The Business of Craft: A Panel Discussion at Mendocino College
By Stephanie T. Hoppe shoppe@pacific.net

A recent show at the Mendocino College Art Gallery in Ukiah, “A Working Living: The Business of Craft” (February 8 to April 7, 2007), featured the work of a dozen Northern California craftspersons, together with extensive photographs and text illustrating their working methods. On March 16, the artists, each representing decades of experience, participated in a panel discussion on business aspects of craft. In their comments on the questions posed and—perhaps even more important—their discussion of each other’s comments, they illuminated a range of approaches both to their various crafts and to craft as a business.

The furniture maker on the panel had set out with a clear ambition, borrowed funds to attend the College of the Redwoods woodworking program and subsequently worked for a cabinet maker. He enjoyed that work, but still wanting to make furniture, struck out on his own. He lives modestly near the Mendocino coast, growing much of his own food on his property and by fishing, while making fine furniture mostly on commissions from the wealthy people building second, third, or last homes on the coast. He noted the political correctness/guilt that well-to-do Northern Californians feel about global warming and deforestation issues around the importation of exotic woods; in part as a marketing tool, more and more he uses local woods, such a madrone. He also teaches part time and enjoys the balance between working solitarily and engaging with students.

For her part, one of the potters on the panel happened onto her craft as opportunities arose for study, apprenticeship, and college teaching, which has been a major emphasis of her career for some thirty years. She lives and maintains a studio in a West Berkeley neighborhood of likeminded persons, selling her work primarily at studio sales several times a year.

Another potter on the panel started some twenty years ago with showing her ceramics at two American Craft Council shows, from which she obtained wholesale accounts that sustained her business (which includes several employees and apprentices) for many years. When orders finally dwindled, she added a retail showroom to her pottery in Ukiah and somewhat to her surprise sells so much locally that her sales have remained substantial but switched from 85% wholesale and 15% retail to the reverse.

A weaver of fine wool carpeting (the husband of a husband-and-wife team) also started, or at least intended to start, with American Craft Council shows. After not being accepted, he toured a show and realized that the venue of a myriad crowded booths was not for him. Through connections to designer showrooms in San Francisco, these weavers built up relationships with interior designers and architects, obtaining sufficient work that they quit their other jobs in the Bay Area and moved to rural Mendocino County (in part to economize on living expenses) to weave full time and raise a family. More recently he has traveled extensively, consulting for groups and organizations of third world weavers.

A printmaker on the panel who works in the traditional Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut technique, started in his craft as a teenager and young adult, sleeping in his parents’ garage beside his press, selling his work at art and craft fairs. For many years he also taught history at the college level. Now in his fifties, he works full time at his craft. He does occasionally teach workshops, feeling an obligation to pass on this historic technique, but finds himself resenting the time and energy taken from his work. Nowadays he sells mostly through his website and at his studio—like both of the potters, he likes dealing directly with customers.

The lineup of the panel concluded with a designer and seamstress of art-to-wear women’s clothing. She too built on a childhood fascination with her craft, beginning as a preschooler to design and make garments. After many years in the health care industry, she and her husband pooled their savings to start their current business (besides doing most of the organizational and paper work, he handweaves fabric she uses as a component in the garments she designs and sews). With the help of two contract sewers and an additional weaver, they produce limited edition and one-of-a-kind garments which they sell at ten to twelve craft shows per year around the United States, a schedule that involves a large organizational component of applying for these juried shows, making travel arrangements, paying sales and income taxes in multiple states, etc. Another panelist had commented about the “graying” of the crafts and an absence of young people entering the field; this couple perhaps exemplifies a more positive trend of people turning to crafts as a second career.

Questions about pricing work illuminated both the individual personalities and the business approaches of the various panelists. The representatives of the two married couples—who alone of the panelists appear to live entirely by their craft—had the most rigorous approach;  they calculated how many hours they could work in a year and set themselves an hourly wage based on the income they needed for living expenses. From that wage they calculated the wholesale price of their products…making adjustments based on, for example, competitors’ prices. Adjustments were upward as well as downward: the art-to-wear maker remembers selling out at early shows where they priced their work as low as they could, undercutting other clothing makers; they soon concluded this tactic would not serve them or the handmade garment business in the long run and raised their prices.

The furniture maker recited the formula of time + materials + profit and laughed, saying it is not necessarily “realistic.” What is the item intrinsically worth? How much money did he need? How much can he get? What would he be willing to pay for the item? He told of a commission to make a large dining room table and numerous chairs for which the customer said she would pay whatever he asked. After finishing the work he decided he could not in good conscience charge more than $40,000—which he later calculated was less per hour than he usually receives.

Both of the potters like to keep some items available at very low prices so anyone can afford them. The potter with the showroom in Ukiah sometimes sells work at low prices to children; she also hides lower priced items here and there around the showroom as treasures customers can discover. The printmaker raises the price of prints in editions that sell well—higher and higher as fewer prints remain.

An audience question about how market forces interact with the panelists’ personal artistic vision met a fairly hard-nosed, even “survival of the fittest” response. The printmaker commented that he finds himself liking particular prints he has made more and more if they prove good sellers. More generally, he noted that artists whose work doesn’t sell—who are not in tune with the market, whether consciously or unconsciously, or do not find a particular niche that fits their work, probably end with leaving the field altogether.

The art-to-wear designer described her test-marketing: she designs clothes based on what she would like to wear, sews them and wears them herself to test for wearability, then produces a limited set of sizes and colors which she includes in her fall shows. If customers do not notice them, she discontinues them; if they prove popular, she makes a full set of sizes and colors for their largest show, the retail and wholesale American Craft Council show in Baltimore every February.

The furniture maker commented that he likes getting direction from clients—it is the actual woodworking that he most enjoys. The carpet weaver noted rather wistfully that working through designer showrooms has restricted his use of colors. He loves blue but has never received a commission for a blue carpet; at the same time, he has woven “miles” of taupe.

The panelists emphasized the need to identify one’s potential clients—who are they and where? What socioeconomic group can afford the work? What venues do these people frequent? What media and style of presentation can reach them? They stressed personally engaging potential customers. Most of them enjoy interaction with people who value their work and believe that selling directly to customers, such as through studio sales or craft shows, is economically the most efficient approach to selling their work. None of the panelists expressed enthusiasm for galleries, although the furniture maker does show a few pieces in galleries. “They never sell,” he said, but he sends potential customers to look at them to clarify what they might like to commission.

Cultivate your mailing list was the panelists’ unanimous advice. Most also find websites helpful. One commented that the internet is taking over many of the functions of the art and craft shows of the 1960s and 1970s. Mailings, he added, seed website visiting. He quoted the old sales saw: It takes three contacts to sell a customer. Postcards announcing website updates, open studios, upcoming shows are all ways to contact and recontact potential customers. These panelists mostly did not use their websites for direct sales, but more as a display and educational venue, showing their work, introducing themselves, advertising their studio location or show schedule.

All of the panelists were enthusiastic about craft and their life in craft. They work hard—but mostly they are obsessive about working. They think of themselves as keepers of traditions and techniques hand work, indeed of human history and culture. (The furniture maker reminded us that for hundreds of thousands of years, up until one or two hundred years ago, all of human culture was hand work. The carpet weaver reported that his travels led him to Arabia to teach Bedouin women rug weaving techniques their grandmothers knew but had been lost to them.) The panelists agreed that as a business craft does not support more than a modest standard of living—but mostly that has turned out to be enough. They continue to be inspired by a passion for their medium, whether it is wood, clay, paper or fiber, the passion that brought them originally, whether purposefully or by accident, into their craft.