Deciding to open your own handmade shop is VERY exciting!
Your mind starts spinning with plans of what products you will make, what your online handmade shop will look like, how you will market your products . . .
and you may have already started doing things like:
Which is really smart and a good idea, you definitely want to make lists of all the tasks that you need to do.
But . . .
there is one very important part of planning a new handmade shop that I think a lot of handmade shop owners don’t realize they need to do . . .
and it is really important work.
Now what is different about this work is that it’s not visible at first –
What I mean by that is,
It is not work that is tangible, like taking product pictures or creating a website.
But this work is really critical for the success of your shop—
—and so this week I wrote an article to explain these behind the scenes super-important questions to answer BEFORE you start setting up your handmade shop.
So, ready? Let’s dive in.
A mistake that I see a lot of new handmade shop owners make is this:
Immediately after deciding to start a handmade business, you want to jump straight into opening your shop on Etsy or Shopify or setting up your website, because that feels like the practical thing to do.
And doing that certainly feels like you’re making progress on your new business: when people ask “how is your new shop going?” you can say, “Great actually! – I’ve got my website set up” or “I set up my Facebook page want to see it?” . . . you have actual “things” you can say you’ve done and show people.
But the reality is, by jumping straight into those “tangible” shop creation details, what you’re actually doing is skipping sooo many steps that you’ll end up having to go back and do later if you want to get sales and avoid hitting a plateau with your shop or worse… launching and hearing crickets!
So today I want to talk to you about what you need to do BEFORE you start your handmade shop.
We will talk about both what you need to THINK ABOUT – and what you need to DO – to be sure that when you open it, your handmade shop is a success!
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First I want to talk to you about the important things to think about before starting a handmade business.
For this step you need to spend valuable time on strategic planning – because this strategic planning will determine a lot of what you will “DO” to create a successful shop.
This work is so so so important, even though it’s work that no one can really see and you don’t have the satisfaction of doing something tangible like creating a website or taking product pictures.
And if you do it up front, it has a compound effect— which means it will make all the things you do after this work be much more effective— and THAT will make your shop more successful! I call this “front loading the work.”
(If you haven’t read about front loading the work and how it pays off for your handmade shop be sure to check out my article that shows how your work up front will pay off big time down the road and will help your shop grow much faster . . . make sure to read this article next!)
Now before I talk about the specific things you should think about before opening a shop, I want to clarify something:
At first look, you will read these questions and you might think they are fluffy or surface level, and be like “Well DUH Deb of course I thought about that.”
BUT. . . we are going to go beyond the obvious into critical details behind the questions, and you’ll see why I want you to think about it, when you should think about it (and why), and what pitfalls I’m trying to help you avoid.
Let’s talk about the first question and I will show you what I mean. I’ll first show you the “obvious question” and then we’ll dive into the REAL issue behind the obvious question so you can understand what you need to do.
So I know when you read this, you’re thinking “well of course I thought about THAT!” . . . and you wonder why I would point out such an obvious thing and think you need to be told to do it!
Because of course everyone thinks about how much money they want to make (many of us dream of all the money we want to make, right?!).
So let’s talk about the real issue behind this question.
The common mistake a lot of makers make is, they think they’ll figure a lot of it as they go and they only think about the money question in general terms, like “enough to quit my day job”, or “I guess I’ll see what’s possible”
Often this is because you might not be super confident at first and not too sure about how much you can really make so leaving it open or a bit vague feels like a safe bet. It’s not.
What I want you to realize here is how important it is to answer this question really specifically, and how your answer may change how you set up and run your shop.
If you don’t do this, what happens is instead of setting up your shop and your business to fulfill your specific money goal, you end up with a shop that isn’t designed to reach your goals, quite by accident.
Here is the trap that can happen: Once your shop is open, if your goal of making money is too general, you start to get busy with making sales and creating products. When that happens, you need to try and organize your workload, and you start follow the advice of other people:
And so then what you create is their shop, or a replica of their shop, which isn’t necessarily designed to reach your goals. . .
and you miss a very important opportunity to set your shop up from the get-go to support the exact profit that you want to make.
Versus if from the very beginning you had asked yourself this question and answered it very specifically “I want to make $40,000 a year, but I want to take summers off, so I actually want to make $40,000 in 9 months, which means I need to make an average profit of $4500/month AND I need to sell products that sell well from September to May. . .
. . . well now you can look at products you are thinking of selling and evaluate how many of them you would need to sell and if that’s realistic or if you need to consider other products instead to reach that money goal.
And now you have achieved the REAL goal of the money question!
