Tag: business

Doing the Sums

I’ve been running Eternal Magpie and the Inexplicable Emporium as a tiny business since April this year. I’ve been very good so far, and sitting down once a month to do the sums, rather than leaving it all until I have to have one giant panic about the tax return in January. (I have yet to make a suit out of my taxes, but I’m sure the time will come!)

Sitting down to fill in my spreadsheet this afternoon, I was disappointed to discover that this is the first month that I’ve failed to break even – mainly because I haven’t made as many sales as usual, and I still have Etsy fees to pay. The numbers are small, deliberately so in these early stages, but I was still slightly confused about where all the money had gone – not just this month, but since I started.

Each time I make a little profit, I’ve been buying materials to make the next lot of Things. Except, as it turns out, I haven’t actually been using those materials. I’ve been putting them in a cupboard and “saving them for later”. Well, it looks as though “later” might be here! I can’t afford to buy anything else right now, so I’d better start using up what I’ve got.

What I’ve Got turns out to look like this:

  • A huge bag of 2″ d-rings and steel rivets, for making belts
  • Three different kinds of mordant, for natural dyeing
  • A bag of linen buttons, for natural dyeing
  • Moulds for making scented wax tarts
  • Three large wool batts for making felt
  • Three different kinds of wooden buttons, for adorning naturally-dyed accessories
  • Three different kinds of powdered natural dyestuffs
  • Eight felt hoods for making new cloche hats
  • Craft felt and beads for making brooches
  • Wool felt pieces for making hat embellishments

Of course there have been other costs too – stationery , shipping, and Etsy/PayPal fees being the greatest of them. But I do have rather a lot of materials here, just waiting to be used.

Sadly the natural dyeing went completely by the wayside this summer, as the new garden simply wasn’t in a state where I could grow any useful plants. But I do have powdered dye, and mordants, and cream cotton fabric and undyed wool, so that’s something I can make a start on while the weather’s still nice. (It’s an outdoor/garage-based activity really, as the dyes sometimes smell very bad!)

The D-rings are waiting for me to actually finish my first experimental felted belt – I wasn’t sure it would be sturdy enough to carry the weight of the rings. That’s about an hour’s work, to finish off the felting and hammer in the rivets, so I’ve got no excuse for just getting that done! In fact, I could go and do that now.

The wax tarts have been put on one side until the winter, which I think is nearly upon us, despite the fact that today is glorious! I plan to melt down the old scented candles, dilute them with a little more soy wax (our overwhelming feedback was that they were a bit strong!), and pour them into shapes that can be melted with an oil burner. I’ve also now found a supplier of ethically-produced and imported oil burners, so I can put together a gift set for anybody who doesn’t own one already.

I haven’t done a great deal of felting lately, mainly because I’ve been a bit down in the dumps about it. I made lots of felted flowers back in the summer, which were widely “ooooh”ed at on Facebook and Instagram, but I haven’t actually sold many of them, and their Etsy listings are just about to expire. I tried turning one of the larger ones into a fascinator, but I wasn’t very happy with the way it came out. I think they might need a little more work (perhaps embroidery? or beads?) before they’re right.

Same with the hats, really – I’ve just been a bit un-inspired. It’s difficult to find the motivation for making lots of new hats, when the ones I’ve made already are sitting on a shelf unsold. Of course it’s been summer, which isn’t the right time of year for selling warm wool hats! I’ve been watching a lot of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, to get me in the 1920s hat frame of mind, and now that the winter coats are starting to turn up in the shops, it’s getting easier to see what colours and styles people might want to wear this season.

Trouble is, sitting around feeling uninspired turns out to be a terrible way of generating new sales. (Surprise!!) If I’m not feeling enthusiastic about my own work, there’s no reason on earth why anybody else should be, so no wonder my sales have been low this month. But, plans are in place for making improvements, and for kicking myself up the behind. And, of course, I’ve got lots of lovely new materials, all ready and waiting for me to make lots of new things!

Onwards and upwards, as they say.

how to be happy in business – venn diagram

I keep seeing this venn diagram popping up all over the place. It belongs to Bud Caddell, and accompanies an interesting post on how to be happy in business.

I ventured up into the loft the other day, to dig out some coat hangers to take the skirts and dresses down to Tiger Lilly. This necessitated rummaging through the three enormous laundry bags that contain the remains of my former business, “GothStuff”. (I made Stuff for Goths. It did exactly what it said on the tin!)

GothStuff started winding down in 2005. I’d spend much of that year in and out of hospital with my endometriosis (culminating with my appendix being taken out by mistake!), I’d started re-training as a massage therapist, and I wasn’t happy with what I was doing, so I decided to make some changes.

Since then I’ve done a bit of soap-making, a lot of custom dressmaking, made a bit of jewellery, taken a lot of photographs… but nothing’s been as successful as GothStuff was, and I’ve spent quite a lot of time wondering why. But when I went up into the loft the other day, the reason became obvious.

I simply haven’t put as much commitment into any project since.

Tucked away in the loft I have clothing rails, hangers, display boards, flyers, labels, business cards, price lists (including the one printed on a giant t-shirt!) and catalogues. I started GothStuff at the same time as working a full-time job, and I still managed to put in eight hours’ work a day. Paul very patiently drove me and a car full of clothing all over the country to go to festivals and run market stalls.

