Hand-Dyes
For Sale:
How
I Turned My Hobby Into A Business
by
Melissa J. Will
author of
Fabric Dyeing 101:
Simple Instructions For Beautiful Fabrics
Version 1.0
Copyright © 2011 Melissa J. Will
ISBN 978-1-4657-7514-6
All rights reserved.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.
Contents
Online Shop Ready For Business: Is Anybody Out There?
What Do You Mean I Have To Be The Secretary?
Hello Guild: I'm Horrifically Shy!
Every Good Success Attracts A Few Trolls
Introduction
There are plenty of useful resources about creating your own small business and this is definitely not one of them. What I want to share is my personal experience taking a hobby I loved and turning it into a small business and some of the struggles and successes along the way.
If you do want that business how-to book, make sure you find one written for your particular area because if there's one thing I know about running a small business, as soon as you hang your shingle up, The Man comes looking for you, ready to double your service fees and tax them some more. It's not easy to make a hobby profitable but I know I'm glad I gave it a try.
It all began when I was actually just trying to make a quilt. I'd never made a quilt before but of course I decided to make one that required hand-dyeing fabrics to get the colours just right. I'd never dyed fabric before either, but I was ready to try that too. It was just not in my character to simply buy a kit with commercial fabrics and follow instructions. I wanted my quilt to be unique. Plus, I couldn't follow sewing patterns to save my life.
Fabric dyeing is a great hobby if you happen to love both fabrics and colour. Every colour you can possibly dream of can be made with Procion MX fabric dyes. While intending to simply dye a few fabrics for my quilt, I ended up staying up far too late at night while my family slept, experimenting for months on end, exploring every possible colour and value combination I could think of. And they were all so impossibly beautiful.
I ended up with about 100 times more fabric than I needed for a quilt (or a dozen quilts) and, by necessity, decided to try selling the surplus so I could fund more supplies.
This book is purely my own experience as an entrepreneur with an art-based business. What started out as a simple quest to sell some fabrics, gradually took on a whole other direction with unexpected possibilities.
While I never managed to get a full night's sleep throughout the process, I did have a rather wild ride along the way. All in all it was a good experience for a homebody-introvert with an obsession for colour. I hope you enjoy my story.
When my youngest child was a baby, we made the decision that I would quit my full-time job and stay home with the kids. I had always worked and supported myself since I was teenager and this was a huge step for me. It meant relying on someone else for income (hello trust issues!) and it also meant giving up outside employment which I had always enjoyed.. I had always wanted to be a stay-at-home parent and this was my chance. It would require some very careful financial management, but my husband was supportive so we gave it a whirl.
In Canada we have paid maternity (and paternity) leave. In my day it was six months long. (Today it's one year.) The full impact of leaving my job set in around my daughter's first birthday when the regular pay cheques had dried up and I stopped being invited to office parties with the old gang. With past connections fading, it was time to create a new life. You don't realize how much you rely on the companionship of your co-workers until they're no longer talking too loud on the phone in the next cubicle. And truthfully, work was my main source of friendships because I am otherwise so disastrously shy that I avoid opportunities to meet people the way others step around live electrical wires.
While I missed the pseudo-security of a steady income, extended health benefits, and daily conversation with non-teething humans, it was exciting to be free to explore new opportunities. I had never been well-suited (pun intended) to office life, having no interest in time-wasting rules and regulations, fashion, shoes, mini—fridge lunch thievery, or forced obligations. Kindness and good manners, yes. Productivity towards real goals, yes. All that other stuff, no. If you can do a job in jeans and hoodie with a breastfeeding baby on board, I'm there! I loved a challenging, creative job but the confinement of office life was very hard on my soul. I had long liberated myself from that portable torture devise known as pantyhose and never ever wore high heels. Having tasted the freedom of never facing another office Christmas party or guilt-enforced charity drive, I knew I could never go back.
I'd always dabbled in self-employment. Back in my university days, I earned good money drawing diagrams for a teacher of sign language. I'd also taken on various odd jobs painting murals, sewing speciality items like slipcovers and curtains, designing posters, and so on. I once sewed an entire superhero costume for someone's dog including a wire-lined cape that made it appear that the wee bulldog was indeed flying.
Today you can buy such critical essentials at pet superstores, but back then, it required some innovative sewing. Frankly, I was amazed how much disposable income some people have and I was rather grateful to have the extra work. Sewing the dog costume paid about 4x more per hour than my job as a unit clerk in an emergency and trauma unit. It's kind of like professional sports salaries: our society really has its priorities straight! Of course you should earn more sewing dog costumes than working in a life-saving team! Who knows what heroic efforts that bulldog made? And for the record, bulldogs become incredibly wiggly when you're trying to measure their girth. That sewing job wasn't all fun and games.
I come from a family of self-employed pioneers—writers, musicians, builders, you name it. The thrill of never knowing if you'd earn enough to survive is engraved in my DNA. I look back on my childhood quite thankful that I had no idea how close to the edge we lived as my father built a career as a freelance professional writer. (It eventually paid very handsomely: when we were grown and gone, of course.) Without wishing to page Dr. Freud, I should say that I also married a self-employed entrepreneur and all the uncertainty that comes with it.
