Hand-making didn’t pan out
This blog is a reflection of 1+ year of solopreneurship in a hand-made business, all the reasons hand-making hasn’t scaled, and why I’ve decided to reorganize the business such that I am more diversified.
Table of Contents
Intro, Context & Things Like This
“Did you make all this?”
There’s a level of pride and joy that comes from making, with one’s own hands, some thing other’s compliment, enjoy, and ultimately purchase. Being able to label something “hand-made by me” differentiates, demonstrates a level of higher value, and reframes items as “artisan”. The question becomes: “Is this enough to sustain the artist’s business?”
My story begins with leaving a career in data and tech to be more hands on, be more active, and ultimately still be financially flexible and lucrative. I understood there would be a learning curve and it would take time to turn profitable. I also understood I had no idea what I was going to make or how I was going to sell it. I very much jumped into JA Murphy Designs LLC with a “I’ll figure it out as I go” mentality.
In September 2022 I launched my first line of designs - my Zenspo (TM) line. 10 designs inspired by a Buddhist teaching all available on mugs, tumblers, and stickers. This first line was launched using a print-on-demand (POD) service. I quickly came to realize I could not realistically sell my products for the retail cost it would take to turn a $1-2 profit using POD. During October and November 2022, I procured the hardware required to bring mug and tumbler printing in-house, reducing the costs of making per mug. In January 2023 I procured more hardware for more making, including a specialty printer and Cricut for making waterproofed stickers in-house as well. The in-house printing allowed me to apply for in-person events and shows and label my products “hand-made”.
I managed my own printing in-house through August 2023 before deciding to launch a Zazzle store. Zazzle acts like a POD service in that they handle printing and fulfillment. They take it a step further, however, in that they also handle returns, exchanges, and any customer service issues. This appealed to me, as you’ll see later, as one of my success-criteria is to be able to work from anywhere while still maintaining a business. With Zazzle, I am able to outsource all risk and logistics, making a small royalty on a per-item basis.
This shift feels a bit like an identity crisis in that I will no longer be hand-making some of my most popular product lines, but as this blog describes, it is an important reorganization of the business in order to eventually scale and grow the business to sustain. While I won’t be abandoning hand-makedness altogether, I will be significantly reducing my reliance on it as a revenue stream. Instead I will be looking towards more scalable ways of selling my work in the form of digital royalties.
Below is more of my story, in case anyone is looking for more information as to why my products are shifting and / or what my experience in hand-making was like.
Scalability - Quantity Matters
Quantity Matters
Scalability is paramount for growing any business. In order to sell more, in a hand-made business, I must make more. Or if I flip that - if I sell more, I must make more. The trouble is multi-fold (which will be a theme throughout), but with regards specifically to “making more”, the bottleneck is always going to be how quickly I can make something. This is illustrated simply in the episode of the Big Bang Theory with Penny and her Penny Blossom business. Making things takes time. In a lot of cases, absent special machinery or more people, there are very limited ways of reducing this time while maintaining quality.
Some examples:
It takes me 4-5 hours to knit 1 hat
It takes me 45-60 minutes to hand-paint & make my Chrysanthemum earrings, which is multi-step and extends over multiple hours.
It takes me 15-30 minute to print a mug I’ve already designed.
It takes me 1-3 hours to tweak and perfect a design, depending on the level of custom work
Let’s say I have 40 hours of working time (not entirely feasible, but for the purposes of this exercise). If I do nothing else, but make one product type a week:
8 hats
40 pairs of earrings
80-160 already designed mugs
40-120 custom designs
If we extrapolate that out to 1 year, with 2 weeks off (doing just one product type):
400 hats
2,000 earrings
8,000 mugs
6,000 custom designs
Also, let’s assume I sold out. Excluding the cost of any assets (such as printers, specialty hardware, etc), if I calculate my average profit on each of those items, the max profit would be, averaged between the 4 options, $16,900. The minimum, least profitable endeavor, hat-making, would be less than $2,000 in profit. The maximum being in the mug making business is just under $30,000 a year. These profit calculations assume no waste (nearly impossible when hand-making / printing).
The bottleneck is simple. It’s me. In order to scale the business I’d need to figure out how to make more, faster, and with more precision.
