A former neighbor owned his own business, and I always remember what he said about offering sales: DO NOT DO IT. If people know sales come and go, they’re more likely to wait around for one to pop up.

That being said … People like free shipping. Like, holy, god, no one wants to pay for shipping. Especially when an item is priced correctly, I think that kind of deal can certainly have a positive effect on sales. It’s less when I see a coupon and more when I see a pair of $3 handmade earrings that I want to bang my head against the wall. Value yourself, people!

I agree completely! I recently wrote my own blog post on why I don’t offer sales and pointed out that I would have to mark my product up to be able to offer a discount……..instead I offer a reasonably priced product every day. I’m not a big box store that uses cheap labor to produce mass products, I’m an artisan who makes my products one at a time and stands behind them.

I wish I could truly value my time. I am a hand embroiderer and there’s just no possible way that my things would sell. It takes me roughly one day (5-9 hours) and around $2-$3 in materials for one hand sewn dishtowel. I charge about $8 per towel (less if they’re in a set of 7) and that’s what I can get. Even if I double the price it would never come close to paying me for my time. Alas, it’s a labor of love.

I have the same problem with knitted items. If I truely costed my items by the labor hour, only people with waaaay to much spare change could buy them I like the idea of my products being acceptable to all different kinds of people, hence, my time is basically free.

THANK YOU FOR THIS POST. I’m the director of Market Day, a monthly indie craft event in Iowa. I’m concerned about these startups who saw stuff like Groupon work. I very much feel like they are cashing in on a hot trend — and aren’t concerned about making a sustainable market. These guys are WAY less concerned with creating a long-term business than they are with getting Startup Cred and ideally creating something that a bigger fish wants to buy.

Some of them think they have everybody’s best interests at heart, but you can’t dive into an industry you know NOTHING ABOUT and convince me that you’ll revolutionize it.

This pains me so much to see — your time is not free! I know knitters and crocheters are underrepresented in most craft fairs, simply because the work is so time-intensive that it becomes prohibitively expensive. But I think if you’re creating something beautiful that literally takes hours or days to make, you need to set your prices accordingly and tell people who balk at the price exactly what goes into making one of your pieces.

@kikimama — Are you running a charity? I wouldn’t sell your hand-embroidered towels for less than $40 each, based on the time you say is involved. I’m really curious to see what they look like now!

I like your thinking Grace! With that in mind, I have some very nice things I would love to sell you for a “reasonable” price Always like to make a new customer!
PS – like the blog

Hello everyone,

I’m a buyer at QuiteUnique.com so obviously this comment is a bit biased. We do a few things differently then the “groupon” type websites.

1. We typically only ask for a 30% discount off wholesale.
2. We buy the product up front, bring it into our warehouse and handle all fulfillment.
3. We highlight your brand/product to a large group of your potential customers, many have never heard of Etsy.
4. We encourage all our vendors to include marketing material in their packaging that we ship directly to the customer.

We don’t offer crazy deals like groupon or other 50% off sites because we believe the handmade aesthetic and the story of each crafter creates enough intrinsic value.

Very interesting post! You make an excellent point about customers being used to coupons and balking at ever having to pay full price.

That said, I offer coupons to customers who’ve been really great or who’ve touched me in some way (like a woman who sent my flowers to her mother as a gift — I have a soft spot for moms

But just offering coupons for the sake of increasing your sales is a dangerous precedent to set. Crafters DO tend to under-value their time, especially if you aren’t taking into account how much time it takes to market, take photos, etc.

I’ll be thinking twice about coupons in the future — thanks for taking the time to write this! Really helpful!

A race to the bottom (price-wise) benefits no one! People who are interested in buying handmade knitted and embroidered items aren’t comparing the prices to the similar items at Walmart. I like to think of it as having confidence in your items (which both of you seem like you do!) and telling the story of how they’re made. People will pay for (and VALUE) an item with a good story that is lovingly made!

Great post Grace. I agree that many craftspeople and artists undervalue their work. I’m always amazed to hear people admit that they don’t have an hourly labor rate which they build into their pricing formulas.

When I first started selling jewelry a good friend of mine (and Business major from UC Santa Barbara) made the remark that “labor, overhead, and a reasonable markup are what differentiates a business from a hobby”.

Oh yeah — I don’t think a maker should *never* offer coupons, discounts or freebies, but you can’t do it willy nilly. I’m a big fan of giving repeat customers little thank you gifts.

