This is a very long article but I did not want to leave anything out – so read on and keep going to the end.
Most of us weave because we enjoy it and did not start weaving with the idea of going into business with it. After weaving for awhile one begins to accumulate a lot of things they have woven and starts wondering what they are going to do with it all. There are just so many scarves, shawls, table runners, napkins, towels, etc. that we and our immediate family need. Then you start giving them as gifts but unless you have an ever growing extended family and group of friends, there are just so many things off your loom that they need or want. Of course, there are charities that welcome anything warm and would love for you to donate the scarves off your loom. All of this is a way to put what you have woven to use, but it does not bring in any money to put to buying more yarn – so that you can continue weaving. That is when you might start thinking about selling your weaving. This is when you start thinking about extending your hobby into a business – not a full time business, but a side business that can support your weaving habit. If this is not you – and never will be you, you can stop reading right here because the rest of this article is going to be my sharing my experience and tips on selling your weaving. I can well understand if you never want to sell what you weave. My good wife is like this. She is a very talented hand embroiderer and she does not sell the many art pieces that she has embroidered over the years. She says that if she got into selling it, it would no longer be fun – and I understand that too. But she has sold other craft she has made over the years and I have as well.
We went into the craft business as a sideline to make some money over 50 years ago. We have done local craft shows and sales, sold at galleries, sold at consignment shops, and sold through art exhibitions. Between us we have created art in many mediums. We have both made and sold dolls. She created a line of small, hand stitched teddy bears that she sold. She has made and sold baby quilts. I have worked in leather and sold the belts and leather accessories that I have made. I have worked in wood and particularly on a lathe and sold the many creations that have come out of my woodshop. While none of this could ever support us, it was a way for us to extend our hobbies to bring a very small amount of additional income in. None of this before I started this site, included weaving. The idea to sell weaving came a year or so later from when I got my rigid heddle loom.
There are many business requirements that are necessary to comply with in many states in the US and I am sure there are similar in other countries. I will go into these toward the end of this article but I will say here that if they are required where you reside they are NOT to be ignored.
So let’s get going with the basics of selling your weaving and we shall start with pricing what you weave. There are two types of prices – there is wholesale pricing and there is retail pricing. Wholesale pricing is what you would charge ANOTHER BUSINESS that wants to buy your weaving to sell in their shop. This lower price is given with the agreement for the business to buy your weaving in quantity. They are not buying one item. They are buying a minimum number of items that YOU set for them to buy at the wholesale price. That shop will then take the price you sold the item to them for and either double it or triple it. Doubling the price was common in years past but this has increased to tripling the price. Retail pricing to sell your weaving to the buying public would be higher than the price you sell your work for at wholesale. You are selling one piece. Your retail price might be twice or even three times your wholesale price. BUT many craftspeople set this whole concept aside and the price they set to sell their work to the public themselves is equivalent to the wholesale price plus the addition of the expenses of selling. This becomes a price somewhere in between an actual wholesale price and a retail price.
PRICING
YARN
SO – what do you do in setting your prices? First, take the cost of your yarn for the weave you want to sell. That cost includes the price you paid for the yarn including any sales tax (or VAT). (We will talk about paying sales tax in the business section of this article later.) The yarn cost is the base of your price, but just one of many factors to be included.
TIME
Next, figure out how much time it took to make your weave. This first includes warping your loom – start to finish from getting the yarn on the back beam and getting the yarn onto the front beam so that you can start to weave. To the warping time add how much time it took you to do the actual weaving. If you wove it straight through without stopping that is easy. If you wove it over the course of a few days a little at a time – figure out how many hours each of those days you actually wove. (The non-weaving time does not count.) Weaving time ends once you take the weave off the loom. Next add to the total time, the time you spent wet finishing - time waiting for the washing and drying to take place does not count, but putting it into the washer/dryer or hand washing and setting up to dry counts. Next, did you do anything with the fringe in this process - twist the fringe, finish the ends without fringe, any time you spent on doing this becomes part of the time it took to create the finished weave. Total all of this time and you have the time it took from start to finished item ready to sell.