Profitability
Understanding Costs & Risks
Profitability is often a success criteria for a business, although not for all businesses. For most small-soloprenuer businesses, however, it is. There may be some debt required to start-up, but the idea being to eventually make enough and turn a profit is typically common. Usually there’s some math at play, with 3-5 year profitability plans. Let’s say, to start up a business in hand-making, the outset of start-up costs is $5,000. This includes website hosting, special machinery or tools, legal fees (I do recommend being registered), costs for displays, rent for any shows, insurance, etc. I’m not including cost of materials or shipping / packaging because that shows up in the profit number already.
As previously discussed above in “Scalability”, if I’m just looking at the hats example, it would take ~3 years, with no unexpectedness, to make back that $5,000.
To increase profitability, I need to either a) reduce cost and / or b) increase price. Regarding price, often consumers have in their minds how much they’re willing to spend. Market research and demand drives price more than cost-to-manufacture do. Purchasers tend to compare costs to what they see on Amazon or on other readily accessible platforms.
This is where value comes in. Trying to express why my items cost more requires my ability to share the value behind purchasing from me versus other platforms. What differentiates my items from those on Amazon or from other Etsy sellers?
Really, my story. Who I am, “you’d be supporting a small business”, etc. Most other Etsy sellers have the same story. A lot of Amazon sellers are also small-businesses with similar stories. It’s very difficult to differentiate and express value in short interactions, regardless if they’re in person or virtually through a list of search results.
This is why profitability suffers quickly. Price and features (“free shipping”, “free returns”, “consumer-centric return policies”) eat into profit quickly and unapologetically. In our current age of globalization, these features are often very common and paired with low prices. I love Amazon Prime, especially as a business owner. I know I can get my materials quickly, reliably, and without having to pay the shipping explicitly. I often return items that don’t fit my needs as expected and take advantage of the “free return” policies, dropping items off at UPS something like 3-4 times a month. I am both a seller and consumer, and very much understand these patterns in the hand-making industry.
All of those things do in fact drive perception of value, however. For the first 2 months I was selling my designs, I had a “no returns” policy. This was because I was a small business using a print-on-demand company that also had a “no returns” policy. If a consumer knows up-front they have no room to change their mind later, they’re less likely to commit. I know this because I am that consumer.
I quickly decided I too wanted to offer “free shipping”, both on Etsy and on my website. This means I’m baking the cost of shipping into the cost of my product. The consumer is still paying for shipping, but it’s less explicit. For example, If I sold my mugs with shipping, I might drop the price of my mugs to $15. But I’d have to charge my west coast customers $13 in shipping. I wouldn’t buy it, unless the mug was so unique and amazing I quite literally couldn’t get it anywhere else.*
Fact is, given there is a ceiling on increasing the price, the only option is to decrease costs. If costs are as low as they can be, shipping is what shipping is, and price is what price is, it stands that profit is what it is. Lack of profit margin plus lack of scalability handcuffs the hand-made entrepreneur significantly.
*As I wrote this section I couldn’t help but think this is an existential problem. For example, should we be shipping mugs across the country? I don’t know the answer to this. I feel as though the “free shipping” mentality has shifted my perception for the true costs of moving small items all around the world. It used to be if I couldn’t find something locally, I just didn’t get it. Or I ordered it from a catalog (remember those??) and paid shipping & handling, and waited a month to get things. I’m having trouble reconciling all this in my head. I like shipping to California, knowing my stuff has made it coast-to-coast, but is it wasteful? Alas…
Anxiety
the Perfectionist’s Dilemma
Hello, my name is Jess, and I’m a recovering perfectionist.
This means I want everything perfect at great emotional, physical, and mental costs.
I’ve grown in a lot of ways over the past 15 months, however, I battle it for every order. I have a deep concern a customer isn’t going to be happy with an order, especially if they’re ordering online and not touching and seeing the product before making a commitment. The art of hand-making things means things aren’t going to look exactly the same from one product to the next. It means there will be waste / errors (especially in mug printing). It means there are uncontrollable circumstances that could cause delays in processing times (i.e. availability of a supply or unexpected hardware issues). All these things lead to a massive anxiety that quite literally would keep me up at night.