I’m not running a charity-haha. I’m actually planning on joining an arts co-op in my small city. My towels are awesome but not out of this world. It’s just that hand embroidery (a dying art in my opinion due to machines, etc…) is extremely time intensive even for relatively simple patterns. I buy iron on pattern available at Hobby Lobby, Sublime Stitching, and ColonialPatterns.com. I buy my flour sack towels in bulk and my floss from auctions and ebay and sometimes retail. There is NO WAY anyone would ever pay $40.00 for one towel when they can buy an entire set on etsy for as little as $28.00. However, those maybe machine embroidery-I can’t discern from the pictures.

That’s a great way of looking at it. I think some people are afraid of seeming greedy if they say “I deserve $20 an hour,” but you know what you’d demand from an employer — why balk at paying yourself the same?

Re. We typically only ask for a 30% discount off wholesale.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but this sounds like buying product for 20% of the retail price [or, 80% off]. Is that correct? If so, it sounds insane to me. I’ve never offered that level of discount to anyone.

We Do the following:

If a product retails for $20, we would like to sell it for $14 and buy somewhere below that depending on the item. We’ve found that Etsy sellers that price their products properly still make money working with us (feel free to contact anyone that has been on our site, I’m sure they only have good things to day). The vendors also get publicity most have received some form of follow-up orders from repeat customers.

Hi! I want to encourge Kikimama to think about the reasons why someone *would* buy her embroidered tea towels at $40 instead of a set priced at $28. Here are some examples:

-Really unique and clever design/style/craftsmanship that cannot be duplicated

-Maybe the buyer wants to support an artist that lives in their town/state

-Maybe the tea towels come packaged in a way that makes them the perfect gift

-Maybe the story behind the artist or the design really hits home with the buyer, making them want to invest in this artist.

I think the reason why so many people are hanging out on Etsy (and, lets say a site like Kickstarter) is because they are truly interested in supporting an artist with a vision that speaks to them. And that is invaluable!

I agree with most of this, but don’t think the Etsy coupon code is the same thing as “value sites”. The coupon codes allow me to do something special for my loyal customers and also gives me a way to smooth things over when I make a mistake. As a self-employed crafter, my customer service is just as important as the products I make.

That being said, this article is great and we need to value our work for our livelihood the greater good of the handmade marketplace!

great article, grace. it seems like among some people there is an attitude that b/c you enjoy crafting, that should be enough payment for your time… when really, not valueing yourself enough is (imho) the quickest way to burn out.

but my designs aren’t really unique. I mean they just aren’t. And I can tell people all day long that my time is worth X amount of dollars but if I can’t actually sell anything then it’s really not. I guess we just have different ideas about what my towels are worth. For me, they’re functional pieces, meant to be used and so ultimately I want to make them available to people to who want to use them and can afford them. I don’t want to make them available only to people who have the disposable income to afford a $40 dishtowel.

This is such a great post. I’ve given out a handful of discount codes in the past and haven’t really had much success with them, so this makes me feel better about avoiding discounts all together.

Thanks for the straight talk – I linked to this post in my Weekend Links roundup today!

I think what daniellexo is saying is that you should come up with a way to make your dishtowels truly unique. Perhaps offering custom monograms would be a better tactic!

BTW — I don’t want to freak you out, but many embroidery pattern makers don’t allow embroiderers to sell items made with their patterns.

That is so true Grace! Way to put things into perspective

I completely agree that it does nobody in the handmade marketplace any good when hard work and quality craftsmanship is undervalued. But, from a marketing standpoint (my day job), there’s definitely value to the buzz (word of mouth and otherwise) that comes from discounts and deals. The more people who have your goods in their homes, the more friends-of-buyers who see your amazing handiwork and ask where it’s from. Plus, if you’re already pricing your items for possible wholesale opportunities, you do have a little wiggle room built in. But, is it worth using that wiggle room to up your visibility and sales, or will lowering your prices in the short-term significantly undervalue your brand in the future? Additionally, if more people buy handmade because a discount firm alerts them to items, will they be more likely to remember that good experience and buy handmade again, even without a discount? I don’t know. Personally, I don’t want to go the discount route, but I do understand why others might.

Kikimama – I don’t want anyone to tell you how to do the craft you enjoy. If you want to keep plugging away at what you do, even if its not considered unique enough by certain people, go for it. Its your time and your interest. Its nice to think that people would spend $40 on a towel, but most won’t and you should be able to keep on doing what you like if you are satisfied with what you are getting out of it. I love that you want to make your items accessable to people who are not privaledged enough to be able to spend $40 on one dish towel.

