How to prepare for a successful year making handcrafted goods.
2023 will soon be here and with it, some new opportunities for promoting and selling your handcrafted goods. The New Year is often characterised by people looking for ways to keep themselves healthy from both a physical and mental perspective, and hand-crafted items can help give people a New Year pick me up.
New Year is a good time to look at how your business has performed over the last year and to ensure that you have all the policies in place that you need for the forthcoming year. Taking a look at ‘craft insurance near me’ will ensure that you have the right policy in place to cover you and your products and also help ensure that your stock is covered in transit and to attend fetes and fayres. In order to get the year off to a swinging start there are a number of ways that you can prepare for what could be your most successful year yet.
Analysing
Take some time over the Christmas break to look at what items have been your most successful over the last year and to look at those ones that perhaps have not sold as well. This will allow you to see which handcrafted items you might want to focus on in 2023.
As a part of your analysis, you should also look at what items help make you the most money. These could be the items that give you the best profit margin. Your analysis will give you an insight into the types of products that could sell well for you again. It will enable you to start the year off on an exciting path.
Another form of analysis is to look at how well your craft items sell each month. This will give you an indication of any periods of the year where you might have a rush in sales or those periods of time where your sales may dip.
Planning
Once you know which products sell well for you and you have had a chance to look at those that might not be as profitable, you can set about planning your creations for the year. If you have in person events that you attend, you should plan this into your diary so that you can ensure that you have enough stock created for you to sell. You should also search for ‘craft insurance near me’ to ensure that you have the right cover in place to attend these craft fayres and fetes.
Your planning should also include looking at the best places to purchase your materials from. If you have a dedicated supplier, you may want to check whether there are going to be any price increases so that you can factor these into your budgeting and your sales forecasting.
After finding out whether you have any periods throughout the year where your sales increase or decrease, you can plan to ensure that you have enough stock in place or work on ways in which you can try to increase your sales.
If your products have a seasonal feel to them it is important that you plan to create and market these in time for the season to begin, This can mean creating Easter items at the start of the year and Christmas gifts around September time.
Marketing
The Christmas break is a good time to look at new ways in which you can market your business or to take a look at the effectiveness of the current methods that you are using. Once you have an in-person event planned and your product range designed, you will be able to look at some of the various marketing methods that could help you.
Social media has become incredibly popular with the handcrafting community and there is lots of content that you can create very quickly and easily. People like to see how items are made and you can produce some short snippet videos that can entice people to buy your products.
Other marketing methods that you might want to consider include printed items such as flyers and leaflets and also adverts in local newspapers and magazines.
Expenses
It is always a good idea to take a look at what your regular expenses are and to spend some time forecasting what these might be for the forthcoming year. This will help you with deciding whether you need to increase your prices or whether you need to look for new suppliers. Make sure to search ‘craft insurance near me’ to check out what your premiums might be and to ensure that you have your insurance in place for the year.
Have fun and be creative One of the many reasons that people set up handcrafting businesses is the joy and creativity that it brings. It is important that whilst you may set yourself some