce a relatively high or low volume? Do you want to spend hours (or days) designing and creating one-off pieces that then sell for a substantial amount at a high profit margin? Alternatively, do you see yourself spending a good proportion of your time making fairly simple designs over and over again? Are you always going to be doing all the making? Will all your jewellery have been crafted by the designer him or herself?

These are important decisions. Get it wrong and you could go from a job you hate to a business you hate. What's going to reward you - the creative craft or the thrill of running your own business? That's why I started with product, because how you want to spend your time is going to have a big impact upon what you make / where you pitch yourself. There's no point drawing up a business plan that adds up, but that you're going to hate after month three.

OK, so you're starting to think about how you see yourself working. What your days will be like. Trouble is, you'll need customers to pay for this lifestyle. What you need to do now, is get investigating. Whether you've decided on high end one-off pieces or 'mass-market' appeal, you need a killer product. Joining the assembled ranks of all those handmakers already trying to make a go of it with a 'me too' product, will make success an uphill battle. What you need is a gap.

You really can't leave this to chance. Don't set out with the idea that just maybe people will like your designs better than other designers, so you'll be successful while they struggle. For a starters, get this wrong and customers may never see your product. Retailers don't want more of the same. We get a constant trickle of requests from handmakers at pressies' and the vast majority don't excite us and don't get in the catalogue. While editors want to write about different, exciting products. They won't give editorial space to more of the same. If you can't get into retail and can't drum up PR, then you're going to need very deep pockets for advertising!

So where do you start? Well, people buy products. They buy them for themselves and as gifts for others. Instead of thinking about the product and how it could be different, why not start thinking about people. Think about when jewellery is bought. Who buys it for whom. When people buy it for themselves. What people are trying to achieve with their purchases in all these instances. You could draw a big spider diagram. Just lots of bubbles (facts or ideas) connected with lines to show links or commonality. Don't try to solve this problem by sitting down and thinking really hard. Dump the data out of your head first. Then go and investigate the gaps. Get more information down. Eventually, gaps, ideas, potential opportunities will start to appear.

You are looking for a niche. A corner of the market that's small enough for you to make an impression within, given your modest resources. Yet, that is large enough and profitable enough to sustain your business. In short, you're looking for a small, but hospitable pond to be a big fish in.

To be genuinely worthwhile, your niche needs to be identifiable and 'targetable'. There's no point defining a part of the market that can only be reached through mass media and mass distribution. Because, you can't compete in that promotional arena and will struggle to get into the required retailers. The people in your niche must be reachable through specialist media or websites and in niche retail.

Let's look at bridal jewellery as an example. You could niche this down to 'bridal jewellery for Hindu weddings'. Niche promotion is available - Asian lifestyle magazines, bridal magazines themselves and then there are, of course, bridal shops in towns with a large Hindu population or specialist Asian bridal stores. The point is, you've got media and distribution already serving your target customers.

Once you've got some niche ideas, then all you need to do is work out how you are going to be different in your niche. Chances are you are not first in. But, can you sub-divide again? Is any one catering from the growing wealth of Asian families and producing high end jewellery for Hindu weddings, for example? Niche and then niche again.

By now I would hope to have wheted your appetite. Got you thinking about the market and trying to think about specifics. Remember that there is no 'market' as such, only lots of individuals who can be grouped by wants and different factors like geographic location, ethnicity, tastes, attitudes, the magazines they read or their hobbies. Ultimately, we are all a niche of one!

You may be thinking, all this post is leading to is more questions but, actually, that's the point really. To solve your problem of what to make and for whom, you need to keep questioning the current situation, finding out more and then questionning that. Eventually, you will hit upon an opportunity, but it's not an easy process. Rest assured, however, it has a far high chance of success than waiting for the idea to pop into your head one day! I could go on some more. Outline some popular marketing tools. But, to be honest, what you need to do now is spend time thinking about those niches. You don't need theory, just plenty of deep thought and a little research to flesh it out. After all, what you sell is kind of important, but no more important than the other 'Ps' - price, place, promotion - so next week I'll tackle another. Until then, thinking caps on!