After my first year of new motherhood, I looked up to notice the fact that I'd rarely left my house that entire time. The routine had me feeling a little too housebound so I went on the wild side and attended a show featuring Amish style quilts. I had never seen quilts like that in person and I was astonished by how beautiful the colours were. These quilts were made from old, re purposed clothing, and the unexpected colour combinations transfixed me. I came home declaring that I would make a quilt like that.
My mother taught me how to use her sewing machine when I was about eight years old but I avoided ever trying to learn how to use a sewing pattern because the instructions seemed profoundly intimidating. (And they were: I swear Vogue patterns back then were written to inflict mental anguish on unsuspecting sewers.) Stubborn and very determined, I sewed everything I wanted (dolls clothes, bags, blouses, skirts) by simply thinking through what was needed, step by step. I knit the same way: I envisioned the project, I thought about it, and knit. Now an adult and still stubborn and determined, I was confident I could make this Amish quilt the same way. And why not? It's not like the old Amish used commercial sewing patterns.
I didn't really have a plan except I knew I wanted beautiful solid colour fabrics that both complimented and aggravated each other, the same way the ones at the quilt show did. I started buying bits and pieces where I found them but I was really underwhelmed by the selections available in fabric shops. I also scoured thrift shops in hopes of finding suitable clothing to cut up, but that proved rather fruitless as well. Solid colours in quilt-weight cottons and wools are hard to find today in a world of mass-produced synthetic prints.
A little frustrated but not daunted, I then decided I would simply dye my own fabrics. Certainly this is how the old Amish got their colours? Keep in mind, this was before the internet was brimming with its current plethora of information (reliable and not so much), so I went to the local library and read up on natural dyeing techniques. I soon realized that I was not keen on dealing with the harsh mordants required for some colours, and learned that the clear, bright, bold colours I was seeking could readily be achieved with synthetic Procion MX dyes for natural fibers. I was familiar with them from tie-dyeing at summer camp.
I got the one book they had on the subject (since that time there are hundreds on the market including my recently— 2011— published eBook), and I mail ordered a fabric dye starter kit with fuchsia, turquoise, and bright yellow dye powders. A local quilt shop owner sold me a bolt of bleached, white quilter's cotton, and I was raring to go.
What I never expected was how ridiculously beautiful the fabrics would be. I had never seen this type of hand-dyed fabrics in person before and they really were drop-dead gorgeous if I do say so myself. My first rainbow set of colours was a success. I had to do more.
Next I tried other recipes that combined my basic dye powder colours plus a few new colours in various proportions to create earthy tones like mossy greens and browns, and various secondary colours like popsicle purple, rich ambers, and emerald greens.
Oh my!
For someone who gets naturally giddy from delightful colours, I had found my new favourite thing to do.
I started dyeing fabric every single night after the kids (and my husband!) were in bed. There was a talk radio show I really liked from midnight until 3 am and I would listen to that while I worked. During the day, while I took care of my kids, I would keep a note pad nearby and jot down any new recipe ideas that came to mind.
What happens when you combine this with that? Or add a pinch of black to red and yellow? (Rich, pumpkin orange.) Or yellow on top of the other colours? (Vibrance.) Or switch to a different blue, or red, or yellow? And what if you put a little less dye in each pot? Do I really need to use this much dye powder? (No.) The possibilities were endless. And the exciting part was, with these particular dyes (Procion MX), there are no bad colour combinations. It's not like paints where you mix colours together and end up with mud. These dyes are transparent so each colour participates in the final product. What may look like mud with paints, looks like rich, multi-faceted tree bark with the fabric dyes. And you know how the sky can have a zillion shades of blue from the horizon upward? That same effect is easy to achieve with these dyes.
The first technique I learned was for a mottled texture, often resembling frost on a window or salt crystal patterns. With some experimentation, I discovered a really easy way to make solid coloured fabrics as well.
To organize my experiments and avoid accidentally trying to same thing twice, I developed a charting system that made it easy to record recipe details and, later, allowed me to easily duplicate any results I liked. This chart system became an invaluable tool both for my own fabric dyeing and later when teaching others the secrets from the midnight kitchen dye adventures.
To gain confidence that the colours were permanent and would not run, I repeatedly conducted washfast or colourfast tests (dampen the dyed fabric and iron it until dry between two white pieces of cotton or wool fabric—if there is dye on the whites, it's not properly rinsed). Everything was fine. I knew I could use the fabrics in a quilt and not have to worry about that. Not that I was ready to sew with the fabrics: there was still so much experimenting to be done.
I would buy one or two 15-yard bolts at a time and dye sets of ⅛ and ¼ yard pieces. After a few weeks and about 200 yards of dyeing, my bulk purchases started to get the shop owner's attention and she asked to see my hand-dyes. When I brought in a suitcase full of samples, brimming with dozens of colours and values, she was smitten. Without a moment's hesitation she said, “You should sell those. They're gorgeous.” And then, without missing a beat, she added, “Can we barter? Your hand-dyes for my dye fabric?”
I was flattered but hesitant. My gut instinct said, Don't barter with this woman! But unfortunately I let myself be overwhelmed by her forcefulness. Later you'll see why I refer to this woman as Mrs. R. Flag.