I have confidence in the crafts I make, but I also live in the real world and I know how much I would sell if I priced my items out of the price range of so many people. I have been doing this for a while and have sat next to many crafters who have beautiful items priced for more than ANYONE walking by their booth is prepared to pay. They tell a wonderful story about their process and the quality of their items to everyone who walks by, but they go home discouraged and deflated, and broke because they didn’t even make enough money to cover their booth fee. Of course there are all sorts of factors that may be affecting those situations, but price is definitely a major factor in the society in which we live, even if we wish it weren’t.

Now, I’m not advocating for $40 dishtowels — I was just trying to make the point that for the amount of time she’s spending making the dishtowels, she’s nowhere near making a living wage for herself. My suggestion would be to work more simply — perhaps come up with designs she could create in an hour instead of eight hours.

Quality is worth paying for!!

Excellent! I agree completely

Wow, so that’s like asking for an 80% discount. How is that good for any artist? Wholesale is typically 50% off and you ask for an additional 30% and cost of supplies is usually around 10% so the artist gets 10% of their asking price to cover their time and reward them for their artistic talents. Hmm, some how that doesn’t seem like a good deal to me. So you make all the profit meaning that you pay the artist $4 for their $20 item and you make $14. It sounds like from your message that you are pushing this as a way to “market and expose” a product or business, however when I visited your site you do not link to the artists site at all, even when a product is sold out. You merely say that the item is sold out and encourage people to become a member for future deals instead of suggesting that they visit the artist site directly if an item is sold out and they want to purchase anyway. So really the marketing doesn’t benefit the artist either.

@newssprout
We wanted to respond to your comments about Quite Unique. When the artist request that we link to a site, we always do. Take today’s deal (http://www.quiteunique.com/deals/526213/shop/) which sold out in 35 minutes. We have linked to their amazon store in three places: on our website, the facebook commenting system on our website and our facebook page (you can check the time stamps on facebook to show they were done well before your post). People that were upset about the product selling out were personally notified by our team to try purchasing through their amazon.com store.

In regards to pricing, we have been flexible about the discount (particularly when the retail price is under $15. The Pop’s Statche was sold at retail price on our site which shows that our customer base is more concerned about the uniqueness of the product rather than the discount. This was confirmed in a recent survey where 76% of those surveyed were more concerned about the quality and uniqueness than the price/discount of the item.

For vendor pricing, we’ve found that our quantity buying allows most vendors to drastically cut their materials/supplies cost and time per item commitment. Vendors can source materials based on the quantity we need and streamline their production of the item we are featuring. I encourage you to contact any of our past vendors as we are confident they will have only positive remarks.

Finally, in response to your comment about us “making all the profit”, that is not completely true. We have much more overhead than the average Etsy store owner. We have a warehouse, staff and, most importantly a very large marketing budget that brings hundreds of new subscribers to our site everyday. Our investment in marketing has yielded a highly target subscriber base that prefers unique/quality items. We also actually buy the product from the vendor and receive the product in our warehouse prior to the offer going live. Most other sites simply sell a coupon (Heartsy), take a large cut and make the vendor deal with fulfillment. Our vendors get paid no matter how many products we sell (and we have had a few products were we lost money).

If you have any specific questions you would like us to answer, you can post them here or email them to vendors@quiteunique.com.

Cheers,
Quite Unique

LOVE this. Thank you. My mom is already constantly telling me to raise my prices…

Great post Grace! Lots of great stuff to think about

efesfdes
freshwater pearl necklace
freshwater pearl earrings
freshwater pearl bracelet
freshwater pearl pendant
coral jewelry

This is such a great post! It’s so true, I don’t understand why hand-crafters keep undervaluing their work. It’s really frustrating for those of us who are trying to price properly and compete in the same market.

This is such a great post! It’s so true, I don’t understand why hand-crafters keep undervaluing their work. It’s really frustrating for those of us who are trying to price properly and compete in the same market.

This article is very inspiring and it spells out some of the advice I have heard from other sellers. 

I hope that doing sales will help me gain a following, as I am still on the start up end of things. I don’t do sales very often and I don’t plan to in the future. I stand behind my prices, so while I get my feet wet in this small business adventure there are somethings I am willing to do…such as an occasional sale. 

Saying that, I do agree with a lot of what was said. It’s good information to keep in mind. 

Grace–I definitely agree with alot of what you’re saying &

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