Customer Dissatisfaction
I worked on my fear of customer-discontent by mindfully explaining to myself that if they’re not happy with their order they’ll contact me and I will handle it on a one-off-basis because I’m generally a nice and understanding person. As long as I treat them with respect, they’ll treat me with respect. Generally, assume positive intent, and move on. I have no examples to validate my anxiety so over time it dissipated a bit.
Business Operations Math
My other anxiety, however, was around failing at business operations. This anxiety is math-based, logical, and there is really no way around it.
What if I run a Facebook ad and I sold 100 mugs tomorrow. Great! However, at my fastest mug-making rate, with 0 waste (impossible), it would take me 25 hours, or 2.5 10-hour days, to fulfill those orders. During those 2.5 days, it is possible additional orders will come in, queuing up, potentially increasing the processing time. This fear of selling my products held me back substantially. As stated in “Scalability”, if I sell more, I have to make more. I can only physically make so much in a given period of time. Therefore, I’m capped on what I can sell.
So I opted on the side of strictly-conservative and purposefully avoided running ads or sales so as not to sell hundreds of mugs. As stated in “Profitability” this very much means I am not making money, and therefore am not going to reach my profitability mark anytime soon.
Waste Management
Also as a perfectionist, and an “expert” in making the things I make, I realize I have no concept for “fresh eyes”. This means, when I make something, I quality-control it, and sometimes notice a small issue. I have no realistic idea how small, small is. Or at what point my product is no longer worthy of a full-price sale. I tested this with a game of “guess what’s wrong” when selling “misprints / duds” for reduced prices in-person. People would laugh, wouldn’t be able to find the issue, and would in some cases insist I charge full-price. I do not trust myself to know at what point it’s okay to still mail out an imperfect product. I do not know what the threshold is for someone else.
As previously stated in “Profitability” the cost of returns / shipping could be close to the retail price of the product itself, so waste and customer service directly eat into profitability. At scale, it all likely evens out for large companies, but for a solopreneur, it’s very personal and can quickly turn to losses. It’s not uncommon for me to lose money on one-off mug sales because the first print came out slightly incorrect requiring a do-over.
Anxiety Conclusion
Anxiety implies if I use mindfulness I can get past it. In some cases, such as the fear of “no one will like my stuff” or “they’re going to hate it as soon as they open the box”, I was able to mindfully move past it. I can’t control their reactions / what they do, but I can control how I react to these situations, if they come up (which they never did!!). Knowing that, and trusting myself to react in a kind and customer-service-centric way, I knew I’d be ok. Having the mindfulness and capacity for this mental conversation helped me move forward despite those fears.
The more math-based / logical anxieties, however, made it difficult for me to succeed in this industry. I couldn’t ever convince myself I was willing to place a social media ad to try and sell more mugs. I was very worried about growing too fast and being unable to keep up without physically hurting myself.
Focus
Choosing Just One Thing
Over years and years in corporate America I learned I do not like doing the same thing for too long. Some might consider this a character flaw. I consider it a strength as it means I’m constantly learning new things, forcing myself into unknowns, and figuring it out.
If I were on a team I’m not the person you assign recurring tasks. If you do, I’ll figure out how to fully automate it (“automate myself out of a job” was a motto I used to shout from my cube) or offload it to someone else. It could take me 20 hours to automate a monthly task, but I wouldn’t care. Anything to not have to do the same damn thing every month.
If I was on a team, I’m the person you assign weird stuff to. Those things where no one really wants to be the one to figure it out first. The projects that require boots on the ground to find the one guy in that one building that can hook me up with just the right access and knowledge to get started. The thing that requires trying and failing because there’s no documentation or process to accomplish whatever it is.
As soon as the process / documentation exists, I’m not interested and would like to move on to the next project.
This directly impacts how I work in my business. My favorite days working are days I am not doing the same thing all day. I do not have a “typical-day-in-the-life-of-Jess” to share with you.
Except Saturdays. Most Saturdays I wake up at 6ish, drink a cup of coffee, shower, try on 2-3 outfits then throw on a hat or hoodie anyway, rush along Pat, hop in George-the-Pilot, get to the City of Rochester Public Market around 7:30a, laugh with all the other vendors who have been there since 5:30 about how it’s already their lunch time and we’re just rolling in, set up our tables and displays, sell things for 6ish hours, pack up George-the-Pilot, go home, unload into our living room, eat out for l-inner, take a nap, and decompress for the rest of the day.