While I'm not big on The Woo, I do have faith in my own hunches and intuition (a.k.a. spidey sense) yet I struggle to listen to it sometimes in new and intimidating situations. The way I see it, my brain picks up way more information and signals about people and experiences than I consciously process. My spidey sense is the intermediary saying, “You may not know what's wrong here but at least listen to the warnings, Missy.” In business, as in life, those inner nudges are your inner security team.
Around the same time Mrs. R. Flag expressed an interest in the hand-dyes, my husband started to notice the stacks (and stacks and stacks) of hand-dyes laid out for all to admire around my work table in the living room. He hinted that, while he didn't really know anything about sewing or quilting, he suspected I had a lot more fabric there than I needed for a single Amish quilt. Very perceptive, that husband of mine is.
Knowing that I wasn't anywhere near done with experimenting with the dye possibilities, I decided I would indeed try selling some of the fabrics since we did not exactly have a budget for fabrics and dyes in these volumes. With encouragement from a few others, I was totally charged up with the idea of starting my own small business.
As a homebody and introvert, I decided I was best suited to opening an online mail order business. That way I could work when it suited me, and not have to face my anxieties about meeting people or, heaven forbid, chatting with strangers.
Ha!
Wrong! As it turned out, I ended up meeting more people than I probably would have if I'd had a bricks and mortar shop. But that's getting ahead of the story.
The biggest obstacle facing any project, whether it's creating a business or writing a book or designing something, is knowing your product and creating a brand.
I felt very lucky with my hand-dye shop: the basic theme just came to me.
I had long been obsessed with the (now) extremely clichéd, poorly reproduced, and overused paintings of Claude Monet. Yes, I was a water lily fanatic. I admit it. When my husband and I were courting, he game me a gorgeous poster of a lesser known water lily painting and I treasured it both because it was an unexpected gift and it demonstrated that he understood what I loved (besides him). Ahhhhh! That was sweet.
In French, the name Claude rhymes with toad. You pronounce it Clode. I was attracted to Monet's paintings because of the colours and textures. My hand-dyed business would be my Ode to Claude. I hope you just said it the rhyming way. It's sounds a little odd otherwise.
Ode to Claude: Monet-inspired hand-dyed cotton fabric.
Ta-da!
Once you have a theme to work with, the rest just flows. I knew I needed a way to package the fabrics in sets and this gave me all the inspiration I needed. I selected about a dozen or so favourite Monet paintings and used each one as a guide to creating a fabric set. Lighthouse at the Hospice . Sailboats. Water lilies. Path in the Forest. Jar of Peaches. Camille on the Beach..... Each set contained about 6-8 different fabric colours that could all be found in the painting. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I felt like I had stumbled upon a rather obvious but useful tool for both selling the fabrics and creating original quilts: take your inspiration from colour sets you know already work in other works of art.
Another good aspect to this approach of creating painting sets was that I didn't have to be exact each time. Each of Monet's paintings contain a whole lot of colours: so I could vary which ones I put in the set depending on what stock I had on hand and what I was experimenting with.
The Monet theme also lent itself to some good fun using Monet as my spokesperson to announce sales and whatnot in the business newsletter. Fun! I longed for a life-size cutout of him to have at craft shows but I never did manage to get one.
My husband, while known for his brains and beauty, also happens to be a very good graphic designer and, knew computer code. He designed a gorgeous logo for my business and showed me how to write HTML code for an online shop. This was before online shopping carts were affordable or reliable (and long before Etsy brought art out of the el-cheapo pricing of eBay), so I had to create a system that customers felt confident using but wouldn't require personal phone calls to secure credit card information. (PayPal was not yet around either.)
Quilting, like knitting, is a tactile activity. Knitters need to feel the yarn to know if they want to work with it. Quilters want to touch the fabric, see designs or patterns, and confirm with their own eyes that the colours are indeed pleasing. To accommodate this, I created a swatch card of all of my standard colours (real fabric swatches attached to card stock with a glue stick) that could be mail ordered. I charged $10 but that money could be applied toward the customer's first order. This ended up being a wise decision: there were some weeks where swatch card orders accounted for over half my sales revenue. (I began to suspect that there's a secret swatch card hoarding cult out there.) My initial error was to not indicate an expiry date on the first cards I sold. Eventually I realized that deadlines create business and from then on all swatch cards issued had a 90-day expiry date reinforced with two email reminders. Many more swatch cards translated into fabric sales this way.
To keep costs down, I first uploaded my site piggybacking on my husband's domain. While it wasn't the most professional thing to do, I really didn't want to fork over the money for hosting until I knew the business would actually generate some revenue. After about a year or so, my husband surprised me with the purchase of my own domain. It was very romantic. Today it's not nearly as costly to do so, but in those days, it was foreplay I assure you.
The technology of the day presented other obstacles. I could not manage to photograph the fabric in a way that presented the colours fairly accurately on the computer screen, and of course, colours look different on different screens. Someone suggested scanning the fabrics and it worked fairly well. It was slow and tedious but it was better than nothing. Still, I was at the peril of variations in monitors and, worse, other people's perceptions. Science has proven that no two people see colour the same way. But the only thing that mattered for me was that most people would like what they saw. Bandwidth was also still a big issue so I had to keep my images small for mercy of those on dial-up (like I was).
Online Shop Ready For Business: Is Anybody Out There?
