Taking my business forward. How and do I need to rethink?

[flanajb]

Morning All,

Many of you have provided very kind feedback for my recent concrete desk lamps and concrete clocks and as a result I wanted to get opinion on how best to take said products and to start selling them. I was made redundant from my soulless corporate job last May and I am now looking at the bank balance and starting to think "ooh, there is about 4 months money left :-("

Ideally, I do not want to have to return to being an IT programmer and in all honesty I am not sure I would even get a job. The industry has changed and I was in a job where I was valued for my experience of the system rather than my development skills.

So given the above, I need to pull my finger out and try and get my products out there. I have the web site and the facebook page, but as you would expect, neither of these has resulted in a single order and I am at a loss regarding what to do. I don't want this venture to never get off the ground, especially, considering the time, effort and money that I have put in over the last 2 years to come up with products that I feel have potential.

Do I just need to accept that making any sort of living is not going to happen for sometime and I should park the business and just make / sell stuff at weekends and get a full time job?

If you have any valuable advice or pointers regarding how you would take these products forward, then I would be very appreciative of any pointers.

My web page / facebook details are below.

http://www.theconcretelab.co.uk
http://www.facebook.com/theconcretelab

Thanks

 

[RogerP]

Have you thought of selling on eBay or Amazon?

 

[EddyCurrent]

What about using somewhere like these ?

https://www.notonthehighstreet.com/join/signup
https://www.artfinder.com/ ( call it sculpture perhaps ?)

 

[Steve1066]

Have you tried selling to shops, I would phone/send an email to any furniture, light and interior design shop in any area were there is money, knightsbridge, Chelsea, Kensington, covent Garden. And towns like Exeter Oxford Cambridge and Chipping Norton.
You have a boutique product and it needs a boutique market.
Hope that helps.

 

[flh801978]

I cant really help with how to sell your products
They look exellent in your photos
But I feel that they are far too expensive untill YOU are a name or you may get coverage in glossy magazines
The lights to move on a direct sale website I would imagine need to be <£50
Clocks perhaps £30 ish
Or put them in trendy shops on sale or return but accept that they are going to take 50 %
I make custom parts for people so I'm lucky that mostly moneys no object in industry
but when making for homeowners/ hobbyists then sometimes i make stuff that i'm making a loss at,at my hourly rate i'e I cant make things fast enough to be competetive

I hope I'm wrong for your products because they look really good

Ian

 

[cammy9r]

Hi, while I too like the look of the products I also feel that they are far too expensive.
Look at material costs, possibly quite low the costly part will be your time for manufacture.
Try and set up enough moulds to allow for a mass production of sorts, maybe not mass but around 10 at least. When I am making something I feel it would only take a tiny bit longer to make two or three of the items providing the material is processed in batches.
This would perhaps bring the cost down and make them more appealing to consumers.
Making batches will also solve the other problem of the 2-3 weeks waiting, people don't wait unless it is out of stock and desirable, a latest must have.
I'm sure in big industry the more they churn out the cheaper it becomes but at the same time less exclusive.
Good luck in your venture as the products are very nice.

 

[mind_the_goat]

Etsy https://www.etsy.com/uk/
Getting traffic to your own website is very hard you need to get on the phone then take your clocks on tour.
Take the items to local galleries and craft outlets, clearly your margins will be hit but no point in having a good margin if you can't sell anything.
This place http://www.danselgallery.co.uk/gallery.html does wood items, so your desk clock may be suitable, but there are many other galleries in Dorset, take a visit to Boscombe for starters. Given the high prices I would suggest you should consider approaching some London based commercial galleries too.
Commercial Interior designers would likely be choosing items for offices, take the items to show people, don't just email photo's (see below)
High end furniture shops
Bespoke furniture makers with showrooms might be willing to put one on display.
Liberties

Ensure any items have your name on them to pick up repeat business direct to your own outlets.

Can you offer some sort of customisation?

In my opinion the photos on your website do not justify your prices, you are using an unusual material but this does not come across at all in the photos, you could just as easily be using plastic. It's going to be really hard to sell these from photo's but I think you could do better, try to show any texture, some close ups perhaps, or try playing with polarising filters on the lights and lenses. There is no sense of scale for the wall clocks and they do look photoshopped, try some real backgrounds to photograph them against. Add some better descriptions, weights, manufacturing process, add some arty BS about the contrast between fluid and intangible time against the solid and immutable concrete make them sound special and unique, which they are.

