New Year, New Idea!

Please forgive any typos; Finn is sleeping on my right hand, so I am typing one handed with my left. (If you have cats, you understand this. It's against natural law to disturb a sleeping cat!) 

After reading of a few people's good experiences with them, I decided to give Faire a try. Faire is an online wholesale marketplace, where buyers can find makers. It makes sense to me as an alternative to wholesale shows, that require you to haul your ware sometimes thousands of miles, stay in hotels, pay thousands in booth fees, etc. The same for the buyers! This seems like a better option. 

Unlike many potters, I like to do wholesale! My favorites are the buyers who come & choose from the inventory I already have, but orders are good, too - they let me plan a bit, knowing when I can expect payment & how much. 

(Oh! There's my hand back. Thanks, Finn! I was starting to lose feeling in it.)  

I have a dim recollection that I considered this once before & decided against it, but I'm not sure I am thinking of the same site, because while I bumped on a couple of things - we'll get to those - nothing jumped out at me as unacceptable right out of the gate. Wait! Was Faire the one that I didn't know I had to apply to & got rejected anyway? Can't remember. I hope not! If I get rejected from something I didn't know I had to apply for a second time that will be a discouraging way to start the New Year! 

You pay nothing on Faire unless you sell, in which case you pay a commission of 15%. This is a little steep, considering wholesale price is traditionally 50% of retail, and Faire asks sellers - well, requires sellers - to agree not to charge more on their site than elsewhere; or rather, it sounds a little steep, until you compare it to the costs I outlined above: booth fees, travel, time out of the studio. In the case of those costs, you pay whether you get orders or not! 15% only on actual orders is starting to sound a little more reasonable. 
Speaking of costs, though, the other thing I bumped on was pricing: I see a lot of items that I can't imagine how they are making money. Someone was offering mugs at a suggested retail of $5, which would make their wholesale price $2.50! That was just one, but there were several on the first page of the search offering mugs at a suggested retail of $25, which I also could not do. I did a big more poking about, though, and found some sellers at more reasonable price points, including one who told me Faire is about 30% of their business. 
There is an algorithm to learn; the seller I chatted with, Gravesco Pottery, suggested starting with 8 - 10 items, then adding new listings in groups of three; that seemed to keep their shop on the front page for up to a week at a time. 
Right now my shop is being "reviewed," so not yet live. I plan to offer only one slip-trail design - flax blossoms - as that is the quickest & easiest, so the lower price I'll be getting won't be unsustainable. I only have one listing, because I need to photograph some items in that design & I need to make a few more. In addition to making cornbread (for prosperity in the new year) I will be doing those things today.
I know I have mostly potters reading this blog; have any of you used Faire? What has your experience been?

PS! The December photo dump is up (free!) on my Patreon page! 

There's Something Happening Here

Dotopia

 About a year and a half ago - seems much longer; I guess because so much has happened in between then & now - I introduced Dotopia, a line I designed specifically for wholesale. The design is easy to replicate (well - "easy" within the limitations of soda firing, which is by nature a bit random) while still communicating the joie de vivre I want my pots to impart. Because the shapes are simple, and the decorative elements consistent - throwing lines, stamps, rib cuts, slip trailing at leather hard; flashing slip, glaze dots, interior glaze either white or yellow - I can make these relatively quickly, and charge a bit less for them than a more elaborately decorated piece. 

I'm still making Dotopia, and expect a majority of my orders to be from this line. It's the one I offer to wholesale accounts, with a product sheet & samples. But my love of excessive decorating has not evaporated, and predictably, it's back! Check out this new work I am making. 

I made a bowl like this, a couple weeks ago, with a frieze thick with sliptrailing. I have sometimes told students that sliptrailing is a two-person job; one to do the work, another to bonk em on the head when it's done. But there was nobody there to do the bonking so I just kept decorating. I think there are the makings of another line here! It'll have to have a higher price point; it just so happened that I was keeping track of my studio hours this week, and between wedging, throwing, handles, and decorating, it took 6 hours (wetwork only)  to make 10 mugs. They'd have to wholesale for ...idk, $20? Maybe $25? OK, that's not all that much, in the world of handmade mugs. 

I also will save a little time on the glazing end, as these - I think - will not even need flashing slip. I am hoping for the peachy-grey of Bmix + soda glass for the background, and the porcelain slip to be a somewhat-glossy white. Probably white inside, although my mind keeps tugging me towards a pale iron-chromate grey. Not a glaze I currently have but easy enough to alter a recipe. 

Etsy Wholesale Update

Received this ^^ in my inbox today!  I've started my linesheet already. As of this second it's only got one item on it but check it out if you like. 

Am I the eternal optimist? Or do I never learn? Or are those different ways of saying the same thing? Either way, I am quite excited about this, in spite of my previous experiences with Etsy. If it goes well, if it goes poorly, you'll read it all here.

Here We Go Again: Etsy Wholesale

Remember my love/hate relationship with Etsy? I love to shop there - mostly for supplies* - and hatehatehate to sell there. Or rather I'd love selling there, if I ever actually sold anything! (I technically still have a store - two in fact, one for pottery and one for soap, but there's nothing in either of them.) Two things made me walk away from Etsy last time:

1. I realized I was spending as much time promoting as I do making stuff, chasing after the Etsy dream. 
2. I noticed when people buy things from Etsy, that's how they describe it: "I got it on Etsy." The seller's name is lost to the mists of history. So all that promoting? Benefits Etsy more than the seller.I decided if I was going to promote, I might as well be promoting me.
    

The fees were adding up, too, as I had to keep listing and re-listing to keep my items visible a search. 

Ugh, I am having flashbacks. I swore off Etsy more than once but now? Now there's Etsy wholesale. The thing is, I've been wishing there was a high profile online means to reach wholesale buyers - kind of an ACC Baltimore, online. Wholesale show are crazy expensive, and I am small enough as a business that I couldn't fill the 50K worth of orders that would make it worthwhile. The only other way to find accounts is to email & follow up with in-person visits - suuuuper inefficient. 

Etsy Wholesale would allow me to expand my handful of wholesale accounts, to maybe two handfuls. I wouldn't need to expand to "a truckload" just to make a show worthwhile. 

No listing fees, that's big. It doesn't make sense, to me, to be asked to pay before I sell anything! You do have to apply - I have started that process already - and who knows? Maybe I'll write all this angst and get declined anyway. I'm not entirely sure what they criteria are, and I am reading comments from lots of established Etsy sellers that their application was declined, so I guess that's good, right? It means they have standards, you won't have paper-clip-on-twine necklaces, unless they are really amazing paper-clip-on-twine necklaces. 

As I poke around further, I've discovered that Etsy Wholesale has existed since 2014. How did I not know this? I just found out recently because I saw a Facebook ad. It the intervening time, have you had an Etsy Wholesale shop? Is there another online wholesale venue that I've missed? What have your experiences been? Would love some input on this. 

*Now I guess there's Etsy Studio for supplies. When did that happen?