IF the weaving only was to create the cloth to make a garment or bag or whatever, that needs sewing, etc., that has to be figured out all on its own and that is going to have a lot more steps that need to be calculated in for time and materials that go into the garment, etc. plus the additional time to create the finished item. Right here we are only pricing an item that is ready to sell coming only off your loom.
Next you have to determine what you want per hour for the time it took you to create the woven scarf, etc. This is up to you. Many states in the US and other countries have a minimum wage for an hour of work. This is where determining the price of what to sell your weave for gets tricky – and this is where most will make some compromises. For example – let’s say that the time start to finish is 9 hours (and that can be a lot more in reality – but just for this example – 9 hours) and minimum wage is $15 an hour which might be high but not too unrealistic) the amount of paid labor that went into your weave comes to $135 US – and this is without the cost of your yarn and more to come in determining a price. If you use $l0 an hour it is still $90. Let’s leave this as it is for now and continue to other factors that go into your price.
TALENT AND SKILL
Next comes putting a value to your talent and skills. This is something that is VERY important to many in the craft communities – and with weaving it is always something that needs to be taken into account and added into your price. Never underestimate your skills. This is not a time to be humble or modest. If your work is good enough to sell then there is talent and skill going into your work. And in the weaving community, underselling your work is not going to make you popular with other weavers. Within this you also need to factor in any special technique you used in your weave. A simple plain weave is different from weaving double heddle twill or a clasped weft design in the weave or a waffle weave. It takes your skill to a higher level in creating those weaves. That needs to be figured into the price of that item. I will have two scarves out for sale – same size, same priced yarn, but one is a plain weave and the other is waffle weave. The waffle weave scarf is priced higher. If asked why, the answer is that this special technique went into making the waffle weave scarf and I explain basically what that involved. It has always been to the buyer a satisfactory reply to this question. I cannot tell you what to add in for the value of your skills and talent – that is for your to decide – but don’t cheat yourself doing so.
EXPENSES
There are expenses in selling and they are determined by where you are going to be selling this item. If you are going to sell at a craft show or sale there is going to be a fee to become a seller at the show/sale. That fee should be divided over the prices of the items that you will be selling at that show. This is not easy to do in advance and will vary greatly from show to show. This means you will add this to your prices for each show – or decide a general amount to include in your price. It is easier if you are selling one item on a selling website such as Etsy which has a set fee to list your item and a percentage fee based on the selling price charged to you by the website when the item sells. Those can go into your selling price right up front. (This sounds more appealing but I will talk more about selling weaving on Etsy and other websites later on for you to decide what is the best venue for sales.) Another expense of selling is taking credit cards. Already you should be able to see that the final determined selling price of your weave is going to be high. If you want to sell at that price level don’t rely on the customer having that much cash in their pocket. Most expect to be able to take out a credit card and hand it to you – and I will share here the easy and least expensive way to do that. The fees are added to your selling price. I will go into the process of taking credit cards later in this article.
THE PRICE
Put all of this together and you have your price for your weave. Take a look at it and decide if it is fair to you. Then look at it as a customer who understands that handwoven is art to wear or art to display (even on a table in a home). Is it fair to the customer? If so, you have your price. Your prices need to be without any need to make any change in coins. Just move it up or down to the nearest whole bill amount.
As I said, the time factor in the price can be tricky. There is just so much that something should sell for – and I am sure some weavers who have been selling at top level craft shows will disagree with me about this – they sell at the type of shows that you apply for months to a year in advance, have to submit professional photos (often slides) for a panel of judges to put in a slide projector or a computer projector if they accept digital photos and flash on a wall screen for several seconds each and the panel decides if you get in or not and you are charged for this acceptance process without any agreement to accept you into the show and be accepted or rejected – with no refund of what you have paid them so far and once accepted into the show pay hundreds or MORE to participate in it –in advance.