What movements do you use? Spending £1.5 on a movement for a £150 clock won;t help sell them, fit them with 'quality' movements and make sure you tell everyone. Fit self setting movements. eg http://www.mobatime.com/home.html

 

[MIGNAL]

Sell the clocks for £30 and you'll have to have them mass produced in China. You will literally have to sell them in the hundreds per month, maybe in the thousands. That makes the initial costs so much higher, with inherent greater risks. If they turn out to be very slow sellers you are left with a big loss.

 

[marcros]

i disagree about the price, providing that is a retail RRP type price, and there is sufficient margin in it for a retailer. if you were to sell direct for half of that price then you would never have the option of selling to trade- they wouldn't be able to complete.

I had read about the lamps without seeing pictures or prices. When I did see both, I was pleasantly surprised about both what you had produced (design and manufacturability), and the fact that they are priced at a boutique level. I agree with Steve1066.

 

[Sheffield Tony]

Hi, while I too like the look of the products I also feel that they are far too expensive.

It is such a problem for selling hand made items of any sort. Peoples' baseline idea of price is set by that of mass manufactured goods - and probably low quality ones at that. At a craft fair before Christmas I was asked how much for a footstool (I had one there that was just for show; I was demoing, not really selling). Well, 12 pole lathe turned components split from one billet of ash, assembled, and a woven seagrass seat. Takes me a couple of days. What do you say ?

Perhaps the Amazon/Ebay/Etsy etc route is worth a try ? Did anything become of Handmade at Amazon ?

 

[Rhossydd]

I am now looking at the bank balance and starting to think "ooh, there is about 4 months money left :-("
Do I just need to accept that making any sort of living is not going to happen for sometime and I should park the business and just make / sell stuff at weekends and get a full time job?

16 weeks is very likely to be too short a time to develop a business fast enough to provide a living, especially in Jan/Feb/Mar.
Don't let yourself be bankrupted by failing to take action to get a proper sustainable income now.

Many of you have provided very kind feedback

Be wary of people and friends being kind and not giving completely honest opinions. Ask the people who sell goods like this their opinion of them, they should tell you straight.

I have the web site and the facebook page, but as you would expect, neither of these has resulted in a single order

The chances of making sales from pages like this are pretty slim unless you have a big stream of people visiting.

If you have any valuable advice or pointers regarding how you would take these products forward, then I would be very appreciative of any pointers.

These look to be the sort of products brought by trendy people with plenty of disposable income. To sell to those you'll need to get the product into more 'designer' type shops (who will have slow turnovers and hence demand high margins), in places like London, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester etc, not the rural market towns. The other alternative to try to get them seen in glossy home style magazines, so you'd need to show them to the set dressers for those mags and persuade them to get them on shoots or plugged in design sections of mags. Also find any successful interior design blogs that have big followings and try to get the author to review and feature them.
Getting them into a big multiple like John Lewis would be ideal, but there are huge hoops to jump through and the process is glacially slow.

I assume you've 'done the numbers' and know exactly how much they cost to make and what your overheads are, so know how many you need to sell to make a living ? Is there a market for that number ?
Also that the products are completely legal to sell with all the necessary compliances and that you have sufficient insurances in place to cover any claims against you.
Local business associations can be useful for help on the more mundane/legal/financial aspects of running a business. If you haven't done some proper research on this do it soon. Being successful is mainly about selling and finance, not just building a good product.

 

[flanajb]

Some really good points made here and it is especially interesting to see the distinct split. Selling the clocks for £30 and the lamps for £50 would only be viable if I was to mass produce and get them made out of China or Eastern Europe where I can exploit cheap labour costs. I would not rule out such an idea, but it is not what I had originally intended.

I understand about economy of scale, but at the same time keep thinking back to a business quote where a seamstress was told to double her prices, but she was worried she'd lose half her clients. A mass production venture where all I do is rattle out clocks / lamps on a conveyor belt at knock down prices is not my idea of an enjoyable business model.

The comments regarding the photos are very valid. I am going to get some professional pictures taken with some really nice high resolution images of the concrete. Hopefully, it will show the visible sand grains and make them more appealing.