With the site uploaded and fabrics priced and ready to go, I had to find ways to attract customers. There weren't nearly as many avenues available back then as there are now, but in some ways that was advantageous. People were excited to get online and try things out. If you had an art shop or blog, you quickly became known in that community.
I emailed various other online business owners and quilt artists and enquired whether they might link to my site. In those days it was common to receive formal link requests. Thankfully, a few years later that all went out the window. I was sure to do my homework and determine a common ground that would benefit both parties before requesting a link. Once there were outside links to your site, the search engines would index it. Within the first two weeks, links went up, traffic grew and I received numerous requests for swatch cards.
I was notified of my first order by email. It seems an entire quilt guild had reviewed my swatches and placed a bulk order. The cheque would be arriving soon in the mail. You know how some businesses frame the money from their first sale and display it on the shop wall? Not this one. That cheque was for over $800 and it was headed straight for the bank. Similar large orders soon followed.
Cowabunga, baby.
I had decided from the start that I wanted to run a debt-free business. I did not want to chain myself to The Man, especially since we were trying hard to live within our means so I could continue a vagrant life of unemployment. I had seen far too many hobbyists call themselves businesses, and then proceed to under-price their goods and fund their overhead with outside income (usually from a hardworking spouse) or max out credit cards to keep afloat. That's not a business. It might be fun, but it's not a business.
However, starting with zero funds, I knew it would be wisest to make my first supply purchases in bulk to make the fabrics really cost effective. To do this, I needed to formally register my business with the government (for tax exemption and wholesale purchases) and I needed a short-term loan.
I had my first encounter with the local small business help office and I have to say, I was less than impressed. I felt like the staff were so busy with their charts and graphs and staff meetings and measurements of all the clients they were “assisting”, that they had their heads up their nether regions and could barely listen to what I was needing or answer my questions. I ended up fumbling around on my own, finally obtaining my business licence and getting a short-term loan from my mom (my best cheerleader). I would like to think these tax-payer supported offices do better today. Or maybe you have to the manufacturing some incredible techie devise to get their attention.
I approached Mrs. R. Flag at the local quilt shop to share my business news and see if she could introduce me to her fabric source so I could purchase larger bolts directly.
This is where you start seeing people's true colours. She saw that I was getting a lot of fabric orders and very evasively came up with some vague excuses why I couldn't buy directly from her supplier, despite my business licence entitling me to purchase wholesale. In other words, she wanted to keep getting her cut in the deal and she was screwing me over.
Now, I could understand (but still disagree with) not wanting to share her source if my business was in competition with hers, but it was not. She retailed commercial printed fabrics. I was a one-of-a-kind hand-dye fabric artist with a rinky dink online shop. It's two very different things. I thought that since I had already purchased a large volume of fabric through her, that she might want to celebrate my success and give me a boost. Naive! Today I would have a much easier time because I could probably get the information online within minutes without relying on anyone's generosity of spirit, but back then, people coveted their secret societies. Because they could. I realized Mrs. Flag's first name was Red.
I encountered this closed-off attitude over and over again. It reeked of insecurity and a lack of vision because truly, when you help others, you often end up really helping yourself. If I need your help today, you may very well need my help in the future. If your business is so dependent on keeping secrets and dissing any real or imagined competition, is it really going to survive and thrive through tougher times? We all know cut-throat people. When you're building a brand on art, quirkiness, and creativity, a machete and a bad attitude aren't really going to help build the business. I thought Mrs. Flag would see it the same way. But she did not. And apparently they didn't break the mold when they made her: I would encounter lots of sneakier people later on.
When you formally become a business, there are some perks, such as not having to pay provincial sales tax, but a lot of leeches and sharks also come out of the woodwork to disrupt things. Suddenly, the bank declares they can charge you huge monthly fees for putting your money there, simply because you are a business. When I ordered my first set of cheques, this elaborate package arrived with 50 cheques and this ridiculous “executive” leather bound cheque ledger. I looked at my account and saw they had charged me $80 for it. I drove right over to see the bank manager and gave him back his stupid cheque binder and demanded a refund. Who the hell wants to spend money on that? Do you know how much work I have done to earn $80 in revenue? I know it was laughable to him, but seriously, most small businesses are small businesses. I had no use for shenanigans like that.
The phone and internet service providers hear the word 'business' and immediately lobby to change your account to the business category at twice the cost for the same services. The municipal tax office wants you to pay business taxes on top of residential ones and questions the zoning of the your home. On and on it goes. Local charities and fundraisers start knocking on the door for prizes and donations, as if, by becoming a business, there is instant and extra wealth available. I will happily do my part to contribute to my community, but honestly guys, first I have to actually be able to make some money. And maybe even pay myself something.
What Do You Mean I Have To Be The Secretary?
The costs of becoming a business put a painful headlock on my efforts to develop a profitable business and seriously gobbled up my time.
I now had to keep an immaculate set of books tracking every single transaction, which again was not so straightforward because I was doing business online, by mail, and in-person.
Mrs. Flag told me about an national craft business organization I could join for $75 a year that had negotiated a deal for its small business members to get them a very reasonable rate as a vendor with a credit card company. (Don't worry: Mrs. Flag hadn't switched to the soft and fuzzy side of life—she got a kickback for referring me.) The bank (with the stupid cheque ledgers) wanted to charge me 5% on every purchase through their credit card system. With this craft business group membership, I qualified for under 2%.
