HOW MUCH $ DID I MAKE SELLING POTTERY // Business Update #6 Part 1 // October 2020

all right so it is what is it today it's 7th of november so i'm a little bit late in doing this video so this one's mostly going to be about the first sales last month in october just some figures about revenues and expenses and also a few things on what went well and what could have been improved and i guess things i will change for the next sales and um a few little details on kilns which i've complained about for i guess since the start of everything but it's i guess it's been especially bad because of the lockdowns and things here i mean everything's kind of going back to normal so it might be okay i'll give it some time but there are plans to basically get a key on and work on a few other things and that includes a potential new business which will be most likely a shared studio with a retail space which i also get into so it's going to be a bit of a long one today uh yeah so you might want to make a coffee and just come back and there's also not going to be any like visual presentation in terms of like items and work in progress and stuff because i haven't been making that much in the last i guess since the last sales i was busy packaging things and then a few wholesale orders and things like that but there's not much to show so feel free to just do this as like a podcast really so yeah first let's go into i'm just looking at my figures all right so just a quick i guess debriefing on the sales i'm so basically eight orders plus one wholesale uh for the eight orders there was 11 units sold so most people bought one item uh i think there's two orders with two and there's 15 units sold for the wholesale order so it's 15 plate so that total to a thousand and 39 dollars in revenue which is not bad i think that's a good starting point and considering how small the audience is right now i think the fact that there were sales is a good thing and i think that gives me a good confident boost i mean if if there was no sales on the shop i would be pretty devastated i'll keep going obviously but it would have been a bit of a i guess discouraging kind of moment but this is a good amount where it's not too much where i'm like okay i'm gonna do amazing and kind of have that expectation into the next one because the first one is it's tricky you've got a lot of friends and family who'll happily support you on the first one but i think those sales don't really come back as often as i guess regular customer if that makes sense so anyway um and then in terms of expense so like a grand a grant seems like a decent amount and most people will be like yeah that's you know a fair amount of money but let's look at the expense in terms of how much it costs to get to that point uh so material is a tricky one just because it's hard to estimate exactly how much clay how much glazes i've used but i would say maybe 30 40 dollars uh for the payment system so i use stripe through squarespace and they take i think it's 1.6 plus thirty cents per transaction uh so it came to about twenty three dollars and packaging came to about thirty dollars and that's an estimate again so if you've seen my packaging video um i think the conclusion was it's about 350 per package in i guess average um so it times that by eight it gives me about 28. this doesn't include the wholesale order because i haven't packaged that yet but i'm going to deliver that myself so i won't have to use as many packaging material because you know shipping is a big one so shipping i want to get into a little bit more shipping cost me 196 dollars which the idea was customer would most likely pay for that because it comes from each other there's a shipping fee calculator based on the weight but what happened was even though the weight was correct i thought packaging weight would be okay in terms of like it's not going to boost it up that much but a lot of time what happens is a piece might be exactly a kilo or like 500 grams and the shipping cost is calculated by kind of tears so you'll go from zero to 250 gram 250 gram to 500 500 to a kilo a kilo to two etc so when you just go above 500 grand for example the cost goes up quite a bit relatively speaking so it goes from like nine dollars to 14 12 or 13 ish so often the weight of the item was correct and the order was calculated based on that weight but because packaging the boxes two boxes plus the packaging adds about 300 gram to 500 grams depending on if it's a small box with a big box and often that boosts it to the next tier which means there's an extra four or five dollars unaccounted for while it's good to have the customer paying for all that shipping fee you also don't want it to be that big so kind of a balance would be incorporating some of that shipping cost into the price of the pieces and still charge for a smaller shipping fee so people aren't just getting free shipping and ordering 20 items separately so they'll be a bit more considerate with their order maybe get a few more items at once instead of spreading it out and that means less packaging for me and less shipping cost for me but in the end i think what i charge for shipping fee was about 150 dollars so that's about 40 different i think it was a little bit more than that i can't remember exactly but it mostly came from the two overseas order because bumping up one tier in the overseas all the men about ten dollars or fifteen dollars so that's something to keep in mind for the next sales in terms of how i approach the shipping kind of fee and if i need to bump my individual prices up just a touch maybe like two three dollars just to kind of account for that difference but yeah overall it's not too bad and then i guess web hosting i'm counting as a sales expense because i need it for all the payment system i need it for the inventory system so i'm just including this to give a more overall look into the whole thing so the total expense for october in terms of the sales and loans this doesn't include things like rent and all that that's 321 which gave me a net profit of 718 australian um again not a bad amount not gonna make a living on it obviously but i think it's a really good start i think it's uh it gives me room to grow and it gives me a little bit of confidence so with figures out of the way let's go into more everything went well everything went smoothly the launch was good uh a decent amount of interest through i think mostly instagram so it's it's a