primalmommy@IVILLAGE.COM on thu 24 jan 02
I have a free website, which means annoying ads you have to click off the screen when you visit -- but frankly, pop-up ads are everywhere anyway, and I have invested only time in my site, not a penny more. I accept paypal (and thus credit cards) and they take a buck or two of each sale. Most of the pages were made using the "fill in the blank" forms at geocities or ivillage. A chimp could do it.
I have a niche market, making a specialty item for a community of work-from-home, attachment parenting, earth-friendly moms. We are committed to supporting each other, linking to each others sites and promoting each other's products (home made cloth diapers, baby clothes, cloth menstrual pads, baby stuff, soaps and herbs, jewelry and beadwork, etc.) So mine is maybe not a typical situation.
About a third of my income this year was from my website. (the rest was from teaching classes and selling pots at 1 craft fair, 1 gallery and to friends.) My website $ was under a thousand bucks. It doesn't reflect the high cost of shipping, (nor does it include bartered goods!) but it is enough to buy books and pay for my annual pilgrimage to the appalachian center for crafts (workshop, room and board and plane ticket) and that's my goal.
We are on a tight enough budget around here that I promised myself from the start that I would never dip into my husband's paycheck/our grocery money to support my clay. And we don't use credit cards, just checking account cards. So for me, this has been a very successful year. I got to do a Jack Troy workshop which I loved, will be going to Wooster in April, and have bought books, clay and glaze materials. Best of all, I have been able to CONTRIBUTE to the household budget in those times when there was "too much month left at the end of the money".
In the next five years or so I can't see my "business" growing much, for one simple reason: I can't expand the amount of time I have to give to clay. That's OK with me; I wouldn't give up hammock time with my kids for mere money. Besides being committed to homeschooling my 3 little ones, I also work pretty hard every day to keep our lives simple and frugal -- cooking from scratch, gardening and canning, raising chickens and tending a few fruit trees, sewing instead of shopping, cruising garage sales.
Pardon my bragging! I am quite proud of all this! It means less time my husband has to be at work, away from his kids; it means the creative challenges of "making a silk purse out of a sow's ear" to make our little home and garden fun, unique, beautiful. Best of all, it's a way for me to thumb my nose at the "use it up, throw it out, buy more" consumerism that our economy seems to be based on -- at the expense of landfills, and for the proliferation of sweatshop industry and a constant bombardment of marketing.
Sorry about the soapbox. Spending long hours with my quicken program preparing for tax time has given me time to think about money.
I'm not listing my website in this post because -- while non potters dont seem to mind -- the specialty pot photos I have there are a couple of dorky, embarrassing prototypes from 2 summers ago, and don't reflect what those pots have evolved into. Need to borrow a digital camera again and update.
Yours, kelly in Ohio (nose pressed to the front window, waiting for my Ron and John glaze book...
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