Skip to main content

A few lessons learned from my first pen sales.

Well have been back from Minnesota for a little over a week, two days after getting back I had my second sale.  Unlike the first one that was in the middle of the embassy this one was set up on a weekend during a community garage sale event where it was mostly the local national employees as the customers rather then the American employees of the embassy.  Between the two sales this is what I learned.

1.  Know your audience- For my first sale I did not have enough smaller pens, most of my pens were to big and heavy for the women customers which contribute 1/2 my customer base!   For my second sale my inventory was much to high end, as I mention below I did not have enough low end products for the type of audience I had and honestly I should have had much more of the low end even for the first sale.

2.  Schedule some time after the sale when you will be available to make the custom orders that are bound to come from a sale.  I really did not think I would have the orders I did after my first sale (about 10 custom items were ordered).  Leaving right after the sale for vacation may have cost me a couple of additional orders as well.   Striking while the iron is hot will undoubtably increase sales.

3. Everyone is a customer! During the garage sale, I did not see much traffic other then the kids of the other people there manning booths for the garage sale.  With nothing else to do I entertained the kids for most of the sale, with only 10 min left I had not sold one pen.  In the last 10 Minutes I sold eight, each child who visited my booth during the sale came back with their parent and bought every low end pen I had in stock.  Some even took advances on their allowances to so they could have a custom pen.   Which brings me to my last point!

4.  Variety is the key, just because you as a craftsman like something does not mean the customer base will have the same tastes!  During my first sale I was shocked at how quickly the big bulky looking wine stoppers I made sold out.  On the flip side the cool looking letter openers I thought would sell are still sitting in my inventory.   During the second sale, the pens I figured I would have forever, the pens I first made when I was still learning the craft, the one that were too bulky or plain looking, those are the ones the kids loved an bought.

I hope this helps those of you who follow my blog who are into the wood turning!

Here is this weeks turning.


Three shaving kits preordered from the first sale!


The Acrylic Pens in a patriotic theme.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

April is Gonna Suck, Embrace the Suck!!

Well this week’s blog is more a personal update then the last few have been.  It is about 7 weeks until I start my terminal leave from the Army, I will leave the Army for home for the last time on Good Friday and get home right before Easter.  The timing is not lost on me that my next chapter will start in full on Easter.  We started doing our taxes today and part of that was figuring out how much we have already put into the farm, not including property or the truck we are over $35K in and that does not even count most of the livestock which we will not have  or purchase until this year.  That is buying mostly second-hand equipment folks and I still have some major pieces to buy, farming ain’t cheap. That being said, I am still confident this was the right move.  I ran into one of my former NCOs from when I was a detachment Sgt in Korea for lunch this week, he was one of three buck Sergeants I had, who basically made my job easy there (except they cou...

Sourdough Fail, it Happens

I am trying to get better about posting my blog every week, it does get difficult at times as I am still in DC for the next 9 weeks or so before returning for good to the homestead.   Some of you have noticed there is more posts lately about things like baking, particularly sour dough bread baking rather than farming/planting/livestock stuff.  That is because that is something I can work on in DC while I wait, and it is skills that will transfer.  I have been working on sourdough bread lately as it is a cultured food, similar to cheese’s and yogurts (which I want to also work on) so it allows me get some of the basics down to dealing with live cultures and further reduces the need for commercial yeasts. The plan for this weekend was to make a loaf of sourdough sandwich bread as well as a sour dough king cake.  I even bragged about doing it on Facebook before the fact.  Admittedly after last week’s success on the artesian sour dough bread I was probably...

Applying for a Grant, Kinders, a Web Page and Bee Poop

It is hard to believe that I am now less than 3 weeks away from signing out of a military installation for the last time and going to the farm live full time. Things have been pretty busy since the last post, I did make it home for a weekend, but the weather was still to bad to do much outside with too much snow on the ground.   On a good note I did got a lot of my woodworking and pen supplies organized and set up while I was home and we got the Saltwater Aquarium stocked with some fish and invertebrates, still 6 months to a year out from coral however but after it being in storage for over 6 years it was nice to have it running again. Most of the work on the farm lately has been behind the screens, working on a business plan and financials in order to apply for a grant from the Farmers Veteran Coalition (https://www.farmvetco.org/).   We are applying for the grant to help pay for running electricity to the farm property, the cost of which will be about $4200.   We ...