[hhw3h]

In my experience if you want to make a sustainable living from selling arts or crafts online, you want to go up market. Charge $1,000 or more per work.

Use a relationship based sales process starting with one focused social media presence, typically Instagram.

Not everyone will be afford your work, but if your marketing and customer service is solid, a plenty large market will exist.

Once you start collecting social proof from happy customers, flow that back into your marketing and getting your next client becomes easier and easier. You can then often charge $3,000 to $5,000 for the same exact work because of the social proof and the brand you are building with it.

Making an art business work is similar to making a bootstrapped software business work, in the sense that software bootstrappers again and again go through the personal realization that writing software is typically only 20% to 30% of what they need to focus on in order to be successful.

They realize they need to bite the bullet and learn sales and marketing too and only if they do so can they overtime shift more and more of their time to just the areas of their software business they want to spend the most time in.

[MonkeyMalarky]

I'm inclined to agree with this. I've watched someone start by making small macrame wall hangings and selling them for $60 on Etsy take this direction. Now they're posting professional level photos of large ($1,000+) custom ordered pieces hanging in client's homes on Instagram. They don't bother with the small stuff or Etsy anymore.

[hhw3h]

Love to hear this, exactly what I'm talking about!

[MonkeyMalarky]

It's great to see but also a bit heart breaking. Those XL sized pieces are beautiful but I can't justify buying one.

[hhw3h]

Yeah I hear you. I naturally can relate more to the producer than the fan or supporter.

Another good comparison is a company like Tesla. Tesla started out with the high priced roadster but as they sold more and their audience grew, they pushed the pricing down and make cars more accessible and affordable to more people.

Art can be done in a similar way but there's some nuance to it where you want to make sure if you offer lower ticket items that they don't cannibalize your core profitable offer and that you can actually have enough volume to profitably sell items at those lower rates.

Better to just focus on one profitable offer and skip the low ticket items until you have quite a massive audience to reach. The low ticket items then become more like "merch" you see youtubers sell to monetize their audience and then a percentage of those folks ascend to investing in commission or originals.

But when starting out just the one core profitable art offer sold through personal branding and relationship building, I've seen be the most sustainable way to go.

[JohnFen]

I'm not an arts & crafts guy, but in my businesses, I've noticed a few relevant things.

Pricing is particularly hard for people to do, especially people who aren't really into business. So here's my big learning about that: people judge by the pricetag. If you're charging a lot, they'll view your product as being more desirable (and if you charge very little, they'll view your product as being cheap and less desirable).

I had a business partner who demonstrated this many times before it sunk in -- any time he was asking for money (from customers, investors, whoever), he would take what he considered a realistic price and ask for four times more than that. He explained that it made it more likely to close the deal, because your asking price is telling people how much they should value you and your product. He never once had someone say "that's too much" and walk away, but sometimes he would negotiate a "discount".

Another thing I learned is that there is a market for literally anything. You can nail two sticks together and find people willing to buy it. That's what "marketing" really is (or should be) about: finding those people. If you're very niche, the internet is a godsend -- it's easier to find a few thousand fans from the pool of the entire Earth's population -- and a few thousand fans means that you're going to be profitable.

[JohnFen]

I know a few people who make their living selling arts & crafts. They all sell online, of course, but all of them report that they get the most sales in person. Fairs and festivals, saturday markets, that sort of thing. It's not as easy as just running an Etsy store, but it is more lucrative.

And for all of them, the bulk of their sales go to people who have purchased from them before, or who were referred by people who have purchased from them before.

And yes, all of them charge prices much higher than what you would have thought if you weren't familiar with the industry.

[tiffanyh]

Brand Building.

You just described Marketing 101.

When you don't have any brand equity, you have to charge low. If you work to build your brand, you can charge a premium.

This is basically how the entire industry of CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) works.

[CosmicShadow]

If you want to have a more enjoyable time with business, if you can do this, it is probably the best way to go, although it's definitely not easy and you are probably not bothering with Etsy.

There is a maximum anyone will pay for a certain type of good, no matter how great it is, and that is the sad truth you learn when turning hobbies into businesses on Etsy. You can be an expert in something, make something absolutely amazing, 10x better than the next, but people still won't pay more than $40 for it because it's just an XYZ.

If you can make the type of Art that someone is willing to actually pay whatever you charge for it, you have a chance to go up market because you've overcome the first obstacle of picking the right product. 95% of people on Etsy will not or cannot achieve this based on what they sell (or know how to do, or enjoy doing), but many can still be successful.

There are a hell of a lot fewer people who will buy something expensive than something cheap, and having run 5 different Etsy shops selling different handmade items from $3 up to $475 I can tell you it's so nice to get those big sales, but they don't come nearly as often as you'd hope. I make over 6 figures selling an average order value of $20. I still have to make and ship a LOT of stuff and I've optimized on the businesses that are the easiest to make and ship with the highest margin over the big sales that take lots of work.