Admittedly I’ve continued to have problems with my health over the past few years, but honestly, that’s not a reason for having given up – it’s just an excuse. If I’d been truly committed to any of the projects I’ve tried, I would have worked as hard as I possibly could to try and make it a success. And much as it pains me to say this out loud, I simply haven’t done that. I’ve spent a lot of time hovering around the edges of “what I do well” and “what I can be paid to do”, and the sad truth is that it isn’t good enough.

Time to try harder.

Tweet tweet!

2nd February 2009 - Snow Day!

Yesterday I met a duck, and today I learned how to Tweet.

The duck in question is not the fancy Mandarin pictured above. It’s Selma, able assistant to Havi Brooks.

Miss Alice realised that I was in serious need of some help with “destuckification”, and sent me a link to Havi’s website, The Fluent Self. I may have had a little cry when I read Havi’s Is This You? page, and have since been rummaging around her blog, and downloading the destuckification sampler. You can find the sampler on the right hand side of Havi’s web pages, and I heartily recommend it. (I’m saving up for The Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic.)

I’ve been making things all my life, but I do have a terrible problem with actually selling the things that I make. I feel pushy, trying to sell things to people, and I don’t like to be pushy. (Apparently “nice” and “pushy” don’t really go together, and I do so want to be nice.) But if I don’t tell people what I’ve made, they’ll never know that they can buy it, and that’s not really a good way to run a business. In fact it’s not running a business at all, it’s just pursuing a really expensive hobby.

My first step towards doing a bit of something vaguely resembling “networking”, is to find out how to use Twitter in a productive way. As it turns out, it’s so much more than overhearing half of a million private conversations, or finding out what the internet had for breakfast. It’s a great way of spreading little bits of news, passing on interesting links and meeting people all across the world that you wouldn’t have been able to reach in any other way.

You can read my Twitterings over in the sidebar there, or you can come and follow me. I’m eternalmagpie, of course.

Move over Facebook – Twitter is the way forward!

Paying the Price.

I’ve just been reading an interesting discussion on about why customers are unwilling to pay prices which genuinely cover the cost of a handmade garment, whether it’s a reconstructed t-shirt or a couture wedding dress. I’ve had many customers – individuals and other small businesses – come to me asking for hand-made clothing, only to disappear without a trace when I told them the price.

Thanks to companies like the dreaded Primark, clothes have become cheaper and cheaper to buy, and the actual cost of their manufacture (in both monetary and human terms) is no longer reflected in their selling price.

As an independent businesswoman in the UK, I am legally obliged to pay myself a minimum wage (currently £5.52 an hour) for my work – and yet in many cases I am simply not able to do that. If I charged the full amount of what my work was actually worth, my customers wouldn’t be able to afford it, and I would make no money at all.

Unfortunately, by selling myself short, I devalue not only my own work, but also that of other business and craftspeople in a similar position, and I exacerbate the problem of customers expecting to pay cheaper prices.

If I were a computer programmer, I’d be charging an awful lot more than £5.52 an hour. Heck, if I were a plumber, I’d be charging more than ten times that! When did dressmaking, or any form of craft which requires a development of skill to learn, become such an undervalued occupation?

has written a really interesting article on the subject: Why do wedding dresses cost so much?

I’ve been the lady hand-sewing the beads onto your precious dress, and I’ve listened patiently to the complaints about the cost of the alterations when I’ve had to hem, by hand, all ten tulle petticoat layers under your skirt. I can state unequivocally that although I was paid slightly more than minimum wage for doing that job, neither I, nor the husband and wife team who ran that independent bridal store, were making our fortune from the cost of that work.

I’ve also had several brides come to me, assuming that because I was making them a “home made” dress, it would be much cheaper than one bought off the peg. In actual fact what I would be making is a couture dress, which is a different thing altogether!

Last week I wore a dress that I’d made myself, to work. One of our customers expressed surprise that the dress was “home made”, because “it looked really neat”. Now I have eleven years’ experience as a dressmaker – of course my sewing is neat! Would you react with surprise if you hired a plumber with eleven years’ experience, and he turned out to do a good job? No, and you’d pay him good money to do it.

The lady who made the comment obviously had no way of knowing that I’ve been a dressmaker for a long time, but it made me very sad that “made by hand” in her expectation was inextricably linked to “looks a bit rubbish”. The current rise in popularity of “DIY” and reconstructed clothing is also doing nothing to disabuse people of this notion, as so many sellers of this style are using the term “DIY” to apparently mean that they don’t have to finish seams or be able to sew well.

Now I’m completely self-taught, so I have no issues whatsoever about people just getting in there and having a go! I’ve written a couple of tutorials for simple skirts, and I hope to write more in the future. I also enjoy reconstructing t-shirts, and making clothes out of recycled materials. However, I do believe that if you’re going to sell your work, then there are some fairly basic standards that need to be applied. Otherwise, once again, you’re lowering the standards and expectations that apply to all of us.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to make a living from my dressmaking, and that makes me very sad. It’s not going to stop me from sewing, because I really enjoy it, but I do wish that it were possible for more people to understand the value of these skills that I’ve worked hard to attain.