The end of October is the end of the Summer tourist season for our handmade business of soapmaking.
It is also the beginning of holiday madness as we and the temporary elves prepare orders to be shipped out until just a few days before Christmas. We’re not unusual. Many of us with seasonal businesses actually have many ’seasons’ throughout the year, with different markets, customers, products, sales and workload. The end of one ’season’ isn’t the end of the business year. It simply marks the next phase of business activity.
For our friends in the fiber world, their season is full speed ahead. Each October we are a vendor at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair outside of Asheville, North Carolina, now the third largest fiber event in the USA. Last weekend was actually our 11th year participating in the festival, which celebrates all the wool bearing animals (llamas, alpacas, cashmere goats, angora rabbits and every breed of sheep), their wool, and the spinners, dyers, and knitters of that wool.
An article I found this week on the seasonal business of knitting focuses on the seasonal aspects of the final product: those beautifully colored skeins of luxurious yarn sold in retail shops. But wool and fiber is not just a Fall and Winter business. It’s the other seasons of the year when fiber farmers continuously care for the animals that provide the wool ultimately shorn and spun. I can’t help but think of all their hard work - all year round - when I read about knitting as a seasonal business.
For farmers and rural business owners, the handmade fiber industry is a twelve-month devotion to duty.
Here’s a link for artists, writers, photographers, and all other creative folk on the back roads. Prosperous Artists - Outrageous Ideas for Creative Business is a blog with frequent podcasts for creative small businesses.
Prosperous Artists is a blog designed to support you in building the career, business and creative life you desire. Dean La Douceur (a professional writer) and Rosh Sillars (a professional photographer) have been blogging and podcasting as your prosperous artists hosts since early 2007. Dean and Rosh share small business, marketing and creative ideas. Dean focuses on developing your creative side and Rosh focuses on traditional and new media marketing.
How can you draw more visitors to your business when you’re in a remote rural location?
Increase your pulling power. Join with other similar rural businesses and promote yourselves as a group. Instead of just one rural business located ‘way out in nowhere,’ you can become a destination worthy of a planned day trip.
Collaborative Marketing is working together with others to sell what you make. It’s a concept that farmers have traditionally used more than artists and crafts artisans. But wherever there is common ground - a common market or a common product - there is an opportunity to achieve more together.
My area of western North Carolina is known for handmade arts and crafts, and it’s not surprising that some of our best artisans have linked together to attract visitors to their out-of-the-way rural locations. Two groups of potters have agreed to work together to market the the crafts they produce, and organized themselves by their geographical locations. Some of the studios represent the work of one artist, while other studios showcase multiple artists. With so many studios geographically close to one another, it becomes quite natural to market them as a group. And it also makes it easy for visitors who love handcrafted pottery of all kinds to see all the studios while enjoying the beautiful mountain landscape.
Each of the groups has created a website with a detailed map that lists all the artists and their studio locations, along with photographic samples of each artist’s work and links to their individual websites. Print brochures with the same information are available and waiting to be discovered by those visitors already in our area and looking for interesting things to do. Attractive and consistent signage at each studio location allows visitors to casually - but confidently - meander their way through the curvy mountain roads.
Here are links to each group for you to take a look at their collaborative marketing efforts:
Potters of the Roan is a guild of emerging and professional potters living and working in the Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina.
The Penland Potters is a group of seven clay studios located within a three mile radius of the Penland School of Crafts in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.
Are you ready to make this kind of shift in your thinking, and include some type of collaborative marketing in your promotional arsenal? It’s a tough question but one you must think about thoroughly before you join together with others. You are still an independent business, but interdependent in some ways. Finding businesses that share common ground is the first step, and then you can organize your marketing efforts around a common theme.
Would collaborative marketing work for your rural business?
Looks like rural business and handmade business owners have found a kindred spirit in Walter Olson, a lawyer at the Manhattan Institute whose opinion piece at Forbes business magazine website states his case - “Scrap The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.’
Olson makes the point that the concern is not only about handmade toys, but almost every product made for children under 12:
With few exceptions, the law covers all products intended primarily for children under 12. That includes clothing, fabric and textile goods of all kinds: hats, shoes, diapers, hair bands, sports pennants, Scouting patches, local school-logo gear and so on.
And paper goods: books, flash cards, board games, baseball cards, kits for home schoolers, party supplies and the like. And sporting equipment, outdoor gear, bikes, backpacks and telescopes. And furnishings for kids’ rooms.
And videogame cartridges and audio books. And specialized assistive and therapeutic gear used by disabled and autistic kids.
Our lawmakers may have been well-intentioned last year when they acted to address the outbreak of problems caused by lead paint in and on Chinese-made toys. But Olson says our government’s haste to take dramatic action revealed a failure on the part of our lawmakers to read the laws they vote on, or to look ahead to how these laws will be implemented. The government might have been worried about defective toys when this process started, but now we can all be worried about the defective process for creating public policy that’s been exposed.
