Taking Your Business to the Next Level

by Amanda Siska

Are You Ready?

What are your goals for your business? What do you want to spend your time doing? A lot of people get to a place with their business where they’re happy making their products, and they sell fairly well at craft events or online. The next step sounds like it should be selling wholesale, but there are quite a few steps that you should consider before diving right in. Here are some of the highlights that I touched on in my recent workshop for I Heart Art: Portland. The first step is to ask yourself a lot of questions:

• Do you need a business license?
• Do you need a tax permit?
• Do you need a federal tax ID number?
• Do you need other permits or approvals?

Having employees involves quite a bit of legal documentation and often specific types of insurance (like worker’s compensation insurance, unemployment insurance, and liability insurance). Make sure everything is legit so you can easily expand when you need to, and you can claim all the proper deductions on your taxes.

Going Into Production

• What is your maximum capacity for production right now?
• Can you make enough products that if you sold all of them, you could live happily off the profits?
• How much room do you have for growth over the next 3 years or more?
• Are there tools, equipment or assembly methods that you could use to speed up or simplify your process?

You don’t want to paint yourself into a corner by accepting orders that you won’t be able to fill in a timely manner, or larger orders that you’re going to get sick of making before they’re finished. You also don’t want to pay your hired help all of the profits. You may need to spend more money all at once now, so that you can be more efficient in the future.

Elements of a Successful Press Release

• Catchy headline and opening sentence
• Short sentences and paragraphs that get right to the point
• Objective descriptions
• Make your news useful to people, not of just a promotional.
• Proper spelling andgrammar (have a friend proofread for you)
• Good photos (here’s a fantastic video from I Heart Art: Portland on product photography)
• Follow-up communication (after a week or two)

Press releases for digital media should be extremely short and concise. Your images will speak for you, and journalists/bloggers will contact you if they want more information. If your news story isn’t about your products, then tailor it accordingly (with photos of yourself doing something relevant to the story, if possible).

If you’re writing for a more traditional news outlet like a print magazine or newspaper, you can make your release longer, but don’t go overboard. In this case, you’ll want to structure your writing as if it were an article, ready to publish. Some journalists don’t want to take the time to write their own story about you, so giving them everything they need, already finished, could give you a big advantage.

I’ve written my own ebook on getting press for your business if you’d like more details on writing a press release and examples of what it should look like.

Wholesaling

• Can I afford to sell my products at wholesale prices (usually 50% of retail prices, or lower)?
• Can I make enough products to make a profit at these prices?
• Will I enjoy making all those products?
• Can I afford to pay for help and equipment to make production more efficient and enjoyable?

Order Forms

1. Your business contact information (include a phone number)
2. Fields for their business contact information (billing & shipping)
3. Payment terms
4. Shipping dates/estimated timeframes
5. Order deadlines
6. Minimum order size (quantity or dollar amount)
7. Products and variations available, or blank spaces to write them in
8. Prices (optional, but recommended)

You can set this form up any way you’d like. Ours has products listed horizontally across the page, with available designs listed vertically along the left. Prices for each product are at the bottom of the columns. Customers simply write the number of items they’d like into each box that corresponds with a product and design.

If you have a lot of products or variations, there may not be room on a single sheet of paper to display all the available options. It may work better for you to have blank columns or rows, with a simple code system so your customers can fill out their requests using a line sheet for reference.

Line Sheets

A line sheet is the detailed information packet that tells wholesale customers everything they’d want to know about your products, including:

• What they’re made out of
• How they’re constructed
• What their exact measurements are
• When they’ll be available
• If they have optional features or variations
• The code for ordering them on your order form (if applicable)

Line sheets also need to include some kind of visual aid for your products. This can be a full color photo (which can be very pricey to print and distribute, but will create a more memorable catalog), or a simple line drawing. If your products are made from textiles, it could be very helpful to include actual swatches of the materials available. They can be glued to a sheet of paper and clearly labeled, or attached to a keyring or other method. Be creative, or keep your samples easy to file (the shoe store I worked in kept it’s line sheets in a filing cabinet, so keyrings of samples were kind of bulky and hard to store, but they always made an impact when we were placing our first order).

The point of the line sheet is to offer all the info that a customer would want so they don’t have to ask you a lot of questions. Also, if you present your products to them in person, it will help them remember what you were selling when they finally decide to look at your order form a month later, or want to reorder something new.

Not all buyers for retail stores spend their time online, so don’t expect them to visit your website every time they want to place an order. There are more and more shops that are internet-savvy, however, so you shouldn’t have to make a lot of concessions for stores with antiquated ordering techniques, unless you really want to.

Read an article on Etsy’s blog on some of the basics of wholesaling. They also have an article on wholesale pricing.

I hope this helps give you an idea what steps may be ahead of you if you’re looking to expand your business beyond the basics. Your business can be as big (or as small and focused!) as you’d like. It’s all about where you’d like to take it. Enjoy the journey!

__________________

Amanda Siska quit her full-time shoe salesperson job before starting her own
business back in 2005. She experimented with art mediums, read lots of
books on business and marketing, and basically absorbed everything she
could before falling in love with glass etching.

Amanda’s artistic inspirations include tattoo art, classic motifs from
around the world, pop art and geek culture. In her spare time, Amanda
enjoys audio books, comics, video games, cooking, knitting, and
learning things on the internet. Honey badgers are her favorite
animal, and continue to inspire her with their fearlessness.