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Things To Consider When Starting A New Craft Business

Things To Consider When Starting A New Craft Business

I started Cookie Dough Kids in 2018 and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done!

To do something that you love, and to do it completely for yourself is just amazing and the pride you feel when you make a product for somebody and they love it makes it all worth it!

Granted it is hard work and there are days when you feel like you wish you could clone yourself to have an extra pair of hands!

So I wanted to create this post to give some ideas of the sorts of things you should consider if you are thinking of starting your own small business, similar to this one!

  1. What equipment do you need? – It’s important to think about what sort of equipment you are going to need for your business, and there will be different equipment for different things depending on if you’re printing clothing or embroidering. You will need to think about the big things like cutting machines, heat presses and vinyl down to the smaller things like postage bags and packaging items. It’s important to get an idea of the prices of these sorts of things and what you can afford for your business.
  2. How much time can you put into your small business? – Are you going to be working full time on your business or are you going to be working on it on top of another job?! Having a small business can be extremely time-consuming, especially if you’re doing it alone! It’s important to consider your time and how much you have of it to dedicate to your business, it’s also important to ensure you still have time for yourself!
  3. Coming up with designs and thinking about what you want to sell – Are you going to be creating designs for yourself? Or are you going to have somebody design your products for you? It’s important to check out current trends and make sure you design products that people are going to want to buy, thinking about things like fonts and colours.
  4. Suppliers and where to buy your stock from – What items are you going to create/produce/sell and where are you going to buy them from? It’s important to find yourself a reputable stockist.
  5. Budget Monitoring / Taxes – The boring side of things, but one of the most important! There are apps/programmes that can help with this sort of thing, I find it helps me to download my monthly bank statements and do this on a monthly basis, rather than leaving It to the last minute and panicking as the tax deadline closes in!
  6. Social Media and Marketing – Running social media accounts can be sooo time-consuming! It can take a lot of time to run your account and engage with people, you want to be following accounts that are relevant to the type of business that you are running, for e.g. for us it’s mum accounts! it’s important to remain active on your social media accounts, but not too active! and good quality images/videos really does make all the difference. Also, advertising is really important to help your small business reach a wider audience. We use a company called RR Web Design – https://rrwebdesign.co.uk/ – to help with our Google Ads and SEO.
  7. Postage – How are you going to post your items to your customers and how much are you going to charge them for postage? Which courier are you going to use? Are you going to have a specific postage day for all of your orders?
  8. Events such as Easter, Mothers Day, Christmas etc – what sort of events through the year are you going to need to prepare for? Generally, for a lot of businesses, Christmas is a busier period than usual so it’s important to consider this and prepare for particular events, get a calendar and mark them off! You may want to create specific products and market specific products for events.

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