The Boss of You

Novem­ber and Decem­ber are ban­ner months for those of us who admire the hand­i­work of cre­ative, inde­pen­dent crafts­peo­ple, because these are the months when craft fairs (and other oppor­tu­ni­ties to buy direct from artists) abound. The past three week­ends have found me at the Cir­cle Craft Christ­mas Fair, Fab Fair at Her­itage Hall, and of course the inc­com­pa­ra­ble East Side Cul­ture Crawl, which is less a craft fair and more of a mas­sive open-studio week­end. Oh, and I snuck over to the Abbott Street Stu­dio sale Thurs­day evening, where I spot­ted a few of the same exhibitors I’d seen elsewhere.

Every year, I’m excited to find the best of indie, cre­ative, and mostly women-run busi­nesses col­lide with the one ele­ment of mall cul­ture that I like, which is the con­ve­nience fac­tor of a sin­gle loca­tion. But I’m also intrigued by the busi­ness ques­tions that each cre­atrix needs to eval­u­ate when she heads into craft fair season:

• What’s the entry fee for each craft fair?
• At my price point, how much do I need to sell to break even? To turn a profit?
• What are the other ven­dors charg­ing for com­pa­ra­ble prod­ucts? Can I com­pete, or do I need to?
• What’s the aver­age price point for this par­tic­u­lar craft fair? Is there another fair that’s a bet­ter match for my price range?
• What is my time worth — both the time I put into each piece I’m sell­ing, and my time to sit at a table and sell to the public?
• After a full week of mak­ing beau­ti­ful things, how much energy do I have to spend a week­end mak­ing sales? Do I have any friends or fam­ily I can rope in (per­haps as volunteers)?
• And on a more per­sonal level, how can I steel myself to watch peo­ple pass by my booth with no sign of inter­est — or worse yet, expres­sions of dislike?

I spoke to some of the ven­dors I met about these issues, but didn’t want to take up too much of their time when they had cus­tomers milling about, but I’m curi­ous to hear from crafters about their expe­ri­ences, pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive (and mixed) with craft fairs.

Although many of the women I know who sell at craft fairs have years of expe­ri­ence, and have deter­mined what works best for them, there’s still a bit of guess­work and gam­bling that goes into their craft-fair sea­son plan­ning. At worst, they stand to lose money, but the poten­tial gains — both finan­cial and markeitng-wise — can out­weigh the poten­tial losses.

One thing that amazes me, year after year, is that so many mem­bers of the pub­lic seem to attend craft fairs as bargain-hunters. I mean, sure, there are always new­bies who under­price their goods, whether out of igno­rance or in hope of gen­er­at­ing good word-of-mouth. But your aver­age local arti­san can­not gen­er­ally afford to com­pete, price-wise, with large chain stores or other sources of cheap pot­tery, jew­elry, hand­bags, belts, or what­not. They may have lower over­heaad, with no store­front or sales­peo­ple to worry about, but local labour, no mat­ter how low the over­head, costs more than import­ing from Asia. Some peo­ple just don’t seem to get that, and I’ve seen some­one balk at a $50 pric­etag on a neck­lace, say­ing, “I just can’t spend more than $30 on a neck­lace.” I mean, if you’re on a bud­get, far be it from me to crit­i­cize, but maybe you just can’t afford to be buy­ing jew­elry at all in that case.

I con­fess that I have the oppo­site prob­lem. As a small busi­ness owner myself, I’m often swayed in the other direc­tion, spend­ing a lit­tle more than I’d hoped because I know what a strug­gle it is to charge what you’re worth, and I know these gifted crafts­peo­ple are often just scrap­ing by. Of course I’m equally influ­enced by the sheer gor­geous­ness of the stuff!

I’ve included pho­tos here from two of the ceramic artists whose work I was par­tic­u­larly drawn to this year: Gailan Ngan (top photo in this post) and Junichi Tanaka (the bowl just above this para­graph). Also in the ceram­ics field, although slightly dif­fer­ent in focus, is Jasna Sokolovic, whose 3D wall­pa­per (photo #2) is sim­ply stun­ning. (She’s also got beau­ti­ful jew­elry, acces­sories for peo­ple and homes, and wall art.) And the ear­rings (photo #3) are my favourite, every­day, go-with-everything ear­rings, by Refine, a local jew­elry design company.

In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, I’ll let you know that Refine’s a solo oper­a­tion, and its owner, Jackie, is a friend and neigh­bour. But isn’t that kind of the point? For me, any­way, own­ing beau­ti­ful things cre­ated by peo­ple I know and love is the high­est form of shop­ping — it ele­vates it to an exchange of trea­sures, and whether I’m buy­ing for myself or oth­ers, I feel won­der­ful know­ing that I’m sup­port­ing the work of local women and men who are mak­ing the world beau­ti­ful, one hand-made item at a time.