lot of instagram and kind of marketing or promotion to like stories and things like that also like friends of friends and things like that so that out of the eight orders five or six were people that we know and then there were two to three that came from complete those two from complete strangers as in like people i haven't interacted with before so they might follow me on instagram or on youtube but i don't i haven't had like a relationship with them um there are a couple of others from other people who i've met on instagram mostly other potters message and we've had chats before so it's more for i guess support kind of sales i see it that way i think all the sales happen in within the first four to eight hours of the launch which makes a lot of sense um and i looked at my analytics even though there were people going to the website after that and there was a decent amount of traffic there wasn't many interest in the sale and that could be for two reasons um one most of the larger items were sold out pretty much right away and what's left were smaller functional wear like cups and a couple of plates it's mostly cups and maybe bowls yeah cups and bowls and they're quite small so things like this and some rice bowls which the rice bowl didn't sell at all um which i was kind of surprised because that was like my favorite thing and i think i was very biased towards it because it was the first things i made in the set that kind of came out right so that was nine of them so i thought you know that might be something people would buy two or three off at the same time turns out people were more interested in the bigger items so the fastest decorative items the large bowls what happened is people are more interested in feature pieces it it makes sense to buy one fast or i guess one sculptural piece just to put on the shelf as a decorative because with plates and bowls and functional wares in the kitchen i guess most people would want the matching set and you want at least two and with handmade stuff the prices adds up quite quickly for example if i sell a bowl for thirty dollars four of them that's 120 and that i guess could seem like a lot for functional wear where home decorative the break point for that pricing is a lot higher like sixty seven dollars for an item doesn't seem as expensive even though you're only getting one thing so i think my focus on the next i would say two three months would be larger items and decoratives obviously i still have stock left over from the last sale so i'm gonna keep that on the shop so at least there's some smaller things for sale but yeah anything that i'm making from now on will be on the medium to larger scale just to see how that goes and if i make less sales but a higher average price point i think that's not a bad thing um so in terms of packaging my packaging system worked quite well and if you haven't seen the packaging video feel free to check that out just in terms of what i use in more sustainable packaging everything's recyclable without really compromising on the protection of the item so everything went according to plan the packaging didn't take too long the only thing i would change is i was wrapping things up one at a time and i would second-guess myself in terms of if i got the right shipping label for the right box the next time what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna keep everything open until the shipping label goes on it then i'll seal it because that way i can be 100 sure that that is the right order i mean in the end i think everything got sent correctly i haven't got any feedback in terms of things weren't going missing or any damages or any i guess shipping mix-ups uh the two us orders are still on the way which i'm a little bit worried about but that was always going to be the case especially now with the way the postal system is in the u.s so we'll give it a bit more time and see how that goes hopefully they get there soon um i'm keeping an eye on the tracking not having a kiln has always been an issue before i started all this i thought that's something i could work around and if it means it's a little bit slow it's okay but it's getting to the point where not having killed just slows things down way too much basically it adds about two weeks of lead time for each order if i was making things do all that and that means doing a monthly sales is actually really tricky without a kiln because i have to make everything on the first week after the sale let them dry to bone dry and then maybe drop it off on week two midway and if i'm lucky i can pick up the best firework a week after and then that gives me another week and a half to do glaze firing so that only works if everything worked perfectly if there's any delay during any of the firing basically i'll miss the deadline if i'm doing a monthly sale so that's going to be tricky i think at this stage i might push it into more of a every two months so the original idea was to have the excels on the 15th of november but if i stick to that that line i won't have that many pieces to sell i think i'll get about 15 to 20 pieces at most and i don't think that's enough most of the sales happen within the first two three days i want it to be a bit more substantial that way with the momentum i can sell a little bit more i think that's going to be a better way than spreading things out too much so just because christmas is coming up i want to do my next sales on the first of december and then i'll give a bit of time for shipping to get to the customers before christmas but after that in the foreseeable future i think i'll do a sale every two months unless i get my own kiln and that's that's a big like i think that's gonna happen that's just depending on when so that's basically i guess in terms of debriefing that's basically it for the sales um overall it was a good experience everyone's been happy i've got a lot of feedback from customers in terms of the presentation and the packaging and the item itself which is really great to hear i haven't heard anything bad yet so fingers crossed everything went well you

Channel: dear Ali Ceramics

Views: 11,059

Rating: 4.9882007 out of 5

Keywords: pottery, handmade pottery, handmade, studio potter, pottery wheel, clay, ceramics, direct selling business, pottery at home, pottery asmr, Pottery Business, Small Business Ideas, Business BTS, Running a small business

Id: Ybyk7_gY998

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020