When you start creating beautiful art and craft and decide to share your talent with the rest of the world, you don't necessarily factor in the business skills necessary to make this successful. Most market sellers are artists first and foremost who would love to spend all their time creating rather than planning marketing strategies and dealing with BAS statements.

Unfortunately to fund future creativity, you need to get the most out of each market you attend. So, to help all our creative entrepreneurs we offer a series of coaching sessions and take home reading material that will help you with the business end of your art and craft business. This coaching series covers the following topics:

Before the market: Marketing on a shoestring

In this session we will focus on what you can do before the market to encourage people to visit your stand. We will look at strategies like pre-market promotions, PR, collaborative marketing and developing a word-of-mouth marketing campaign.

At the market: Making your business stand out

In this session we will focus on your stand as your store, stand layout, creating the right atmosphere, at-market promotions, customer service and managing expectations.

After the market: Creating loyal customers

It is much cheaper from a marketing point of view to increase the spend from existing customers than to continually chase one-off sales. In this workshop we will look at building a relationship with your customers over time and moving them from customers to advocates of your business.

Pricing Strategies

It can be very difficult to price the time and attention you pour into your handmade items. We will look at some of the ways you can determine the price of your products, including value-based pricing, loss-leaders, the special order, wholesale pricing and selling on consignment.

Developing your brand online and offline

In this session we will examine what you can do to differentiate your business both online and offline. We will explore the basic laws of branding that will help you to decide where and when to advertise, how to use PR, when to expand your product line and how to advertise on the Internet.

Developing a marketing calendar

We will tie everything we've discussed together to produce a marketing calendar that will make the best use of your time and money to promote your business.

This series of six coaching sessions costs $1,800 + GST. Please contact us to see how we can help you build your craft business.