There is a price point that exceeds some types of shows. These shows are generally the local community shows at a church, at a park, at a community center, at the local library. These are shows that with the prices we are likely to come up with including that $135 in your selling price for time reimbursement will result in your not going to make any sales at those shows. And these are the shows you are going to be able to find and afford to take a chance to do. This is where I make a big compromise in my prices based on dropping the time factor much lower than what it actually is. My prices are not low but I do not overload my prices by including all of the hours that went into my creating that item. Most of my items are high in price but I will weave some scarves that are not as wide and not as long as others and are plain weave with a lower price point – that I am still satisfied at what I will get in payment for that scarf. These are still prices well above what the Walmart, Target, and Kohl’s shoppers will expect to pay for a scarf – and there are a lot of those shoppers that show up at shows. I was doing a show and one woman who was buying a scarf – one of the higher priced ones and was not questioning the price at all, said to me – “How long did it take you to weave this?”. I smiled and said, “If I told you, you would know just how good a price you are paying for it.” She smiled and said – “That long!” She then handed me her credit card.
As you can see pricing handwoven is NOT easy. The prices for handwoven are a cut well above what you will find at a local community craft show where your prices will be compared to the local discount stores and customers will tell you so or you will hear them say it as they walk away how they can get the “same” thing at those stores much lower. Yes, they can but those are coming off a machine and not from a craft artist’s hands.
PICKING A CRAFT SHOW
In the Spring, summer and Fall there are often a lot of craft shows and sales being advertised either in a local newspaper or by signs where the shows will take place. These can be churches, community centers, local charitable organizations, libraries, parks, museums, and even assisted living centers. The shows will generally be affordable to do and convenient BUT will they bring in a buyer who will pay the prices you have set on your weaving. Too often, they will not. I am not saying that you have to look for one of those really expensive top level craft shows but you need to know about the area that a show is taking place in.
After having done too many craft shows that when we got to the show to do it, it was filled with vendors selling commercial items – unpacking the cartons of made in X import items and putting them out – in their commercial packaging on their tables and selling at very low prices. And despite this being a craft show, they were selling like crazy. That combined with buyers coming up to our display and saying – “Oh you made that?” surprised to see anything handmade, and then going to the next booth to buy from the commercial vendors led us to decide that we would not do a show that we did not know and have done before, and if a new show came around we would visit it and determine if we would do it the next year. Of course, if you are eager to get out and sell you likely won’t want to wait, but you are taking your chances as to making sales and competing with the re-sellers with commercial factory manufactured items. And sadly, at this type of show, the show organizers don’t care – as they have their vendor fees and if you don’t come back next year to be in the show, they can fill that space with someone else. Even shows that we have done where we had to go before the show and let the organizers see what we were going to sell at the show and for them to see that WE actually made it – started bringing in many commercial vendors with factory made items.
With weaving, I saw right away that I had to be in a show in an upscale community where there would be affluent buyers who know art to wear and what goes into handwoven, appreciates something unique, and not mass-produced, does not look at price tags because they can afford to buy what they like and not by how low it is priced. And lately, I am beginning to think that the higher an item is priced at a show located such as this – the more desirable it will be to buy. When we now pick shows to sell my weaving we go to the shows in those affluent communities and just as I thought – the buyers at these shows know what they are looking at and will buy – even buy in quantity for themselves and for gifts. I highly recommend looking for shows like this.
The other thing in picking a show is once the winter holidays are over wait until the Spring. But in the Spring and summer go to the show with warm weather items. House items or light weight and cool to wear items are what are going to sell in these seasons. No one wants to buy a nice warm scarf when it is 80 degrees F outside.
PREPARE FOR A SHOW
There are some expenses to selling that are put into the cost of doing business. You will need to put together a display for your weaving that is going to attract customers to come over and buy from you. You may or may not get a table included in the space you are given to sell in and may have to bring your own. Chairs are generally a bring your on your own. These are all business expenses that would not generally go into your price. Even your loom can be a business expense. Most, if not all, of these will be used at every show you do.