The ability to accept credit cards opened up a lot more business but it also created a lot more work. Every transaction had to be phoned in with all of the details communicated through the touch tone phone. That's a lot of beeping. When I started selling at craft shows, I might have a few hundred transactions to phone in when I returned home. Oy! Today I'm sure I'd have a WiFi connection at the shows to transmit the information on the spot, but back then we pioneers had to really work for our supper. (Yes, I know there's always hardships in any era, but I can't help soliciting for a wee bit of pity.)
You can see the slippery slope forming: I started out dyeing fabric for fun in the wee hours of the night when I could have time alone. I did a lot more because I loved it. I made way more fabric than I could ever use. I started selling it because I loved the idea of running an art-based business and I needed the money. But gradually the rules and regulations and timelines (a.k.a. The Man) forced more and more of the work into my office during daytime hours, bumping up against my time as a stay-at-home mom. Uh-o. I was becoming a bureaucracy.
Although the business was web-based, along with attending some local craft shows, I also started getting orders by telephone. Time stealer! Yes, I was delighted to have sales, but, when someone is tracking down your unpublished phone number to personally order your products, they don't just want the goods: they also want to experience YOU. What should have been brief phone calls taking orders could turn into 15 or 20 minute conversations. And the problem was, these are all very kind people. People I would love to know better and many I would like to have as friends. But boundaries have to be set if you're going to have a home life separate from a bustling small business and the telephone is nobody's friend. And don't forget that telephones were designed to torture shy people like me.
When you don't know how successful business will be on an ongoing basis, it's really hard to know when to ignore the phone or the knocks at the door and trust that you'll generate enough business otherwise.
Yes, I said knocks at the door. I only ever published my post box address yet some people would get my home address and show up at the door unannounced asking if they could just quick come in and browse the fabric. As if my online store was an actual store at my home. Ah, the delusions of the world wide web.
Help!
It still makes me squirm to think of this. Even if I wanted this, my home was in no condition for guests. And it's not as if I kept everything set up like a store display for browsing. I actually had a bin system with codes on labels and everything was stacked up in various rooms throughout the house. I've seen episodes of Hoarders that looked better than my place.
Come in and browse? I think not. Grateful for your interest, but no. Thank you. Please go now. Seriously. Bye!
Another big dilemma was packaging. As I said, when someone is buying from a art-based small business, they're not just buying the stuff but the experience. They want contact with the interesting and quirky artist. They want your DNA. They want something really unique and not mass produced. So, while it would have been environmentally-awesome to be able to use re purposed materials for bundling and packaging the fabrics, at that time I could not find anything that looked good enough to use that would give my customers the complete Ode to Claude experience.
While not much of shopper myself, ok, well really, not a shopper at all, I would watch and listen to people at craft shows and see what they responded positively to. I ended up buying rolls of brown craft paper for wrapping, gold ribbon, printing out cool little business cards, and writing personal notes on them to include in each mail order. This seemed to tickle people. And bring repeat business.
Even these few years later, people seem so much more receptive to the reuse and re purposing of materials that I bet there are many more acceptable options that would be greener, cost less, and still please the customers. But back then, the problems of over-consuming and excess packaging were not yet making the headlines and recycled craft paper cost about four times more than the cutting-down-fresh-trees stuff did. It's just too easy to be consumed by The Man.
I enjoyed participating in craft shows, finding it fun to design an eye catching display, though I was really disappointed by how many organizers charged really high table fees. In many cases it was not worth the gamble. I didn't want to have my first $500 of revenue from the event just cover my base cost for being there. After all, if they didn't deliver the crowds, they weren't about to refund the vendors for their costs. So I chose lower priced shows to start.
Customers soon tell you what you need to do. After the first few shows, I understood that people loved the fabrics but wanted specific ideas for using them. I mean really specific ideas. I'm always surprised by this because I'm always overflowing with ideas and don't like following directions. But I was not like many of my customers, and to succeed, I had to really listen and respond to what they were requesting.
To showcase the fabrics, I made a large bed quilt featuring a variety of my fabrics and began using it as a back drop at my booth. (It's the one you see on the cover of this book.)
The quilt attracted a lot of attention but as soon as customers would see it, they would ask to buy a pattern and fabric kit to make that specific quilt. Some people want a lot of hand-holding! Okay. I can hold hands. Many of these people were not free form quilt artists but avid sewers wanting to just toe test the waters of innovation, not skinny dip in them.
It seemed that for every problem I solved, another chore presented itself. Did I really want to get into the pattern publishing business as well? I joined an online group of professional quilt pattern designers and, after some experimenting, decided it was best to simply order some of their patterns wholesale and sell those. The last thing I needed was more computer and desk work to write out quilt design instructions and diagrams. And it wasn't like I was suddenly a quilt making genius.
To promote the use of my fabrics, I sewed samples using these independently published patterns with my hand-dyes and displayed them online and at shows. That brought another revenue stream and I admit it was a relief to sell something I didn't have to manufacture myself. I just placed orders, listed the patterns, and sold them! Easy peasy. What a concept.
