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.
Some small business owners are choosing to save money and in some cases save their businesses by moving their offices home, according to this article in the Dallas Morning News.
“We’re seeing probably twice as many businesses doing that compared to a year ago,” says George Cloutier, founder and chief executive officer of American Management Services, an Orlando, Fla.-based consultant to small businesses.
The article discusses the unique difficulties a small business owner may encounter moving their business to their home, including business image, zoning and tax issues, employee perceptions, moving costs and the distractions that must be managed when working within your home and family environment.
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.
Here’s another example of collaborative marketing, this time among a community of sellers on Etsy, a popular site for handmade art and crafts. Last week I featured two collaborative marketing efforts among potters.
To provide a support system for its individual sellers, Etsy has created Teams. Etsy Teams are groups of Etsy artist members who organize to network, share skills, and promote their Etsy shops in collaborative ways.
Etsy Teams can form around anything they have in common - a geographic location, their art or craft medium, or any other shared interest.
There are now nearly 500 Etsy Teams, demonstrating that Etsy is not just a marketplace of individuals, but a community of like minded artists interested in collaborative marketing.
Different teams come together to promote their members in different ways, including the development of joint websites.
Here’s a link to one of those websites, created by The Amazing Carolina Etsians, The ACE Team, organized by Etsy sellers who live in beautiful North Carolina (my home state).
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?