I have just applied to sell on 'Not On The High Street' so will wait and see what happens here.

As to the idea of selling in galleries. A clock at £175 rrp will most likely be sold to a gallery for < £100, so are you better off just selling direct to the public for £100?

 

[howser]

It might help if you list all that you are currently doing to try and sell your products ?.

I will give a few initial thoughts, they might seem harsh but you need to get past being offended by criticism (it can be hard when you have worked so hard on something), i have gone through a similar process with my business.

These are just some observations that instantly jump out at me having looked for no more than 2 minutes at your website.

1. It looks amateurish, like it was thrown together using dreamweaver and a schools guide to website building. Local councils can get away with this kind of crap website design, but someone trying to sell £10 worth of concrete for £300 cant. And i am not criticising your product btw, as i too sell simple bespoke products for big money.

2. Photography is pretty shocking, it does nothing for your products, pictures look dull and washed out, including the wood parts. Go on a photography course and learn how to present your products in the best light and also get some pictures with them in the surrounding for which they are intended, the harsh white blackout background does nothing for the grey concrete. Google Product lighting. (edit) Learn how to do this yourself it's not rocket science, dont piss away loads of money on getting this done professioanlly, become a good amateur instead. There are guides on the internet about product photography and lighting hard to photograph products.

3. You only have Paypal as a payment option, add another card (consider stripe for this) provider and bank transfer options ? again payment page looks amateurish and having only paypal as a payment option also suggests this.

4. I googled conrete lamps, concrete clocks, conrete labs, the concrete labs, even googling "theconcretelab" gave me no results for your website in google. If you aren't on the first page or 2 of google wether that be through organic search or adwords you are going to struggle to even get views never mind sales. (edit) you dont need to spend thousands on website design, something like opencart and a good template from template monster and you can have a far superior website for a hundred quid with all kinds of paymnet options built in.

5. As someone else mentioned, your prices seem very high to me, if you are going to convince people to spend that kind of money on your stuff, you better be convincing them from the second they click on your website with amazing pictures, like someone ele said i think product options such as different woods for the lamp stand and different hand colours for the clock etc would be good and simple to implement.

6. Dont underestimate b to b sales, as i found out myself one good business customer is better than 100 private sales, private sales give a nice boost to my income but business customers are where my big money orders come from, i imagine boutique hotel chains would like your products etc.

Unless you have a ton of money to throw at this to pay other people, you need to become a jack of all trades. Product Design, Photography, Website design, Marketing, Accounting, Production etc etc.

 

[Wizard9999]

Ah, I would have thought that market research should happen in parallel with product design, this is key to ensure you do not end up with a product with no market or that is pitched at too high a price point for the market that does exist.

To establish financial viability you need to establish what your cost to manufacture each product is, what margin you will make from direct sales via your website and on sales via other channels such as shops who you will need to sell to for a much lower price so they have a margin on the products, I would guess that a discount to retail of 30 to 50% is probably not unrealistic. Then take a conservative estimate on volumes. Margin times volume will give you contribution, from which you must then take the fixed costs of the business, repayments on any loans, etc. Finally work out what share the tax man will take of remaining profit. What is left after all of this is yours. Also, do not forget that if the revenue rises above a trigger point (was about £85k, but may be higher now) you are into the world of adding 20% VAT to your prices but this does mean you can reclaim VAT on expenditure though on balance the impact is likely to be negative overall. Do you think that you will get from zero sales to a level where you can support yourself if our months? To be brutally honest I would doubt it.

If that wasn't enough, you have a much more fundamental problem with the lamp. There is already a very similar product on sale, produced by a known 'name' in industrial design which won a design award back in 2009. This is being sold by one of the major online retailers of design lead household products. The price point they are selling at is higher, but with the similarity I think you may struggle to sell directly and / or find others to take your lamp unless there is 'clear water' between your lamp and the one that has been out there for years.

http://www.nest.co.uk/product/decode-heavy-desk-light

I am sure if this all sounds very negative, but I think you need to think very seriously about this before you 'burn' your remaining cash buffer over the next few months? Better to decide you need to find a paying job now than in four months time. Again, I am sorry if it sounds like I am trying to discourage you, I am not, just suggesting you need to be dispassionately realistic.