The quilt artists did show up as customers as well. They wanted one-of-a-kind small pieces of fabric in all sorts of colours and textures. In other words, they wanted my rejects. Any fabric piece that accidentally got splattered or blotchy or just didn't have the wow factor that qualified it for the Monet sets or other bundles, now started going in the
Quilt Artist's Dream Package: no two the same, nothing you'd ever find at a fabric store, and combinations you may never find again. ~Claude
Basically my customers showed me how to outsmart my own preconceived notions.
This approach was fantastic for selling off my misfits. I didn't have to guarantee anything and I could state right on the website that what you see in the photo is probably not what you'll get in the package. Anything simple like that provided much needed relief for me.
As sales continued, I soon started noticing buying trends. There were certain colour blends that far outsold everything else. I had one set that was a mixture of blue and fuchsia, forming an array from royal blue to a pinky purple. I also did a lighter version of the same set. Those two sets probably accounted for 30% of all my fabric sales. (After a while I couldn't stand those colours-lol!) The next best seller was a set called Forest Floor. It was a random bundle of earthy tones in various browns and mossy greens. Those were around 20% of my sales.
You know how consumers demand that fast food restaurants offer 'healthy' choices such as salads and grilled meats but they don't seem to ever order them? That's how it was with many of the fabric colours. They helped boost my display, but many of them wouldn't sell nearly as well as those best sellers.
Like eagles spotting mice from a hundred feet in the air, giddy colour lovers would come dashing over to my booth and either grab popular set A or B or C. Sold! If I put them on display in masses, they hardly sold at all. It seemed the novelty of them amongst other colours was what made them stand out.
It was a great deal of fun to try out different arrangements and predict results. And as long as I had loads of those popular sets on hand to replenish the display, sales were usually very good. People also panic and buy extra if they think you're running low on something they love. Good to know.
One thing I was so slow to learn at craft sales was the peril of the door prize. Often the show organizers will approach each vendor and ask them to contribute some sort of door prize for the attendees. Initially I would hand over a bundle of fabrics with my card on them. Then it occurred to me: never just give something away when you can create a future customer instead. From then on I came prepared with gift cards offering a discount on a purchase for a limited time period. Much better door prize! While someone who won the fabrics at the door might never come to my booth at all, the person with a 20% discount burning a hole in her pocket will certainly at least check it out. Those discount card prizes nearly always resulted in a sale.
Thorough business bookkeeping provides the information you need to analyze the true costs of doing business. In the case of fabric dyeing, besides the materials (fabric, dye powders, soda ash, containers...), there's a big demand on work space plus water and use of a washing machine and dryer. Because I did all the work within our home, I had to review our utility bills for the year before I started dyeing fabric, and then the first year of fabric dyeing to get some sense of how much our household expenses had increased because of it.
I wanted a business that covered all costs (including wear and tear) plus a profit, paid me a living wage (when I was actually working well beyond full-time hours), and was a kind to earth as possible. A lot of people try to romanticize having an art-based business, as if you get to have your cake and eat it too. Believe me, I would have tried if the cake wasn't buried somewhere in the bins and buckets lining the rooms of our house. It can be fun but wow, it's a lot of mess and work as well. And thinking. This duck's feet were paddling very fast under that smooth, blue water.
There were times when I really wanted to hire a studio assistant to help with the mailings, restocking supplies, bookkeeping, ironing and bundling fabric sets, and so on, but, that would mean having this person in our home. I intentionally did not advertise or mention I wanted help because I knew several of the people I had met through the business would probably be interested but none of them seemed like a good fit. I knew it would be too invasive for my family in our tiny home. What I a was really needing was a very intuitive and efficient robot who would also make our meals and give me a good laugh when I needed it most.
Excited by my business growth, some people offered to learn how to dye the fabrics for me, just to help out. While that was very kind, it reminded me of when you have a new baby and everyone offers to come over and hold the new baby when what you really need is for them to clean your bathrooms and do the laundry. I was running a art business based on the unique, quirky characteristics that you wouldn't get by buying something mass produced overseas. And since hand-dyes are like finger prints and snowflakes: no two people get the same results, I did not want to sell a product I hadn't made myself. The point was that the Ode to Claude brand was my very own hand-dyed creations and what I really needed was someone to take on the more mundane stuff, preferably in the middle of the night. Like that happy robot.
I continued to keep very late hours and do all of the work myself, sensing that one day I would have to make some big decisions about expanding into a bigger space and getting help.
Hello Guild: I'm Horrifically Shy!
After a few months of business, my local quilt guild hosted an evening where members could come showcase their quilt-related businesses at the monthly meeting for an audience of 300+ people. I'm ridiculously shy and loathe public speaking but forced myself to give a little presentation. I'm quite certain my little speech was a rather incoherent mess (it's hard to speak in a loud, clear voice while blacking out to the sound of your heart racing in your ear) but I did get a lot of people coming over to my table later to view the fabrics. They were probably propelled over by sheer pity. The two most common questions were, “Would you be able to dye my drapes to match my carpet?” (No.) And, “Do you teach fabric dyeing?” (Maybe!)
I had anticipated the teaching question because people always asked about the how-to's of fabric dyeing at my booths at craft shows. It seemed to be a mixture of interest and small talk.
I put out a sign-up sheet for a possible workshop on my guild table and by the end of the evening I had over 50 contacts to follow up with.
