My apologies for being absent last week. Steve and I both caught a nasty cold and after three years of avoiding bugs our bodies had forgotten how to deal with them. So for the last couple weeks we’ve subsisted on Tylenol, poor sleep, cough drops, a ton of tissues, and negative Covid tests. We both seem to be on the road to recovery now, fortunately.
In the spirit of trying new things, I am starting an online sales venture with a couple friends. Probably because I am completely deranged.
Since getting back to my beading during the nasty weather this winter I have completed many projects, and I realized I wanted to do something with those finished items. At the same time I had a couple friends who were in pretty much the same spot.
Never, ever let a trio of retired women with time on their hands get together and
Start plotting. When you do, you’re likely to get something crazy. Maybe it’s good crazy, but it’s gonna be crazy.
What we have decided to do is to try and set up a sales site for our handmade items. You’ve seen some of what I do; I post pictures here from time to time, and I talked at length about my creations earlier this year. It was my lost love that I rediscovered a few months ago.
Now, it seems like this shouldn’t be that big a deal. It’s just a couple friends getting together to try and boost each other and share the work of running a little sales site online. And if we use an existing platform like Etsy it should be pretty easy, right?
Well, we have already run into a pile of questions we need to answer, and I find that many of them reflect issues we have talked about here. Issues of control and responsibility, of handling the business details and keeping financial records, of planning for the possibility of failure or success.
That last one is something I need to come back to in a new essay, because there are huge pitfalls that await the successful creative endeavor, pitfalls that we need to think about and plan for. But that is a topic for another day (makes note on her list of “Topics to talk about”).
For now I wanted to touch on the subject of just what is involved in selling your creations, and how much work is actually involved, especially if you decide to partner with another creator.
First, the old adage of a partnership being two people working together with each person doing 90% of the work is absolutely true. At least from the viewpoint of each partner. Teaming up can reduce the workload, but it also adds other tasks that can greatly reduce the time savings you expect.
Two, it takes a lot of communication. A lot. And if you don’t allow time for discussion between partners in the beginning you will be taking a lot more time down the road to settle issues that should have been agreed upon at the start.
Three, it is going to take a lot longer to get up and running than you ever expect. These things always take more time that you think, and when you add another person to the process, another voice that needs to be heard, another opinion that must be factored into every decision, and someone you have to depend on to complete their part of the process – well, that’s going to take time.
Right now we are still working on getting all our expectations and responsibilities settled. We are meeting and talking through what we expect from each other, and what each of us is prepared to do in order to move the project forward.
What we have found so far is that the creating is the easy part, the fun part, the part we all want to do and are doing. We are each happily producing the things we want to create, which is great. Honestly, that’s what we are all about here in the Tsunami Zone.
But if we want to take this past the creating stage to the selling stage there is work that has to be done.
You will notice that I used the work “work.” That was very purposeful.
Normally I avoid that word in this space as much as possible, particularly when referring to our creative output. I never want to apply work, or should, or have to, to my creative endeavors – which sometimes leads to sitting with my head in my hands trying to recast a sentence to avoid those words – but those are concepts I don’t want to apply to the things I do because I want to create.
I may feel like I need to create, I want to create, but I don’t ever want to feel that I should create because of some arbitrary rule. Isn’t that why we are retired, so we don’t have to listen to someone else’s shoulds?
But in this instance, when we face outward toward the commercial world, there are shoulds, and musts, and have tos, and I am going to share this outward-facing journey with you in the hopes that it might help you in determining whether you want to embark on a similar path.
[I do recognize that most of my little band of followers here are writers, and a discussion of craft sales may not apply. But I also know that many of you are also polymaths, and may have other creative projects that could fall within this discussion. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to take over the feed. Updates will likely be only occasional, I promise.)