Can I Make Money With My Crafty Cards?

For the last few years, I’ve been making greeting cards for our family and friends.  I’ve also made sets of photo greeting cards and given them as Christmas presents, with 10 cards and envelopes tied in a bunch with pretty string.  Time and again recipients have told me that I should sell my cards, but I’d never given it much thought.  Recently however, I started thinking more seriously about it.  I love making cards, and if I could earn us a little extra money by making more of them, it would help us meet our financial goals faster. 

Yesterday, we went to a nearby pedestrian mall, and I inquired at three crafty/arty stores about how the whole process would work.  I still have to contact the people who handle cards at each store, and submit samples, but I’m optimistic after my initial meetings.  It looks like in general the artist gets about 50% of the sale, and handmade cards sell for between $2 and $7, depending on the complexity.  I have a pretty wide range of cards, and I would probably sell the photo cards for about $2.50 ($1.25 for me), and my more ornate, stitched cards for about $4 or $5 each.  The photo cards are very quick to make, once I take a good picture.  The hand stitched cards take a lot longer to make, so I wouldn’t make as much money on a per hour basis with those.  But if I were able to have about half photo cards and half stitched/papercraft cards, I could probably end up with about $20/hour for my time. 

This is of course assuming that the people in charge like my cards, and that customers buy them.  I looked at the cards on display in the stores yesterday, and my designs are very different – I didn’t see anything that looks like what I do.  I really like my cards, and hopefully other people will too.  The nice thing about this particular pedestrian mall is that it’s in a high-income town and there are lots of tourists, pretty much all year round.  And it seems that they are all spending money, judging from the shopping bags we always see people carrying and the prices of the stuff in the stores.

I’m going to work on this project this week.  I have to take samples to one store, and contact managers at the other two stores to see what they’d like me to do.  I’ll let you know how it goes after I get through the “interview” process. 

Related posts:

1. Christmas Cards
2. Spending Money