If you do outdoor shows, which are for the majority, in the Spring and Summer you may want to look into buying a popup canopy tent to set up your booth under to stay out of the sun. If you will be going out to shows in these seasons you will glad you did. Be sure it is one that can be easily weighted down with filled gallon bottles of water or bricks that you attach to the each leg or on grass or dirt can be securely staked to the ground. These tents are easily picked up in the wind like a sail on a boat and will send the tent flying high up and then crashing down. Make sure it is secure – and if a strong wind comes along get to one of the tent legs and hold on just in case the weights are not enough.
THINGS TO BRING AND DO AT A SHOW
One of the more important things to bring is a friend. It can be a long day and if you have the need to leave the booth to find a restroom you do not want to leave your booth alone – or ask the booth next to you to watch while you are gone. They have their own booth to watch and even if they agree, will only have half an eye on your booth and your inventory. You don’t want to come back and find some of it gone. Also two people working with customers at the same time means more sales.
Bring at least a hundred dollars in cash in mixed bills. If your prices are in whole bill amounts you need no coins. Bring this in a cash box that can be locked and can be hidden out of sight. Another reason for a friend to be there with you – both sets of eyes with an easy side glance to see the cash box is still there.
Bring a lunch from home. Food prices at most craft shows and sales are high - and you don’t want to have to go looking for lunch and spend half your sales income buying it.
Wear comfortable shoes and dress for the weather. If it is the winter and you have a coat, bring something to put your coat in – a large trash bag nicely holds coats and keeps them clean placed under your table on the floor or ground.
I bring the small rigid heddle loom I bought to weave on while selling at shows. I have a Kromski 10” Presto loom with stand just for this. My 32” Kromski Harp Forte takes up too much space in the limited space a show gives you to set up in and it would leave little room for my display which is the most important thing in the space. The 10” loom is just right. I have a small wood bench that I sit at and it is set up next to our table on one side and the racks with my scarves on the other side. I talk with the public as I weave. I explain what I am doing, I point out on my displays what I did to make certain items. And I explain that I have a larger of a similar loom at home to do the large pieces on display. This is a BIG attention grabber. After watching me and asking questions they go to the displays and buy.
Bring a mirror. Even a handheld mirror that you hold up from a few feet away lets your customer see what they look like with your scarf or shawl on.
The other very important thing to bring is a BIG SMILE. No matter what keep smiling and at some shows that is not easy. Try to ignore some of the dumb things people will say. We have heard some whoppers.
At the show do not bargain over prices. Your price is fair and the buyer either pays that price or you take the weave home to sell at the next show you do. Don’t be tempted.
At all times at the show, keep aware of everything that is going on around you. It is sad to say but there are shoplifters at craft shows just like there are at stores. Be aware of the little kid with the ice cream cone whose mommy is not paying any attention to him and he is about to grab one of the scarves off your display with chocolate ice cream covered hands. And worth saying again – watch your money box! More reasons not to do a show alone.
Do not leave the show early. Often buyers will walk around a show and wait until the show is almost over to come back and buy that item that they had to “think about” and have decided now to buy it. We were often the last to pack up at the end of the day and made a lot of sales at that time. But a word of caution – some craft show buyers will come back at the end of a show and offer you less money than your price with the story that you should sell it to them now so that you don’t have to take it home with you. Again – it will sell at a future show – don’t lower your price.
CREDIT CARDS
There is a company online called “Square” that provides a service for you to take credit cards in payment. They have very low fees and no commitment that you have to pay them a fee even if you don’t make any sales in a month. Credit card companies that work with stores and larger than single person businesses charge monthly fees even if you don’t make any sales. Square does not do this. You only pay them if you make a sale that uses a credit card. At this time (and this is always subject to change so I will provide a link to the Square website) the fees are an average of 3% of the selling price plus 10 to 15 cents. Signing up with them is free – they take nothing more from you other than these fees when your item sells with a credit card.