So once you’ve done this, the next thing to think about is, what about time?
Now you might again be thinking “yes Deb I thought about this it’s kind of obvious. . . “
. . . like you might know that you can’t wait to own your own business because then you get to control your schedule, and decide when to take days off, . . . and it just sounds glorious!!
. . . but let’s dig a little deeper.
So again, just like in the money question, you need to be much more specific when you answer this question. Don’t just ask if time off is a priority for you, ask:
For example, let’s say you want to sell advent wreaths. And you make BEAUTIFUL advent wreaths, and people will pay a lot of money for them, so they fit your money goals for question #1.
But when you wrote down the specific details of the time off you want to have in your business, you wrote that you want to make sure you have time to see your family at Christmas, and they live far away.
Suddenly you may realize that advent wreaths aren’t going to be a match for the lifestyle you desire, which includes traveling and spending time with family over the holidays.
And this “obvious” question suddenly became a very important one that kept you from choosing a product that didn’t match your lifestyle goals.
So now that you’ve worked through your time goals, the next question to ask yourself is:
Now here again you are probably thinking – that’s a pretty simple question Deb!
But it’s not – because if you don’t think it through, first you are going to look for the answer on the internet or from friends or other shop owners, and if you do that you may end up picking a product to make that doesn’t support your goals or doesn’t make you happy.
If you don’t think this through for yourself and instead look for guidance online, you will find a lot of people sharing their opinions very strongly on the internet saying things like: you should not sell, for example, one of a kind items because they’re really hard to sell. . .
or that you should focus exclusively on selling digital products because that’s the way to make passive income and that you can sell your designs in a very scalable way . . .
or that you should only sell reproducible items.
And the reality is that none of these are true— you can do any of those and be successful! You can sell one of a kind, you can sell reproducible items, you can sell digital products, or you can sell a mix of all of those but the question is what do you want to do?
And what will you be happy to do consistently for years?
You DON’T want to ask what the people who make money are doing, and then reverse engineer to do the same thing, because that’s not going to lead you to where you want to go. That’s going to lead you to where they are!
If you want to go to a place where your handmade business sells exclusively one of a kind items, you are going to build a strategy around that and so when your shop is open and you look for advice online as to how to grow it, you’re going to be able to filter out advice that doesn’t relate to this specific category of products or to this specific handmade business model.
And that is why these questions that seem so surface level are actually very, very, VERY important— because they will dictate everything you do once your shop is open and will allow you to cut out a lot of the noise that exists on the internet of people trying to tell you what to do so that you can focus on the strategy that is really going to take you where you want to go.
Can you start to see how all of this thinking and planning will change everything you do moving forward, and how important it is not to skip it?
Trust me, you will be tempted . . . it is SO much more fun to do things like create your website and make your products. But I want you to hear my voice cheering you on in your head saying DON’T GIVE IN! . . . because I know how much doing this planning will help make your business successful!
It also avoids the scenario where a few months or a few years into your business you realize that you aren’t happy because your business isn’t supporting you financially, or furthering your lifestyle goals (which is equally frustrating).
I have seen too many handmade shop owners work really really hard only to realize they have built a business that they don’t like, because it doesn’t support their goals or the things that are important to them in life.
I have an article that walks you through the “what products should I sell” decision process in great detail, I’ll include the link down below!
So— now that we’ve talked about what to think about before starting a business, let’s talk a bit about what to do before starting your handmade shop.
Now that you have done all the very important work of what to think about before you open your handmade shop, you are ready for the more sequential steps of what to DO before opening your handmade business.
For this stage you will work in a very linear fashion and go through all the steps that you need to do in order to create products, pricing, packaging, and all that kind of stuff.
It can be a lot to keep track of, so to make it easier I put all of them in a free guide for you called “The Maker’s Roadmap Snapshot” which I can send you so you can have a look!
Essentially what this guide will do is give you a visual map and checklist of the different things you need to do in order to start your handmade shop:
DOWNLOAD THE MAKERS ROADMAP!
This 35 page guide is our most downloaded and loved resource and will guide you through each step from planning to launching to growing your handmade shop – and everything in between!
It helps you set up your shop successfully – and do things in the right order – so you NEVER have to go back and do things again. I call this front-loading the work: the work you do will have a compound effect and each step will build on the one before, ensuring your handmade shop’s success.
Sooooo . . . if you’re over the moon excited to do these steps and start planning your soon-to-be wonderfully successful handmade shop, click the link below to download your free Maker’s Roadmap Snapshot and get started on the right foot!
Thanks for reading and until next time, au revoir!
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