Making Products to Sell

I had been putting off making an Etsy shop for a little too long so after setting up an account, I finally got round to making some things to sell after all my deadlines were over. I have been using designs I have created for my college modules and other personal work I have done this year so it was just a case of getting things printed and going through the processes of making them into different products. There is also an opportunity for me to maybe sell some of my work at a local arts fair at home so I am bearing this in mind when making these products too. 

I started off making greetings cards and basic saddle stitched notebooks. I produced some digital prints of some of my designs, I made them all 7x5 inches in size so they would fit a standard sized frame. I think this size is quite small so depending on the success of these, I will consider making some larger ones in the future. I used the offcuts of leftover patterns to make gift tags and saw that this was working quite well so I printed some of my designs on a smaller scale purely for this purpose. I realise that gift tags are small and cheap and this might not be a viable product to sell online as the cost of postage may make the overall price slightly unreasonable. However, it could be something I choose to sell at the art fair instead or give away alongside online purchases. 

I tried to be quite thrifty with my making processes, using materials I had leftover from other projects and tactically arranging my designs ready to print to keep the printing costs low. Because I really didn’t know how successful this venture was going to be I wanted my overall costs to be as low as possible but still without compromising on quality. This made it hard for me to come up with an actual figure I had spent on making all of these things, and therefore there won't be a clearcut answer as to how much I make as a profit or a loss. I have spent no more than £25 making these products but I can’t put a price on the materials I already had lying around.

I really enjoyed making all of these products. As much as I love drawing, I also love making things with my hands so this was the perfect way to tie these two things together. The products I have made are better than I had imagined they would be and I have already received promising feedback from the people I have shown them too. I really hope they are successful so I can carry on making things like this!

Here are some examples of the products I have made.