Terry.

 

[Rhossydd]

A clock at £175 rrp will most likely be sold to a gallery for < £100, so are you better off just selling direct to the public for £100?

If a gallery sells it, first remove the VAT they have to charge > £145 then they'll probably expect to make a big margin because of low volumes, so they'll expect to pay around £80 or so and possibly expect sale or return too.
You need to do the sums.

The market exists for them. Just walk around Hoxton or similar and you'll see that type of product at that price.

 

[flanajb]

I am now looking at the bank balance and starting to think "ooh, there is about 4 months money left :-("
Do I just need to accept that making any sort of living is not going to happen for sometime and I should park the business and just make / sell stuff at weekends and get a full time job?

16 weeks is very likely to be too short a time to develop a business fast enough to provide a living, especially in Jan/Feb/Mar.
Don't let yourself be bankrupted by failing to take action to get a proper sustainable income now.

Many of you have provided very kind feedback

Be wary of people and friends being kind and not giving completely honest opinions. Ask the people who sell goods like this their opinion of them, they should tell you straight.

I have the web site and the facebook page, but as you would expect, neither of these has resulted in a single order

The chances of making sales from pages like this are pretty slim unless you have a big stream of people visiting.

If you have any valuable advice or pointers regarding how you would take these products forward, then I would be very appreciative of any pointers.

These look to be the sort of products brought by trendy people with plenty of disposable income. To sell to those you'll need to get the product into more 'designer' type shops (who will have slow turnovers and hence demand high margins), in places like London, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester etc, not the rural market towns. The other alternative to try to get them seen in glossy home style magazines, so you'd need to show them to the set dressers for those mags and persuade them to get them on shoots or plugged in design sections of mags. Also find any successful interior design blogs that have big followings and try to get the author to review and feature them.
Getting them into a big multiple like John Lewis would be ideal, but there are huge hoops to jump through and the process is glacially slow.

I assume you've 'done the numbers' and know exactly how much they cost to make and what your overheads are, so know how many you need to sell to make a living ? Is there a market for that number ?
Also that the products are completely legal to sell with all the necessary compliances and that you have sufficient insurances in place to cover any claims against you.
Local business associations can be useful for help on the more mundane/legal/financial aspects of running a business. If you haven't done some proper research on this do it soon. Being successful is mainly about selling and finance, not just building a good product.

Thanks for this. If I am to be honest, I really don't want to go down the route of selling through galleries. The John Lewis idea is the one I like the most and have given great thought too, but unsure how to proceed.

I have contradicted myself with that statement, but selling through a major home retailer is a very different business model to the one for selling through galleries. One can be done just by me, the other would require me to hire / train employees. I don't have an issue with that, as I actually enjoy the design and formulating the manufacturing process much more that I do making them one after the other.

 

[custard]

You are one of the most talented designers that I've seen on this forum, and your making skills don't look too bad either! What's more you seem tuned in to the contemporary style that makes your work particularly saleable.

However, despite your many abilities, if you need to pay off a mortgage and put food on the family table then unfortunately the answer has to be, get a proper job and build up the woodworking income as a sideline.

You can make a modest income from furniture, and if you are in the fortunate position of having almost no overheads and few financial obligations, then that modest income might be enough. But the reality is I don't know of a single designer/maker who generates a decent and reliable income purely from bespoke furniture making. To take a wage that's over £30k, everyone that I know has had to add a second string to their bow, fitted kitchens, teaching, joinery packages, boat fit outs, etc. Furthermore, even getting up to the modest £15-25k level that's more realistic from purely bespoke work, even that takes a year or two before the commissions start to arrive with reasonable regularity, and if you need to add a chunk of overhead by renting a workshop and buying machinery on credit then you'll almost certainly end up at or below minimum wage.

But it would be real shame if someone with your skills and originality hung up their tools completely. I hope you persevere along the commercial route, most sensibly in your spare time or on a part time basis, and I'd be absolutely delighted if you prove me completely wrong and make an absolute mint with your talents!

 

[cammy9r]

Hi, while I too like the look of the products I also feel that they are far too expensive.

