Introduction to the topic
It is a well-known fact that the vast majority of people have a hobby that they devote their free time to and that brings them pleasure. Many hobbies are in one way or another connected with creativity - knitting, making jewelry or cosmetics, sewing, modeling and much more. And almost everyone who creates something with their own hands once wondered: shouldn’t I start selling my products? And these are not utopian thoughts at all, because in the modern world it is quite easy to direct your creative potential to attract additional income.
Any thing made by hand, today, as always, has much greater value than something mass-produced in a factory. Each item created by hand is unique; even the master himself cannot reproduce it exactly. It is also captivating that every hand-made thing contains a piece of the master’s soul, his love for his work. Buyers appreciate these qualities of handmade products, and therefore are ready to give them preference.
Next, we will analyze in detail who is suitable for this method of earning money, such as selling your handicrafts, where to find buyers and how to convince them to give preference to your products, and most importantly, how the Internet can help in this difficult matter.
A hobby that generates income. It's possible
How to choose a hobby you like so that it also generates income?
Some enterprising people, of their own free will or because literally “necessity forced them,” decided to turn their favorite business into a profitable business, into an income-generating hobby.
You can teach, write, talk about, or consult about your passions. You can also make videos about your hobby, make and sell products related to it; you can become a coach and “train” other people in your chosen activity. There are a lot of ways, everyone can make money doing what they love.
Many hobbies allow you to work from home, and this is a very big advantage. But, be that as it may, depending on your experience and qualifications, desire and determination, having chosen a hobby, you can make money from it in various ways. But these methods still need to be found and implemented.
Don’t be lazy: once you’ve decided what kind of hobby you can make money from, take the time to analyze in more detail what profit potential your future business has.
The business plan you wrote will help you figure this out. Then the picture will be, if not entirely truthful (plans are good, but there are also surprises), then at least more complete - it will be clear what you need right away and what later.
Who is this way of earning money suitable for?
Anyone who can create an interesting product with their own hands can earn additional money by selling what they create. The craving for the unique and interesting gives such an opportunity to everyone. Can you knit a sweater with your eyes closed? Create interior toys, blankets or clothes for sale. Do you love working with soft and pliable clay? Garden and home figures or original ceramic products for flowers and kitchens are in great demand. Can you even create an exclusive decoration from waste material? Many women dream of just this. It doesn’t matter what you do - sew, sculpt, assemble, solder, write or cast. The main thing is to find your audience.
In order to start making money from your hobby, you only need two things: the ability to make quality things and a client base. With the first point, everything is quite prosaic - you need to be confident in the quality and long life of your products, or you need to work hard and get better at making these indicators competitive. After all, no one wants to buy something that looks like a first attempt, or falls apart in the first week of use. The second point depends more on your luck and ability to present yourself and your product. You should have at least ten items in your assortment that will show what you are capable of, as well as reviews of your products, albeit from friends, colleagues and relatives, but honest, and very preferably, with photographs. This will help new clients trust you. We'll talk about how to build a client base a little later.
Where to begin?
Start by designing your page on different social networks. Surely, you have friends on Instagram, Facebook, Odnoklassniki and other Internet resources. Let them be the first to see your work, ask them to evaluate your creativity. Business starts with warm contacts, on social networks - this is everyone with whom you have ever communicated or simply liked.
Offer your goods for sale in shops closest to your home, participate in fairs and exhibitions. Turning a hobby into a corporation is a long process, but it does not require large investments. The one thing you invest the most in is your time.
How to buy an inexpensive car in Germany: traders in the northwest and Swabia are more reliable
Make shopping lists: how smart spending saves your wallet and nerves
Funny incidents from the history of world brands: why Ikea is called that
What kind of income can you expect from selling handmade products?
