Took my prints off the calendar-market circuit and started selling them the boring way
Seven years I did the Christmas markets circuit around Galway, and sure I loved the craic of it, the whole gang of us makers propping each other up over cold tea at half nine. But I started doing the sums on it last year and the amount of hours I was standing on my feet to shift maybe thirty prints at a tenner margin each... you'd get more per hour stacking shelves in Tesco.
So I pulled out of the big one this winter. No table, no fairy lights, no man trying to haggle me down to a fiver for something that took me two days to carve.
What I did instead was dead boring. I printed a plain little catalogue, four pages, black and white, every piece photographed flat on the kitchen table with the kids' homework shoved out of frame, and I posted the damn thing to about forty people who've bought off me before or who run the small galleries I've dealt with. Old school. Envelopes and stamps, like a man posting letters to his granny.
And it worked. Sold twenty-three prints before December even got going. People wrote back, some of them just to say they liked the look of the hare on page two, no purchase, and that's grand too. The gallery in Westport took twelve on the strength of a paper catalogue and a phone call.
I'm not saying markets are dead. I'm saying I was so busy performing the selling I forgot the actual selling. Nobody wants to scroll you at a draughty hall in November when they can sit in their own kitchen and pick what they genuinely like off a table of your work. Turns out the thing that worked was the most old-fashioned thing I could have done, and my phone never once told me how many people saw it.
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okay but this is such a big deal and I think people don't talk about it enough. the markets are sold as this romantic thing for makers but the maths genuinely never works unless you're shifting volume or selling something with a big margin. I do the same reckoning after every market here in Valencia, sitting in my studio counting the hours against what sold and just staring at the wall for a while.
the boring way probably pays better and you get to actually make instead of standing on your feet freezing with a flask. the craic is real though, I'll give you that. I'd miss the other makers. but they're still your friends when you're not at the same table, you know?
curious what the plain little thing was anyway. did sales actually hold up?
Baby, you just put your finger right on it. Folks think handmade means you're supposed to suffer for it, stand out in the cold all day for pocket change and call it romance. I've watched young makers wear themselves to the bone chasing that picture-postcard version of the work, and it grieves me, because the making is the gift and the selling is just the errand.
I sewed for fifty years before anybody called it art, and I'll tell you what, the money was never in the standing around. It was in the doing, and in the people who found you quiet-like and came back. That boring way you and your friend found sounds like wisdom to me. You get to keep your hands on the cloth, and that's where the joy lives anyway.
The other makers do pull at your heart, I won't deny it. There's something about folks who understand the labor of two days in a single piece. But you can keep those people without freezing your feet off for them, you know. That part comes with you wherever you go.🙂
Fifty years sewing, now that's a proper apprenticeship and no mistake. You'd have seen every fashion cycle come round twice and just kept on quietly doing it right.
That's the bit I'm after coming round to myself. I spent so long thinking the selling had to look a certain way that I near forgot the carving is where it's at. And you're right, the customers who came back found me through word of mouth and a bit of a website, not through me shouting over the mulled wine.
Still feels a bit odd on a Saturday morning with no stall to pack the van for. But the dog's delighted, and the hare's getting a proper look-in at last. Fair play to you for fifty years of it, that's a fierce love of the doing.
Ah you've hit the nail on the head entirely. The romanticised version of it, sure the markets are gorgeous in the photos, fairy lights and all. But nobody photographs the hour you spend explaining to a woman that yes it's real lino and no I can't do one with her dog wearing a Santa hat by Friday.
The staring at the wall, I know that exact stare. Did it in the shed for about a month before I admitted to meself the markets were a hobby with extra steps, not a business.
Valencia though, I'd imagine the craic with the makers out there has a bit more sun in it anyway. Here's the thing I keep circling back to: is the wall-staring worth it for the other makers? Because that's the bit I still haven't quite settled with meself. I miss them something fierce this winter, I won't lie to you.