It is such a problem for selling hand made items of any sort. Peoples' baseline idea of price is set by that of mass manufactured goods - and probably low quality ones at that. At a craft fair before Christmas I was asked how much for a footstool (I had one there that was just for show; I was demoing, not really selling). Well, 12 pole lathe turned components split from one billet of ash, assembled, and a woven seagrass seat. Takes me a couple of days. What do you say ?

Perhaps the Amazon/Ebay/Etsy etc route is worth a try ? Did anything become of Handmade at Amazon ?

@Sheffield Tony. You say a couple of days, is that 48 hours or two 8 hour days ~16 hours. How much do you need for your labour per hour £7 or £70. I did a custom paint job on a 'friends' motorcycle, many layers for colour variations and accents. Then clear coat and wet colour sand and polish to a mirror finish. Charged £350 for the lot including materials. He thought it was a lot of money but when I broke it down for him he saw I barely made £5 per hour.....so what should I have charged. Good fun as a hobby but finding a price is difficult.
Im only offering my opinion in that average people lurking on facebook will find £315 for a desk lamp a bit much. At those prices he is catering to a niche market and will find it difficult to shift products at this early stage.
My 2p worth and will let the thread continue on topic.

 

[flanajb]

It might help if you list all that you are currently doing to try and sell your products ?.

I will give a few initial thoughts, they might seem harsh but you need to get past being offended by criticism (it can be hard when you have worked so hard on something), i have gone through a similar process with my business which is marine related.

These are just some observations that instantly jump out at me having looked for no more than 2 minutes at your website.

1. It looks amateurish, like it was thrown together using dreamweaver and a schools guide to website building. Local councils can get away with this kind of rubbish website design, but someone trying to sell £10 worth of concrete for £300 cant. And i am not criticising your product btw, as i too sell simple bespoke products for big money.

2. Photography is pretty shocking, it does nothing for your products, pictures look dull and washed out, including the wood parts. Go on a photography course and learn how to present your products in the best light and also get some pictures with them in the surrounding for which they are intended, the harsh white blackout background does nothing for the grey concrete. Google Product lighting. (edit) Learn how to do this yourself it;s not rocket science, dont water away loads of money on getting this done professioanlly, become a good amateur instead. There are guides on the internet about product photography and lighting hard to photograph products.

3. You only have Paypal as a payment option, add another card (consider stripe for this) provider and bank transfer options ? again payment page looks amateurish and having only paypal as a payment option also suggests this.

4. I googled conrete lamps, concrete clocks, conrete labs, the concrete labs, even googling "theconcretelab" gave me no results for your website in google. If you arent on the first age or 2 of google wether that be through organic search or adwords you are going to struggle to even get views never mind sales. (edit) you dont need t spend thousands on website design, something like opencart and a good template from template monster and you can have a far superior website for a hundred quid with all kinds of paymnet options built in.

5. As someone else mentioned, your prices seem very high to me, if you are going to convince people to spend that kind of money on your stuff, you better be convincing them from the second they click on your website.

6. Dont underestimate b to b sales, as i found out myself one good business customer is better than 100 private sales, private sales give a nice boost to my income but business customers are where my big money orders come from, i imagine boutique hotel chains would like your products etc.

Unless you have a ton of money to throw at this to pay other people, you need to become a jack of all trades. Product Design, Photography, Website design, Marketing, Accounting, Production etc etc.

Thanks for your open and honest advice. The web site was done by me using a wordpress template and of course I was really pleased with it. I totally agree with the photos and am getting that sorted out this week.

A lamp costs ~ £25 to manufacture and all in not far off a day to build, so doing these cheaper is not really viable. I think I'd rather become a taxi driver.

I appreciate I have a great deal to learn.

 

[Rhossydd]

The John Lewis idea is the one I like the most and have given great thought too, but unsure how to proceed.

Simply call them up and ask to speak to the buying department for homewares. Eventually you'll get through to someone who will talk you through the process and if you're lucky will post you one of their compliance packs. That's a big volume detailing what they expect from you as a supplier and how they'll trade with you.
Eventually you might get the chance to take them in to show and pitch to them, (ever watched The Apprentice or Dragons' Den ? you'll know the score).
Don't forget they'll expect nice packaging, instructions, CE labelling etc etc.

If you started now, you might get them in the shops by Autumn, if you're very lucky.
Not impossible, glacially slow, but a good company to deal with once you've got a sale.