This method of earning does not have a maximum threshold. The cost of products consists of their type, quality, cost of material and, of course, how labor-intensive the creation process was. One of the easiest types of handmade products that are easy to sell is soap making. The materials for it do not cost exorbitant amounts of money, the creation process itself can be mastered quite quickly, so that already at the start you can earn from 6,000 rubles per month for handmade soap. Naturally, the more complex the product is to create, the more expensive it can be sold. For example, for creating exclusive brooches or necklaces you can earn from 10,000 rubles a month, and for clothes sewn or knitted by hand - from 20,000.
Your income will directly depend on how much effort and time you put into your business, as well as how many buyers you attract. There is more than one example of how craftsmen began to sell their products, for example, clay figurines in various themes, devoting four hours to this business every day, and receiving 30,000 rubles or more. As was said, there is simply no limit to how much you can earn from handmade products, because their value is higher than that of mass-produced items.
The spice jar has become a multi-million dollar business.
An HR manager named Sanjay loved the spices of his mother, who prepared them with her own hands by combining different spices. Her passion was making beautiful little tea and spice boxes. When she retired, her standard of living decreased, so her son came up with a way to help his mother earn a little extra money. Who would have thought that spices packaged in handmade boxes would soon turn into a large Spice Kitchen company, co-founded by Sanjay.
Economic dependents: how to teach children the basics of financial literacy
In India, old buses are being converted into food trucks
Warm-up your fingers: exercises necessary for sedentary work
The first small batch of the “starter kit” was sold on eBay, then the second, third, orders came in, Sanjay presented his mother’s spices and boxes at exhibitions. Today the company employs 200 salespeople, box assemblers and spice packers.
This is how even someone else’s hobby can become a profitable business.
What is relevant in the market of handmade products
The easiest way to analyze the popularity of handmade products and their types in Russia is to visit the largest handmade trading platform “Fair of Masters”. If you want to go international, we recommend visiting the Etsy website.
So. The most popular product category at the Crafts Fair is the jewelry category. It includes everything that people traditionally decorate themselves with: earrings, beads, pendants, bracelets, brooches and everything like that. Almost anyone can create unique handmade jewelry - from a blacksmith to a seamstress, because the materials can be any. Jewelry wire, felt, wool, thread, clay, natural materials, leather, metal - this is not a complete list of available materials. If you can’t seem to create something from scratch, but you have excellent taste, you can always buy blanks and consumables and assemble something amazing from them. Even people who are passionate about chemistry and physics can make money from jewelry - through the magical process of galvanization. Such jewelry is created on the basis of natural materials, looks unusual and expensive, and is also in great demand.
The next popular product category is various interior decorations. This is also a fairly broad area, because it includes everything you can use to decorate your home: interior dolls and toys, cozy blankets and carpets, figurines and figurines, vases, pet beds and much more. A product such as mug coasters deserves special attention. This small but functional item is increasingly gaining momentum, both here and abroad. This cute little thing will save any surface of the house from stubborn stains, and will also become an interesting accent. These stands are easy to make and can be made from almost any material.
Another category of popular handmade goods is handmade clothing. This is a rather complicated and expensive process, but in our age of fashion and style, as well as a love for exclusivity, more and more people buy clothes not in stores, but from seamstresses and knitters. After all, it’s always nice to warm up in the winter with a cozy sweater that was knitted just for you, and in the summer to put on “that very dress” that was once born in your imagination, and now you are holding it in your hands. Here it is also worth mentioning the customization of clothing, a process in which an item purchased in a store is painted, decorated with embroidery, appliqué, or even completely remade into something new. There are a lot of transformation options; there will always be those who want something made by you.
Products that are closely related to holidays are in special seasonal demand. New Year, March 8, Defender of the Fatherland Day, everything connected with these dates sells like hot cakes on the eve. But, since we don’t have many such pleasant dates, creating exclusively themed products cannot be turned into regular income, but you can always leave it as a seasonal part-time job.
The Crafts Fair can be a good platform to display your products, but you shouldn’t rely on it alone. Perhaps you are creating something much more complex and exclusive than the above items. In this case, it’s worth trying yourself at several venues, and leaving the “Masters’ Fair” as an additional one.
