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.
The artwork pictured here to the left is ‘Marsha’s View,’ an original pastel painting by artist Kay Gordon of Marshall, North Carolina.
In recent weeks I’ve featured collaborative marketing partnerships among those in crafts.
In Collaborative Marketing for Rural Small Business I introduced the idea of increasing your power to pull visitors to out-of-the-way rural locations by joining with similar local businesses and promoting yourselves as a group.
I featured two groups of potters in North Carolina that work together on their marketing efforts to drive traffic to their individual studios: The Potters of the Roan and The Penland Potters.
And in Handmade Collaborative Marketing,I described the team support system that Etsy has created for its individual sellers.
More artists than ever before are exploring collaborative marketing. Art Marketing Through Partnerships: A Marketing Tip written by Kim Cady describes how artists can take a subject or theme they like painting (in her example, cats and dogs), and joining hands with community organizations and businesses that share that theme.
As Ms Cady points out, the new year is a good time to re-think our businesses and how we might reach out to others and create win-win situations for all involved. Finding ways to promote your artwork locally is especially important for artists, whose work can celebrate that ’sense of place’ in ways few other businesses in a region can.
Marketing Your Art Locally: 7 Reasons to Market Your Artwork Closer to Home encourages artists to take advantage of the stronger motivation many customers have to ‘buy local’ these days, and to enjoy the advantages that being the ‘big fish’ in the smaller pond could bring.
Painting historic homes and buildings or capturing the spirit and energy of your town’s festivals in your art will create value-added products that local businesses and community organizations can sell for you, increasing sales for everyone and allowing you to continue creating.
Many small businesses in rural and small towns proudly feature the work of their local artists by selling not only their originals, but giclees (fine quality productions) in all sizes, and even refrigerator magnets and postcards. Tourists, in particular, often prefer to purchase handmade art and crafts as souvenirs of the places they visit rather than mass-produced memorabilia.
What partnerships or collaborative marketing efforts can you explore for your 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.
In July 2008 Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. This law was created in response to dangerous levels of lead and phthalate (a chemical in plastic materials) found in toys and other children’s products. This law is scheduled to go into effect February 10, 2009.
This new law poses a big problem for handcrafted toy makers and those who handmade clothing because it requires expensive testing by rural business owners to prove their handmade toys are safe for children. Artisans must have their products certified by third party businesses that often charge $100.00 to several hundred dollars per test. And each part of a toy or piece of clothing - paint, buttons, a zipper - must be separately tested.
Retailers are also required to make sure everything they sell in their store is certified safe as of the February 10,2009 date. Anyone who violates this new law can be fined tens of thousands of dollars.
Right now, there is no distinction made between handmade artisans and large manufacturing firms, or mom and pop stores and chain stores. A second vote needed to finalize changes to the law that should help handcrafted and rural businesses will not take place until AFTER the law goes into effect. Until then, you can read more here.