Long story short, teaching fabric dyeing is far more lucrative than making and selling hand-dyes. I came up with a system for teaching where the workshop participants would get hands-on experience with all the critical steps in the process, go home with a lovely bundle of their own hand-dyes, but still only have to be there a few hours (fabric dyeing involves a lot of waiting time). To help them further, I provided each of them with a manual I had written so they wouldn't have to take a lot of notes at the workshop but instead could enjoy playing with colour and getting to know one another (or not, if they are socially inept like me).
Remember how I said I encountered a lot of sneaky people? Business people who were secretive with information and not at all helpful? Or happy to take from me but never reciprocate in return? My hunch with teaching fabric dyeing was that I would be rewarded ten fold if I openly shared my so-called tips and tricks and hard-earned fabric dyeing lessons with my students.
I declared myself an open book. I also knew that many quilters (and knitters) are extraordinarily intelligent people. If I shared what I knew with them, certainly I would learn a lot in return. If some of them loved the dyeing so much that they wanted to try selling their own fabrics? No problem. I was happy to share my experiences in case I could help them avoid some of the pitfalls I had faced along the way. It may be small world sometimes but it's also a big planet with a lot of people and there's room for all of us to thrive. Or that's my theory and I'm sticking with it. One woman told me she had been to a surface design workshop where they had to sign a confidentiality agreement in order to participate. Even if it could hurt my business, which I doubt it ever would, I never wanted to be like that. I also heard through the grapevine that Mrs. Flag's shop was struggling partly because her demanding business tactics were offensive to so many customers.
Ironically the more I taught, the more they bought! Fabric, that is. My students who continued dyeing fabric on their own after the workshops, often came back to me buy more of my hand-dyes and see if I would be the middle person supplying them with bolts of dye fabrics and powders. I would always tell them my sources and provide contact information, but many of them were more comfortable going through me. How's that for accidental reverse psychology?
I made it clear that I would have to charge a flat fee to justify my time ordering and distributing the wholesale fabric, but that was fine with them. (I never could get more than a 10% discount on dye powders because that's a heavily protected market with few vendors and they are apparently very keen to protect their shares.)
My presentation at the quilt guild prompted me not only to start teaching fabric dyeing but to wholesale my fabrics as well. A few of the other guild members who presented that night were fabric shop owners and several of them expressed an interest in having my fabrics in their shops. Selling the fabrics in a shop meant there was no pressure to match a swatch card sample or image on a screen. I was able to offer a reasonable wholesale price because I could simply create a variety of bundles with whatever odds and ends I had on hand, display them nicely and wait for their customers to snatch them up.
I went to visit each of the owners at their shops and all of them purchased significant volumes of fabrics to get started. When supplies were running out, they would contact me to come replenish the display.
From there I went on to contact other quilt shop owners throughout the province. There were a few who were such incredibly bitter people that, even though they did want the fabrics in their shops, I could not bring myself to deal with them. One aspect of running your own business is, for better and worse, you get to be the boss. And this boss did not want constant dealings with human crab apples. So, even though I first approached them, I would eventually decline the sale and deal with the inevitable stream of expletives. Whatever. Good-bye! It's amazing how many business owners really seem to hate their businesses as well as their customers. Me? I'd rather stay on the happy side of life.
The long-distance shops would receive their fabrics by mail. I had very good relationships with all of them and they could phone me at any time to place more orders or relay customer questions. (Am I the only one who has been using personal computers since the 1980's? It's amazing how many shop owners didn't get online and have email until just recently. I am certain email was invented by a phone-phobic person like me.)
Around this time, good old Mrs. Flag came into her own business troubles and as a result, I felt the wrath.
As you will recall, like a bumbling fool, I had initially negotiated with Mrs. Flag to barter my hand-dyes for dyeing fabric. She would supply me with bolts of white quilter's cotton and I would supply her with hand-dyes to sell in her shop. From my bookkeeping analysis, I had a pretty clear idea of the actual total cost of my fabrics (including overhead and paying myself for my work).
Unfortunately, Mrs. Flag, while knowing what it cost her to purchase dye fabric for me, was not willing to share that information with me (which told me she must have been getting an amazing deal). How do you negotiate when you don't know what the other guy's costs are, and, more to the point, you don't trust him/her? This made it rather difficult to fairly exchange goods. After seeing how well my fabrics sold in her shop, she eventually agreed to pay me cash instead (at my wholesale rate), which, I thought, resolved the problem.
I liked having the fabrics at her store because I could refer customers there when they wanted to come to my house to shop in person. And I was sure it would benefit Mrs. Flag to bring more people into her store.
Fast forward and Mrs. Flag's quilt shop was really struggling. She had expanded way beyond her means using a pie in the sky business plan to secure a big bank loan. I went in the shop to replenish stock and collect my current payment and she sheepishly acknowledged that she couldn't afford to or didn't want to pay me in cash, despite our deal. Instead, she offered, with far too much enthusiasm, that I could 'have' the same amount in goods from her store.
Now think about it. She buys her wares at wholesale rates with at least a 50% markup for retail. She had sold over $400 of my fabrics, retailing over $800. So she wanted me to take $400 in goods that cost her $200. Forgetaboutit! Mrs. Red Flag was making me see red.