How and where to find buyers
Of course, the first thing you should launch when starting to sell your products is word of mouth. Ask your acquaintances, friends, family and colleagues to tell others about what you do. As a little self-promotion, you can give them as a gift or sell at cost something you made, something not false, but beautiful and of high quality. This way, word of mouth will spread the word about you based on actual user experience.
The most popular and effective way to build a customer base is social networks. You can create your own groups in the most popular ones: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Facebook, it’s also worth creating a working page on Instagram. You should invite everyone you know to these pages. There you can create a convenient catalog, post all the new products and prices, easily contact the buyer, and also add content on similar topics for inspiration, or your own videos with the work process. Gradually, the group will reach the top recommended ones, and the flow of clients will increase.
As an additional way to promote your product, you can consider collaborating with stores that sell handmade goods. Such sites now exist in almost every large and medium-sized city. In fact, these sites are filled with goods with the help of craftsmen who rent space on the shelf and replenish it as the goods are sold. This rental does not cost a lot of money. If you live in a small town or simply where there is no such store nearby, you can negotiate with flower shops, souvenir shops, islands with decorations and other similar places. Most likely, you will have to share part of your earnings with these sites, but they will also take a little.
Separately, it is worth mentioning various handmade fairs and festivals, where, for a small fee, you can equip your showcase and get new customers.
Online master classes and training videos can be a completely inexpensive way to create advertising for yourself. By fixing the camera above your workplace while creating the next masterpiece, and then speeding up the resulting video, you will create content that is very popular as a direction, and also shows well how the magic of creating a product is created. After such a video, I involuntarily want to say: “Give me two!” But this method only works if you do something really at the highest level.
Online bulletin boards, such as Avito and Yula, can also be a good additional platform for selling your products. You can simply place sales ads there and wait for buyers to write to you. The advantage of these platforms is that real people are most likely to contact you. And with the help of these services you can organize delivery to any city in Russia.
The last way to advertise yourself and your work is to connect to paid advertising. This method is quite expensive; there is a possibility that sales will not cover the costs of the advertising campaign. The advantage of this method is the opportunity to hire a person who, for a certain percentage of income, will completely take on all the work of organizing. This is quite convenient, because you can completely focus on creating items. But this method also has a downside - such advertising can bring you a larger flow of orders than you can process.
Stories of those who sell their creativity
One friend shared a very real story. She created simple New Year's decorations - Christmas tree decorations, decorative stockings, garlands and the like. Then she mastered soap making, honing her skill, and right before the season of mass gift buying - in early December, she created pages with soap on VKontakte and Instagram. To sufficiently popularize these pages, it was simply necessary to ask all my friends to repost from the groups. As a result, by taking the right shot and offering people something unique and cute, she earned about 10 thousand rubles and a good customer base before the holidays. When the New Year season ended, she changed the theme of the products, and the customers returned, now 10,000 is her stable income.
There is also a well-known story of a girl who did what she liked, and eventually became the founder of a whole trend in modeling. These were decorations with so-called “tooth flowers”. The creepy and predatory theme very soon found its fans, and since then its popularity has been growing. The assortment now includes not only jewelry, but also molds that are hand-cast based on figurines molded by her, jaws and claws of various predators, which are gladly taken by puppeteers and those who sew toys, 3D printing, as well as paid master classes, where everything is described in detail, from the initial selection of materials to how to achieve maximum realism of the product.
Some people, even after moving to another country, do not abandon their love of creativity. For example, one woman living in Thailand gained enough fame there to turn her hobby into her only source of income. Local residents really loved the handmade leather goods that the woman originally sewed for herself. Over time, the number of orders increased, but even the birth of a child did not force the woman to give up her favorite hobby. Now it brings good money, as well as happiness, because the work you love so much cannot be a burden.
All these stories prove that if you love your business and really want to develop in it, making money will not be so difficult. After all, the most important thing is desire, with it everything will work out!
