I’m hoping to start my shop in the spring and in time for summer craft fairs and festivals. My questions are how much product do you keep in stock? How do you price point with cost of yarn + time to produce?
Is anyone in the NFT community with their crochet items? I’ve been thinking about branching out there.
How do you know if there would be enough interest in your pattern to call for testers? I’ve made a few things I think are super cute, but I’m not sure if there would be enough interest.
Thanks for any information! It is very much appreciated!!
I’m so glad I found this community!
I only sell patterns, so I don’t have stock
My daughter does ami commissions and charges like 15 cents per inch for the largest measurement of the piece
Tester calls are free. Put it out there and see happens… Now you know if the item is popular. And the journals are free advertising.
In fact, in ribblr, the shop is free as well you only get charged based on what you sell so there is no downside to it sitting there.
Hi! I dont have a shop, so cant tell you regarding how much to stock, but i do sell my amigurumis to friends and coworkers.
The price is an estimate of:
- how much you used in materials (i do a rough math here, if the skein is $10 and i can do a total of 4 items, then i spent $2.5 in raw material)
- how much time you used on making it (so i spent 3hrs and i want to earn x per hr)
- how much profit i want to make
Also, do test your patterns! Nothing to lose in doing so!
Best of luck!
For items, i charge the price of the skein of yarn I use (regardless of how many items I could theoretically make from it) and add a multiplier based on my discretion for complexity. I also try to think of it from a point of what i would be okay selling something for. For instance, my headband pattern that i hace coming out, i can charge 18 to 20 per and sell quite a few of varying yarns and colors.
I think the most important thing ive learned in terms of amigurumi and physical products is to not sell yourself short, and make sure you take into account the full yarn skein - cause sometimes youll only need it for that one thing, if that makes sense.
Super true! I guess the important part when selling is for you to be happy with how much you are earning.
Not selling yourself short is a great advise!
Yes, charge for the whole skein. Don’t forget to add taxes paid on the products when you buy them. And shipping if applicable.
Thank you everyone! These are all great things for me to know!
For me, I got some really great sales on yarn. If you do also, be sure to use the replacement cost of yarn, not the sale price.
If it’s custom I charge per color, they’re buying the skeins. I have several skeins that where used for some tiny detail now I’m stuck with what’s essentially a new skein of something I won’t use. They sit around so long, I’ve started selling those on ebay. I just weigh them and subtract the missing weight % from the price.
I’ve done conventions, I find others were bringing 1-10 of each design they had based on estimated popularity of the piece. It seems to work out. You’ll get hit with a surprise now and then but if your goal is to make the most money be honest with yourself you’ll do fine. (For example, I like digimon but pokemon are more popular so even if I might want to do more digimon that would be foolish to bring them over pokemon.)
I have worked with nft, but not for crochet. I’m not sure how that would work. I’m not for non-utility nft so the only way I see nft being useful to crochet is to link a pattern to it. But the average price point of nft for profit isn’t in line with average pattern prices.
Sorry but what is nft? And that other acronym you’re using?
NFT stands for non fungible token, I don’t quite understand everything. It was suggested by my hubby who is an NFT artist. It’s an internet thing that I think I’m too old to understand. Lol
My hubby is an NFT artist and he suggested selling a video/story about the amigurumi and then mail it to them so they get an actual physical thing. Like you, I just don’t know how it would work.
@PleiadesCrochet I guess you could, the thing is I don’t think the crafting community is there. My nft work is with a game, due to GameStop there’s tons of gamers in on nft. And the art community is currently heavily divided on the ntf issue so you either make it right away or not at all.
Minting nft cost money on most markets all the ones that don’t that I am aware of you have to apply to and he accepted. So in the end you either have to convince one of the free communities it’s a good idea so they let you in, or upfront the mint cost and take a risk.
A good way to judge may be to ask here how many people even know what an nft is/how to buy one. That may give you a better idea of how many crafters are in the market to even buy such a nft from you.
@anoswaldoddity
This might be long and a little off topic here but here we go. NFT stands for non fungible token.
Currently it’s more a proof of concept then a solid thing. People who are getting in on it, are in many ways betting on it being the next Bitcoin-type takeoff.
You need a digital wallet, then there are many markets you can buy them, you usually have to use crypto to do so. If you heard about the “digital trading cards” Trump just did those were “art” nft. These kind of nft have put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouth. The allure of nft is you take ownership of whatever you’re promised. “Art” nft upset people because “I can right click and save the image” making the contract to the image pretty useless in most people’s eyes.
The push for nft is that it isn’t just a random image or data - it’s a contract. The image or whatever you get that represents the nft doesn’t matter, what matters is the contract behind it which defines what your actually buying.
In the example of what Pleiades suggests, the image wouldn’t matter, the contract would be access to the video or story about the amigurimi.
People hope to make this take off in hopes big companies will use it. Then if you bought a movie for instance, you’d own access to that movie for the duration specified in the contract, be that temporary or permanent. It combats issues like buying movies on Apple or Amazon but if you account is banned or they decide to remove that movie from their site you no longer have access so really you bought nothing. Especially when these companies can change the rules at any time, the nft contract is predefined and can’t be changed once exchanged.