I loathed these sorts of difficulties. Mainly because my hunch was that she really could afford to pay me, but she just didn't want to if she could get away with doing something else. We eventually sorted it out but my fabrics no longer appeared in her store.
I later heard from one of my customers, Diane, that she, Diane, went into that shop specifically to buy more hand-dyes (because that's where she first encountered them) and, when she discovered the display was gone, she asked Mrs. Flag where she could get some more. Mrs. Flag played dumb and told Diane she just couldn't remember the source and suspected I'd gone out of business. Nice, eh? You can see why thicker skinned business people feel they have to play really rough sometimes.
My one and only mishap with dyes running happened with another wholesale order. I had been supplying this other shop with fabrics for about half a year and I got a call one day from the owner saying a customer had a problem with my fabrics. She said it was a fuchsia piece and when she went to test it for wash-fastness, it ran. A lot.
This is just about the worst news you can get as a hand-dye seller. I prided myself on the fact that I produced absolutely washfast fabrics that anyone would confidentially sew right into a quilt without pretesting or worrying. Had this customer sewn with the fabric and then washed the quilt, the quilt could have been ruined.
I wanted to die. No pun intended. Well, not really, but this was bad. One slip up like this and customers lose faith. They get scared off, they tell their friends all about it, and before you know it, we're back to the 1934 wives' tales about fabric dyes. It's like vegetarians always being asked, “But where do you get your protein?” It's a cliché and irrelevant question because all sorts of foods contain more than ample protein without a person every consuming an animal product. With fabric dyes, it's “Do the dyes run?”
Well they shouldn't but these ones did.
I looked through my dyeing notes for that particular order and immediately knew what the problem was. It was a particularly hairy time and I had rushed the job. I chose meeting a self-imposed deadline (liking to wow the shops with my speedy service) over taking an extra day and doing it right. It was the one and only time I did that and I knew at the time I was pushing my luck. Never overrule your spidey sense! Haste makes waste.
By my good fortune, the shop keeper was extremely gracious about the whole thing and didn't seem to mind at all. Meanwhile I was beating myself up over it. I couriered a replacement set of fabrics to the store with a few extra bling pieces and as far as the owner and customer were concerned, it was a happy resolution. She continued to order my fabrics, and I continued to live on edge, fearing that some other bigger mishap might derail the business I had worked so hard to build. Who me, paranoid? You can see why I'm not running a major corporation (besides the fact that I'm not a fan of The Man and fear the telephone and public speaking.)
Every Good Success Attracts A Few Trolls
Turns out, I didn't derail anything and business continued to chug along. But lots more trolls came out of the woodwork to try and rattle my cage. Here's an example:
Around this time, more hand-dyed fabric shops starting popping up online and several of the businesses were located within an hour or two of my home.
I started noticing some long visits to my online store as indicated by my sitemeter. One particular IP address would visit over and over again, checking every single page. At the same time, from the same IP address, I started getting general enquiries by email asking about fabric dyeing, suppliers, and sales volumes. These were just from innocent, curious fans, you understand.
Other information confirmed that two of the competing shops were essentially trying to get all my business information without ever simply coming forth and asking me directly. People just assume you won't cooperate so they start trying to shimmy the lock without ever testing to see if the door is actually already open.
While I probably would have shared resource information, I can't say it ever thrills me when the other party refuses to reciprocate or be open with their intentions. Again, think about it. It's a big, freaking planet and there really is room on it for lots of us to have similar businesses. In fact, why not promote one another? If a customer wants something I don't have, I will gladly direct them to your shop in case you do. It's win win. The customer remembers the helpfulness and probably tells other people about it, plus, they get what they wanted. If your fabrics are better than mine, that's my cue to step up my game. (A big difficulty is competing with other vendors who don't price their goods to cover their true costs. But that's what happens when hobbies are subsidized by hardworking spouses.)
The spying trolls tried all sorts of crazy things, and eventually I met one of them head on at a craft show. I had the opportunity to reveal that I knew some of the spy emails were from her (again by matching up IP addresses on various emails and site visits). I admit it was fun to see the woman sputter and writhe, trying to cover up her silly and lame attempts to garnish my 'secrets'.
While I never did locate the wholesale supplier of my favourite first quilter's cotton, I did continue hunting for other options throughout Canada to avoid dealing with Red Flag Betty. After testing some samples, I bought 1000 yards of a slightly thicker mercerized cotton that felt lovely and sewed beautifully. The arrival of this new fabric coincided with a huge order for many pieces of Forest Floor colours so I went ahead and dyed a whole bunch of batches.
Two problems occurred. First, because the fabric was slightly thicker, the mottles were not nearly as crystal-like as they appeared on the old fabric. Ack! Before completing the order, I had to courier a sample to the customer (who was buying on behalf of a whole group of people) and see if she'd even want the fabric at all. Fortunately, while it was very different looking, she still wanted the whole lot. I finished the order and shipped it out in several big boxes.
The next problem was, the fabric arrived damp! I had organized everything into sets, all nicely ironed and folded into beautiful bundles tied with ribbon (that particular gold ribbon that was my signature), and I enclosed everything in large plastic bags as instructed by the courier service who couldn't ensure that the boxes wouldn't get wet along the way.
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