$1911

was donated
RE: Selling friendship braclets by mischieviousbob 11 years ago

If bracelet making is just a hobby you don't have to worry too much about it, though I would still recommend doing some equations to make sure that you are actually making money. A good starting point is to add materials costs, fees (if you're doing a market assume you'll sell x number of bracelets and divide the fee between them), and a decent wage for how much time you spend making them (for starting out that will probably between $5-$7 per hour). At the very very least you should be charging whatever that total is.

I'll disagree with elfmaiden a little on venues - in most cases, selling online (when done properly) is going to be more profitable. You can easily pay $15-$25 per day/weekend even for a small farmer's market, and to be keeping yourself in the black you'd need to pull in around $100-$300 in that day/weekend. And if your prices are incredibly low (I am someone who you'd probably think had "inflated" prices) you're going to have to bring in even more. And if you have a bad day you're stuck with the full booth fee anyway, and you have to spend the whole day there selling, etc. You also have to deal with the crowd you're getting, which may be unwilling to pay prices you need to charge in order to make a profit.

To sell on Etsy, on the other hand, most of your fees are incurred when you actually sell something, so while you're starting up you could be paying as low as $5-$10 a month, and that fee will only increase a lot when you start selling and therefore have money to pay the fees. Also, as long as you put in the work on your photos and listings you can attract the right kind of customer - I've sold $600-$1000 worth of bracelets in one go, as well as sold single bracelets costing $50-$65 each. The latter might have happened at a fair, but certainly not the former!

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