We'll do craft shows and sell $20 items like hotcakes all day, while the depressed folks in the booth across from us selling expensive art make maybe 1 sale a day, and usually not for an expensive piece. Our $475 item that takes a week to make will turn heads and bring people in all day and we might sell one of them, and 5 other folks will just say they can't justify the cost, despite how unique and big and amazing they think it is. On the other hand, we'll sell wedding invitations that take 10 minutes to print for $500 and people won't even blink when we name the price, and then they'll re-order again because they changed the date. It's shocking.

There are tons of digital download shops that makes 10k-100k sales a year on Etsy at $3-$15/sale and they only need to do the work of producing an item once. Those are amazing businesses and 100x times easier to run than trying to convince someone to buy a $x,000 item via social media and paid channels.

There are ways to make money, it requires work and cleverness and staying on top of things. You can go upscale and play the sales/marketing game. You are better off just starting from the point of already being a marketer/sales person and find something to sell, because trying to do that from just being an artist is not going to be easy. You can sell stuff people want that aren't that hard to make, but certain markets get flooded or less popular and you need to find a good niche and keep on evolving, but it's doable and can be fun. People underestimate how good the long tail is on Etsy and how much they can market for you with the right product. Even with crappy SEO people can just find and buy your stuff, which is mind blowing, but it doesn't work well when what you sell is just "crochet hat" or "pikachu shirt" or "watercolour lilies".

[SuoDuanDao]

Not sure if this is an appropriate ask, but I'd be interested to see some of the download shops you're referring to - I'm putting my art up on print-on-demand sites and I'm interested in continuing the endeavour, but it's a slow process - I'd love to get some inspiration on the business side of that sort of thing.

[CosmicShadow]

Just start with the word "downloadable" in the Etsy search bar, you'll get quite the wide variety of random crap. Page through it and you can start rabbit-holing down different keyword combinations. It's vast. Most people don't even know you can get digital downloads on Etsy and we are still surprised all the time at the new things people sell (and that people are actually buying them and finding them! how???). We sell some SVGs and PDFs on one of our shops, but we haven't actually put any effort into it last year. Based on the handful of listings we already had up we made $3k USD in 2022 with like 20 minutes of work for the year.

[hhw3h]

Really appreciate you sharing your perspective.

And I'm really glad to hear you are doing so well with your approach!

> If you can make the type of Art that someone is willing to actually pay whatever you charge for it, you have a chance to go up market because you've overcome the first obstacle of picking the right product. 95% of people on Etsy will not or cannot achieve this based on what they sell (or know how to do, or enjoy doing), but many can still be successful.

Such a good point. Most artists I see work from their own beliefs outwards rather than seeing what the market will bear at different price points and targeting a higher rate. They think things like, "I wouldn't spend more than $X00 on a work of art" and so end up charging the same or less.

> I make over 6 figures selling an average order value of $20.

Just curious, is that 6 figures of profit or revenue? The nice thing about the $3k to $5k sales is how high margin they each can be.

> We'll do craft shows and sell $20 items like hotcakes all day, while the depressed folks in the booth across from us selling expensive art make maybe 1 sale a day, and usually not for an expensive piece. Our $475 item that takes a week to make will turn heads and bring people in all day and we might sell one of them, and 5 other folks will just say they can't justify the cost, despite how unique and big and amazing they think it is. On the other hand, we'll sell wedding invitations that take 10 minutes to print for $500 and people won't even blink when we name the price, and then they'll re-order again because they changed the date. It's shocking.

Yeah it's interesting at these kinds of events I see little mistakes or points of friction that artists selling high ticket work introduce that reduce their sales. Things like, sitting on a chair way back in their booth reading a book or their phone, not having an assistant standing out in the flow of foot traffic saying hi and drawing people in, displaying pricing, having too large a range of pricing, not asking questions about the person and their desires and instead "talking at them" about the art versus "talking with them", etc. Again it takes learning a communication / relationship building style that works great if you don't accidentally get in your own way.

> There are tons of digital download shops that makes 10k-100k sales a year on Etsy at $3-$15/sale and they only need to do the work of producing an item once. Those are amazing businesses and 100x times easier to run than trying to convince someone to buy a $x,000 item via social media and paid channels.

I could see once you identify your niche, write your copy, optimize the SEO, and set up all the other tech required, and you have a product that really resonates with your niche, this could be easier to manage once up and running than the social media / high ticket approach—at least for some people. That said, it sounds like it could be hard and unpredictable for non tech savvy art folks to initially set up.

There are definitely multiple paths that work for sure and there's no one magic ninja hack or silver bullet that doesn't require personal development, learning new skills, mindset shifts, etc.

Again, really glad to hear about all your success and I hope your businesses continue to serve your life and goals well in the future!