More and more people are looking to be their own boss to find a sense of fulfilment, have some fun and earn money doing what they love. You can turn your little craft hobby into a home-based business venture.
You’re either a craft-type person and enjoy making things with your hands or not. In fact, some of my friends enjoy making home-made jewellery as a hobby and then go to local craft fairs to see if they can sell it. They also sell it to friends and family and give it away as birthday or Christmas presents.
Turn Your Jewellery Making Hobby Into A Home Business Sideline
Some of my friends only do this purely as a hobby. They both work full-time and any profit they receive from selling their jewellery goes straight back into buying more beads etc. to make more jewellery.
But you can take it a step further if you really want to. You can turn your little craft hobby into a home-based business venture. It could start out as a little ‘side-line’ and eventually turn into a full-time business, if this is what you want.
Although there are hundreds of women creating and selling jewellery (making the competition quite fierce), there is still always room for new people getting in on the act. If fact, this goes to prove that there is always a huge market out there for people wanting to buy hand-crafted jewellery – so why can’t it be yours?
Learn How To Make Handmade Jewellery
If you know how to make jewellery already, then you can skip this section. However, for those of you who don’t and would love to learn then your best bet is to get into this Jewellery Making guides.
- Jewellery Making: The Ultimate, Epic Guide (PART-1)
- Jewellery Making: The Ultimate, Epic Guide (PART-2)
- Jewellery Making: The Ultimate, Epic Guide (PART-3)
- Jewellery Making: The Ultimate, Epic Guide (PART-4)
How to determine prices
This is probably the number one question that I hear from anyone who sets up at a craft show, flea market or fine craft gallery. You need to cover your costs for materials, your time, your overhead (which includes things like marketing, utilities if you have a studio, and office supplies), but you don’t want to end up charging six digits for a single bracelet.
While there are no hard and fast rules for pricing your beadwork, the general rule of thumb is to calculate your materials costs, plus anywhere from 25–40 percent profit on materials; and a fee for your time. I beg people, PLEASE charge a fee for your time! it's important to recognise that the time you spent working to create inventory for your jewellery business is valuable.
Selling At Craft Fairs
One of the most traditional ways to sell your hand-crafted jewellery is at craft fairs. Basically, you pay a fee to the organisers to allow you to take a stall to sell all your handmade jewellery and other products. Just make sure that the craft fair is well advertised and will be well attended,you don’t want to pay a fee, go to a lot of trouble travelling and setting up your stall to not sell anything because there are very few customers.
Jewellery Parties
Another fantastic way to sell more jewellery is through organised jewellery parties. Once you have invited your friends and family to your own jewellery party, ask your friends and family to throw one too. You can then offer them free jewellery or a percentage of the takings as a way of saying thank you for being the host.
Selling Online Through Specialty Handmade Sites
A more increasingly popular way of selling jewellery is via the Internet. You can sell through e-commerce platforms but you may find yourself up against a price-war where you will be forced to sell your jewellery cheaper than what you wish in order to compete.
An alternative way is to sell though existing, well-established websites. These very handy sites allow you to set-up your own Online jewellery shop within the site. This is ideal if you don’t want the hassle of setting up your own website and these sites already have a stream of visitors coming to it anyway. They will charge you a small fee for this service.
Creating Your Own Website
If you want to go down the route of starting your own jewellery website, then you need to buy a domain name and rent hosting from a hosting company. If you want to do this and don’t know how to build a website is to use website builders.
What you must realise when you have your own website is that you will need to do a lot of marketing (Internet marketing) to get visitors to your site. You will need thousands of visitors per month to see any sales and rewards for your hard work. Internet marketing is a very large subject in itself, so this is something extra you will have to learn.
