It’s absolutely mind-boggling when you think about tracking. 

Statistics aren’t everything, but they sure do help if you’re serious about wanting to make your hobby into a business.  Well, okay… a business that stays in the black financially.  Keeping track not only of inventory and sales, but also of time, overhead, depreciation, sales trends….

I’ve been musing on this all week.  Read about it in Craftrends and The Crafts Report.  Dialogued about it on blogs.  Discussed it with friends.  With family.  The myriad responses and reactions were in themselves worthy of a study.  The subject is a wide current running through the hobby industry as we all face the realities of tightening up our business belts in face of lower sales volume.

Some people want to doom and gloom about the current financial cycle.  Things like Craftrends magazine publishing their last print issue can have people running scared.    Shows are changing their venues and raising booth fees, or closing altogether;  competition with low-cost imports is on the rise;  our customers’ buying habits are changing as they have to weigh competing items and make decisions about where to spend their more-limited expendable income. 

Tracking can be a very useful thing, but only if you get the big picture.  There are cycles to the hobby industry, and while this particular cycle of the low end is lower than many… it’s not the lowest.  Cycles from previous decades will play that out if we can look back far enough.

And perhaps if we take the glass-half-full view, we can see this trend as a good thing.  It forces us to take a hard look at how we are spending and tracking and selling and marketing.  Because we now have the time to do that — when things were booming, when the customers were banging down our doors to buy our products, we were so busy making and selling as fast as we could that we put off taking that long, hard look.  In the glow of the moment, we felt the sky was the limit and we could do the math later.

Well, later has arrived.

So is there hope?  Of course there is.  Taking a deep breath and remembering that there are cycles to business, and that things will get better eventually.  Tightening up the tracking and making necessary changes to eliminate those processes or products that drag on the profit line.  Moving with the flow of customer traffic and exposing our preconceived ideas to closer scrutiny. 

The potential is that our businesses could come into the next upward trend stronger, tighter, and better fit to face the increased volume.   

The response to the reworked show booth series has been overwhelming.  Thank you to everyone who has sent me email and forum messages about it.  It’s really exciting to see people responding to a project like this with such enthusiasm!

Something I hadn’t said (or don’t think I said) was about keeping the arrangement of my booth fluid.  What I mean is, not getting too stuck in only doing the booth one certain way.  A couple of leading artists have mentioned cautions about doing that, because the dynamics of the craft and art show system are subject to rapid change and we need to be able to change with it.  It’s more than just sticking with it through this ‘dry spell’ in the economy;  it’s being willing to take a good, long look at processes to see which things are working and which aren’t.  Trying new things!  Exploring!  Pushing the limits of what’s possible. 

Judy Dunn has been doing that recently with her art business, and she has some wonderful comments in her recent blog post.  It’s important to be farsighted enough in this industry that you can see the flow and be able to adjust to it.  That’s hard for me, when all I really want to do is just ignore the business side and spend all my time creating pretty stuff. 

Back to the booth - I’m convinced now that the pictures I took of the booth at the different shows last year were an absolutely invaluable resource, not just for me now but for the length of my business.  I’m saving those pictures to a CD for future reference.  Years from now, I may go back and explore further some of the ideas which I’m passing up now.

This Saturday (tomorrow), if the weather holds (it’s supposed to rain, but I’m going to chance it), I’m having a sale at my booth.  All floral/tropical pieces are 20% off.  In support of the sale, I’m decorating the booth with a tropical theme.  Of course I’ll take pictures.  I don’t know if I’ll wear the grass skirt and coconut bra, but I’ll certainly play up the theme in the booth decoration to attract customers and get them to laugh.  There’ll be tiki torches, a vinyl bamboo-ish wall covering, giant parrots, grass skirting on the table, floral garlands - and the Beach Boys playing softly in the background.  The idea is 1960’s Polynesian kitsch.

My goal is to attract attention and hopefully get people to smile or even laugh at the thematic elements.   That’s one way to break the ice, to reduce the tension between customer and artist.  If the customer can relax, they’re more likely to buy.  They want to talk to you, to find out what makes someone do a crazy stunt like this.  If they like it, they want to take a little piece of the artist home with them.  But even if I don’t go all out with the accessories, I still will do this one thing:  be enthusiastic about what I’m selling.  Talking to the customers, coming out from behind the table, showing them pieces and handling things with them - that’s a way to help transfer ownership to the customer and give them incentive to buy!

And if the artist is a bit of a character, well…. that certainly helps!  Take one of my heroes as an example:  Christi Friesen.  She’s got a ton of talent and a shrewd business head on her shoulders.  She’s also delightfully funny!  I admire what she’s doing and how she continues to push her limits when it comes to both her artwork and her entrepreneurial attitude.  Yay, Christi!

Many thanks go to Cyndi Lavin, owner of the art blog Jewelry & Beading.  She’s recently uploaded an interview with me on her Artist Profiles series.  You can see the interview here:  http://www.jewelryandbeading.com/2008/05/08/artist-profile-ca-therien/.