Jewelry and things

[featherynscale]

Saturday, I packed up my stuff and went out to the Snake Saturday festival. They have a small arts and crafts show, and it was very inexpensive and easy to get into, so I figured I'd haul a table and some jewelry out there and see if I could make any money... It didn't go as well as I had hoped.

The festival has a lot of things associated with it. There's a parade, a barbecue competition, a kids' midway with rides and games, fair food, music, auto club exhibits, and this art/craft show. The arts and crafts tent is set up in a parking lot, between the barbecuers, the car exhibitors, and the midway. In my initial estimations, this was going to be perfect. People would be wandering through getting barbecue, and going to the midway, and then they'd see this art show and come over. This would have worked, except that the barbecue was not for general eating -- they are prohibited by Clay County Health from actually selling or giving away the barbecue to festivalgoers. So there's not really any point in walking through the barbecue tents and trailers, is there? You're just smelling something you can't have. The midway did attract some folks, but mostly only those with small children. The car people were not the sort of antique autos that I had imagined, the sort of thing that attracts people from the street -- they were ultralight racecars, which are probably very interesting to racecar people, but not so much to the average joe off the street. And then, the tent we were in had no signs or label or anything to indicate that there was anything of interest inside the tent.

The result of this is that I sold a handful of pieces, and made $80. It covered my table fee, so I did better than any of the other people in my part of the tent, but still was perhaps not worth dragging my arse up to North Kansas City early on a Saturday morning and sitting out in the cold all day. The only people in the show who seemed to be making any money were people who had kids' toys (one guy had marshmallow guns made of PVC pipe), and people who had ignored the "arts/crafts" requirement of having a table and were selling St. Pat's Day t-shirts, deelyboppers, mardi gras-style beads, and other green kitsch.

Also, and this is what makes me a bad person, every time I make jewelry specifically for a particular showing, I make a piece according to every principle of wretched taste, and I have a bet on with myself about whether or not it will sell. It always does. This weekend's shiny chunk of awful was a piece built around a pendant that I'd gotten in a random assortment -- it was a large chunky cross-shaped thing, with turquoise enamel and little tiny yellow and pink flowers on. I paired it with turquoise heishe beads, bright pinky-purple glass in the same shade as the flowers, and bright blue triangle glass. The overall effect was somewhere between "candy" and "vomit". Every person who passed my table in the first few hours of the show picked it up and told me how lovely it was. It finally sold about halfway through the day. On the one hand, I'm deeply offended. On the other, I have two more of those awful crosses in my stash, and I'm betting now that if I act quickly, I can get rid of them this season. It seems like at any given show, the two or three things on the table that I like least are what sells. I'm starting to think maybe it's me.

Anyway, the other thing is that I continue to have a large stock of jewelry available. I'm starting to put it online on Etsy, which is pretty cheap and easy to work with. I'm hoping that it's as easy to buy from as it is to list on, but I really don't know. There are only a few pieces up now, but I will be adding more as days go by. If you're interested, take a look at my shop. And feel free to let me know if it's my sense of aesthetics that's gone awry, or the rest of the world's. Knowing the answer to that question would save me a lot of trouble in the long run.

Comments

[bloominglotus.livejournal.com]

Nope, your stuff is very pretty!

I have always found Etsy very easy to use as a buyer.

[celticwhistlin.livejournal.com]

this is what makes me a bad person, every time I make jewelry specifically for a particular showing, I make a piece according to every principle of wretched taste, and I have a bet on with myself about whether or not it will sell. It always does.

I don't think this makes you a bad person. I think it is cool as hell!!

I wonder sometimes at people's taste. I believe there is no right or wrong to it. There is only similar and different. Some people's (most) taste is just different than yours... ;-p

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Website looks good, except that the closeup in Leaf and Vine is weirdly pixelated. Any idea what happened there? Also, the "necklace" in the title of the midnight moon piece isn't capitalized like the rest.

I'll help you take more photos this week if you like. And for the record, I don't think you're awful for making what people will buy. kittenpants had the same dilemma, remember?

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Yeah, once I started posting things, I realized that they resize your photos to fit their template. That closeup isn't big enough, so they stretched it. I can fix it this evening, probably.

On sales of vomit

[diermuid.livejournal.com]

What I have found in observing other leather artisian's and armorer's sales, is that if you want to sell 'art', it has to stand out. If someone else can make the same thing, then it is common and passé. The trick is to have a few vomit pieces mixed in with cheapy easier pieces so that patrons can see the comparison, and how they stand out amongst the crowd. Currently, there is far less money spend on trinkety stuff, so the people I know that have managed to stay afloat since the recession all have something that distinguished them even when the money was dripping from fingers.

I -do- look forward to an economy that was like the late 90's again, that is the best time to start a self-based business if you want to really take off. I'm waiting for the next swell. But even if I DO quit my day job and make fetishwear/armor/ren gear/pagan accoutrements/distinct biker gear, I will aim to target my wares as hardcore as one must do in todays slower economy, and that should (in theory) take me through the next lean period.

[zylch.livejournal.com]

So, if they could neither sell nor give away the BBQ, what were they doing? Cooking up loads of meat and then eating it themselves?

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Cooking up loads of meat, having it judged by a panel of five people who were apparently exempt from the health code requirement, and then either eating it themselves or packing it up and taking it home ('cause that's totally sanitary). Some of them did have some fairly large entourages, though, and I'm assuming that those people were there to eat the barbecue.

[celticwhistlin.livejournal.com]

I talked with a friend of my at Clay County and while she didn't know specifics, she suspected the reason behind the restriction was on of two things:

1. They didn't get the appropriate permit in time
2. Clay County is revising it's food handling code and the event (or the code) wasn't in line with what it should have been for the event.

[lilia-blackbear.livejournal.com]

this is what makes me a bad person, every time I make jewelry specifically for a particular showing, I make a piece according to every principle of wretched taste,

I do the same, actually. My mother told me once that I should occasionally crochet things I think are hideous, colors that I completely don't think go well together, styles that I would never wear myself. So at any show, I make a few ridiculously gross things, and those always go. And the things I really like seem to stick around until I finally wear/use them or end up giving them away as a gift.

[zianuray.livejournal.com]

I USED to deconstruct and necklace, candle, whatever that I thought turned out the slightest bit wrong or bleah. At the urging of one I won't name here, I took some stuff I considered downright HIDEOUS to a sale. And it sold. No bargaining, just "Oh, I MUST have it!" and hands over the full amount marked. *shakes head*

Now I just finish an item and put it in the *sell* pile and keep making!