When you create your free account with them they will give you a coupon to be able to go to a local store that sells their credit card reader – a swipe model that sells for $10 and with the coupon it is FREE. This is plugged into your cell phone –the free card reader plugs into the earphone jack on your phone and communicates through your phone’s data to Square to process your sale with the Square app you install on your phone. When you create an account they will ask you for the details of a bank account to which they will deposit the money that you made in credit card sales minus the fees on each sale. They are very quick in doing this – one to two days. On their website when you go into your account you will have a full report of your sales and what you sold. To make taking credit cards easy while you are out making sales on their website on your account page you can pre-list every item you will have for a sale with the selling price and a place for an identifying item name, a photo of the item and a description if you want to put one on. When you make a sale you go to the app on your phone, click on the item you are about to sell, swipe the customers credit card and there is a place (if you want them to) for the customer to sign their name with their finger or a stylus you have in a box on the screen. That is it. If the customer wants a receipt emailed to them you ask them for an email address to enter into the sales screen.
If you use a more advanced square credit card reader that can take a chip card or a tap and pay card (or phone payment app) the fees on Square are lower. Square sells a credit card reader like this and it sells for about $50 US. It also includes the swipe reader and I believe that you can use the $10 coupon from Square when you start with them toward this reader to reduce the price. This is a much more secure card reader and it connects to your phone by Bluetooth. It has to be charged before use and it holds its charge for a long time. It is still charged at the end of a craft show having been used through the day. Make sure your phone is fully charged as well.
SQUARE WEBSITE - https://squareup.com/us/en
There are other companies’ websites that do the same thing as Square but we have found Square to be reliable, easy to contact, responsive, and very reasonable in cost.
SELLING FROM A WEBSITE
I am not going to talk about the different websites that this can be done on – most are not that good and I am not going to go into details. I will say that it has been my experience that handwoven has to be seen in person. No photo does it justice. Colors change depending on the monitor one is using to look at the photo from a website. Handwoven needs to be able to be touched. The yarn needs to be felt. The person has to be able to try it on. This will make sales. Looking at your weaving on a selling website with thousands of other sellers with weaving is a hard sell.
If you do decide to put your weaving on a website to sell - don’t include anything that has a copyrighted connection and state what that is. It is best to explain with examples. You make Harry Potter scarves with the “House” named designs or you make scarves with team colors on them and say in the title or description “Giants” scarves for the football team or Syltheren House scarf as examples. These are licensed and copyrighted names and designs. Without the name it is just a stripped scarf in certain colors – and that is OK. If a shopper sees it they can make their own conclusions of what these stripe colors mean. If on a website for sale with the name associations – you can be sued for copyright or license infringement or both.
SELLING ON CONSIGNMENT
This is a link to an article I wrote some time ago about selling on consignment. It was a good way to sell craft providing one is aware of the details in this article.
http://qbranchltd.blogspot.com/2008/03/selling-on-consignment.html
SELLING AT GALLERIES
Selling at a gallery involves a process set by the gallery to accept your work to be displayed and sold at the gallery. The gallery will have a set percentage which they will take on each sale. Usually you set the price that you want the item to sell at. Gallery sales are similar to consignment sales and you need to be sure that you and your work are protected. I have always seen selling at a gallery as an honor. Finding a gallery that will take woven items that are not art wall hangings may not be that easy.
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT GOING INTO BUSINESS
“I am not in business! I am just a home weaver who wants to sell some of my weaving!” Well, no – and this depends on what State in the US or country you live in. For most – unless you sell something to your friend, person to person or you have a garage sale (and even those have some restrictions in some places) if you sell you are a business. And businesses are regulated by local and national governments. Just about every state or country will have some website detailing the requirements to do business there. The first thing before anything else in this article, GO to that website and start reading.
A State will have a place online on their business website or in person at a local office to register the name you will do business under. You can just use your own name if you don’t want a unique business name. They will then assign you other identification data that you will need to have to be in business there.
