Consider Consignments

When you are trying to find new customers for your handmade items you may want to consider offering them at a local store that features local artist’s items for sale. Most of the time they will offer to sell your items on consignment while on some rare occasions you may be able to sell them wholesale. That would be ideal because you will get paid right way but mostly they only want to do a consignment agreement.

Generally, that means you agree to give them your items to sell in their store for you and get a commission on each sale. We have tried this before at a vintage store that wanted to expand their offerings to include local artists products along with their antiques. We could pay them a monthly/quarterly shelf fee and they got a certain percentage around 30% Or they would get 50% of any sales without the monthly fee. They would handle the arrangements of the items within the store all we have to do was tag them with our price and name. Since the owner is friends with my sister-in-law we felt comfortable leaving them with the store owner and she would give any earnings to her along with a report of what was sold. We were traveling a lot and it took us 6 months to get back in the area to check the progress. We sold some items and the owner even bought some herself for Christmas presents. Sadly, she had a couple of burglaries and asked us to come pick up our items until she could afford a better alarm system and secure the store better.

This past summer we received a notice on one of our Facebook group pages about a local craft store opening up in our area called Things Crafty. They are offering craft classes, crafting parties and a gift shop featuring local handmade artists products. They have two tiers as well. One commission percentage for members ($30/quarter and 30% of sales) and another for straight commissions (40%) on sales. Members get preferential listings on their website, are able to book the classroom to teach classes, can participate in any trunk sales or crafts events they organize and can offer as many items as they like in the gift shop. If you want to conduct crafting classes or parties they get a 30% commission of tickets sales for members and 50% commission for non-members. Non-members are limited to 5 items in each category they make.

There are several special considerations you really need to make when placing items for consignment. The most important one is that you have to create items specifically for that store. You cannot have them listed on any other online store because you will never know when or if they have been sold. Most consignment agreements also ask that you leave them with the store for a certain length of time before removing them to give them a chance to be seen and sold. You will want to take pictures of each of the items and keep a listing for your own records of every item that you give them. You will want small but tasteful tags on every single item with the prices you are asking and perhaps your initials. I include lengths and widths on some of my items so that the customer can tell at a glance that something will fit their needs. If you have extra displays for your items you may want to give them to the store as well. Some of the owners we have encountered would prefer to place your items where and how they think they will best be displayed. Of course, you will want to give them some of your business cards as well.