Saturdays are the only day that are typical from a routine perspective, but they’re anything but typical during the 6ish hours of selling. Every day brings new people, new weather, surprise sales, funny stories, and that’s how I like it.
If things were predictable I’d quickly be bored.
This is where variety and lack of focus has been a key component to my business. I want to do a little bit of everything. Problem with this is scalability and profit. Both of those things have a slightly better chance if I’m focused and only doing one thing.
For example, my per-mug time reduces with more mugs because the initial getting started friction is averaged across more than one mug. It takes me time to find the designs, get them ready to print, print, cut, tape up, quality control the taping, and heat up. The percentage of duds also decreases with more mugs, as I get more into the groove and simply through the laws of probability and small / large numbers.
Typically an unfocused, unspecialized business is less profitable and less scalable. I imagine you can take that $16.9K number from “Scalability” and cut it down by at least 25% ($12.7K), but I’ll bet it’s more like 50% ($8.5K).
Being unfocused could (and in my case has) also resulted in unused materials from abandoned projects, assets not being used to their fullest potential, and technical debt in the form of multiple website builds.
Question becomes, can I reorganize my business to feature this part of my personality, rather than have my personality hinder my business?
Yes, I do believe I can.
"Work from Anywhere"
One of my success-criteria in life, both personally and professionally, is to be able to work / exist from anywhere I want for extended periods of time. I have family all over the country and have this fantasy I’m going to go visit them for a month and have minimal impact on my main revenue stream.
My studio set up is 3 8-person dining room tables, 3 printers, 1 laser engraver, a 7-in-one heat press, hundreds of blank products, 10’s of skeins of yarn, too many knitting needles to count, a laptop, two 32-inch LED displays, and WiFi. It’s not practical for me to take my business on the road. Even a small part of the business is cumbersome to bring along.
I quickly came to realize I needed a way to restructure my business such-that I could be anywhere without having to close the business. There needs to be flexibility and grace built into my business model. Otherwise it’s not sustainable. Otherwise I will grow to resent it all. Passion project or not, everyone needs a break. Everyone needs space for error, getting a cold, needing to be somewhere else.
Solopreneurs in hand-made businesses need guilt-free, no-strings-attached, breaks.
Fact is, if I sell more, I need to make more. Also, if I’m not making, I’m not selling. And if I’m not selling, I’m not bringing in any money.
It’s all quite obvious when stated / written out, but these facts get lost in the excitement of starting a business. These things don’t always become obvious in business planning or running projections. When I followed my heart into this business I truly felt I was different and I’d continue to differentiate because I have technical skills, and I’ve done XYZ before. In reality, the bottleneck remains the same: me, the time it takes me to make something, and the physical need of being at home with all my supplies & materials to make said things.
What's Next
a Conclusion
It doesn’t feel as though hand-making will be joyous if it’s extrinsically driven to make money. It seems as though the purpose behind someone making something almost needs to be for some other entirely different purpose. I’m very unsure what that purpose could be for others. For me, I have an idea, and I obsess on it until I can actualize it, see what it looks like in real life, and see if it’s as cool as I had in my mind.
I do try to realize that as I try these projects and ideas, I’m learning new skills, I’m trying new things, and I’m keeping my life interesting. Sometimes this is enough and yet other times all I can think of is the financial aspect of the business. My hope is by strategizing the business in such a way that the hand-made portion has less weight in the business’s revenue, I can get back to making things for the sake of making, for the joy of bringing an idea to life, regardless if it sells. For my own sanity, it seems making needs to be more of a hobby and side-hustle and less of a dependent source of money. This frees up my mind to be more creative. This lets me test whacky ideas and take up space I would otherwise let fear dictate and hold me back.
What you can expect to see from me and JA Murphy Designs LLC:
Continued niched sarcasm and digital designs, available on Zazzle
Content for gift ideas in the form of blogs
How-to’s; as I learn I’ll write things down and share my story
More project-based products & information, in the form of Limited Edition Hand-Made products in my Etsy shop
If you know someone in this business, consider supporting them in the simplest of ways: following them on social media, sharing their work, and listening without offering advice or “you should try” statements.
Are you a hand-maker? I’m very curious as your experience in the business. Please connect with me and share your story.
