One of the quickest ways to grow your handmade business is to get into selling wholesale to shops across the country and around the world. Selling wholesale gets your work out to a lot more people than you can manage to reach yourself and alleviates the customer service element so you can concentrate more on designing and making.
It can be really daunting if you’ve never had any experience with wholesale, but like everything once you have learned how to do it, it comes really easily. As a start, here are my top tips for preparing your handmade business for wholesale:
// Make sure the prices you are selling your products to the public for allow you to be able to afford to sell wholesale. A shop will be looking to buy products from you at around 50% of the price you sell them to your customers for, so bear this in mind when pricing.
// Create a recognisable brand for your handmade products and carry this through from your logo down to your packaging. Give shops every reason to buy from you and not someone else.
// Think about how a shop would display your products and brainstorm to see if you can offer an affordable display solution as a package to the wholesale customer. If all the shop has to do is open the box of your goods when it arrives and place them on a shelf then you are making part of their job really easy. It’s so hard to display a lot of products well in a store.
// Create a catalog or brochure of your items so potential wholesale customers can easily browse everything you have to offer. You can have this available online as well as sending a physical booklet out to interested shops. Don’t forget to include a price list too!
// Ideally being able to produce items in large quantities will make it easier to sell wholesale. I’m not saying you need to produce items in a factory or on a production line, but if you can make more than one of a product quite quickly then this will help you fulfill large wholesale orders with ease.