Most States in the US – not all – have a state sales tax and in addition sales taxes for local counties. Some countries have a VAT (Value Added Tax) which is even more complicated. I will focus on the US for states that have a sales tax. I don’t know enough about the countries with a VAT – for that go to the correct website for your country. In states with a sales tax there will be a website for that Sales Tax Bureau or Department. You will need to apply to collect from buyers and submit to the sales tax department, sales tax in your State. They will give you a certificate of authority that declares this and it will have a sales tax ID number. There will be a schedule of when you are to submit a report of your sales and the sales tax you collected from your customers. This may be monthly or on another schedule as they direct. You are required to submit on this schedule even if you have made no sales. This all seems like a pain to go through but if you don’t you are breaking the law – and if found out, you can face serious penalties. You or an accountant can set all of this up for you and the accountant can also do the submissions for you. The money you collected in sales tax for that period has to be submitted with the report. Understand, that this money is not coming out of your pocket – you are collecting it from the buyer on behalf of the state when the buyer pays you for the item you sold. You are just the middleman sending that money then to the state. Some states allow you to include the sales tax in your price. There are some guidelines that must be followed if you do this. Also when you do business in some states you are required to have a copy or the original certificate from the sales tax department visible at your place of business – aka – your sales table at the craft show. Depending on your location – state or country – there may be specific items that have no sales tax on them or a lower percentage sales tax on them. In some state’s clothing has no sales tax and you would not collect sales tax for a scarf or a shawl, but if you sell a table runner you must collect sales tax for that. This depends on where you live and/or where you are selling. These clothing no tax items still have to be reported as sales when you submit your report to the sales tax agency – but there will be no tax money to submit for those. This is another thing you must find out from your state or country.
Some craft shows want to see your certificate before you are accepted to the show. Some don’t. In some states, Sales Tax Agents have been know to visit craft shows - even some obscure local craft shows and even on a Sunday, and look for certificates and proof that you are collecting sales tax. We have been at shows like that. At one show they were just giving warnings. At another show in the next state that were just visiting the show and not selling at, we watched these agents confiscating inventory and closing the vendors down who were out of compliance. An accountant shared with me that the state sales tax agencies can be more ruthless than the IRS.
If you sell on a site like Etsy they have you put the sales tax percentage that must be collected for your state on your shop’s account and when a sale is made to someone by you in your State they add on the sales tax and collect it for you to receive with your sale payment for you to submit. Currently there are states that want sales tax collected if you make an internet sale to someone in that state even if you are NOT in that state. This gets very complicated and Etsy will do all that work for you and submit to those states for you - otherwise you would have to be registered to collect sales tax in each of those states and that is not something you want to do.
On Square you can put into your account the percentage of sales tax you have to collect and they add it to your sale when someone buys something. This will be paid on the buyer’s credit card along with the item’s price.
Is there any upside to having to collect sales taxes on your sales? In some states if registered with state Sales Tax –not all – you are entitled to not pay sales tax on materials that will go into what you are selling. So if you buy yarn, you don’t pay sales taxes on the yarn – as it will be collected as part of the sales tax you charge when you make the sale to a buyer. Most stores have some process in place for you to not to pay sales tax with proof you are a business registered with State Sales Tax. There is usually a form that you fill out with the information from your certificate and give it to the store. With some stores you only have to do this once a year. Michael’s Crafts has it on their app and you set this up with them on their website. When you buy yarn in Michael's, you show the app to the cashier who scans a code on the phone screen and the sales tax is removed from what you pay for the yarn. Walmart does this in the store and gives you a card to present to the cashier when you buy something you are entitled to not pay tax on. Joann’s has a process in which it goes into their computer and comes up on the cash register when you buy yarn or whatever for your project that will be sold.
Of course, any sales your business makes is income and you have to include it in your income tax returns – Federal and State on the appropriate business return forms. You can do this yourself but it is VERY WISE TO HIRE AN ACCOUNTANT to do this for you and keep you out of trouble.
I am not a lawyer or an accountant. My wife is an accountant which is how I am so well aware of the information regarding taxes which I have shared.
SO after all of this do you still want to sell your weaving? While it is not as easy as you thought it would be - it is worth it. I love the feeling of someone not only admiring my work but also paying money to buy it. Anything worth doing is always going do have its complications but if you can make some money in the process it is worth it.
