You are gifted.
Do you enjoy painting, clay modelling, sewing, origami, toy making or making/designing handmade products? Do people appreciate you for those exceptional skills? Do you feel any sense of satisfaction when people take time to appreciate those objects? Are you passionate about those hobbies?
Then it may be just perfect for you to take your hobbies to the next level. Those hobbies may be your source of a niche business. You may consider developing those special skills into a source of income. Welcome to the humongous world of handmade products market. There are many handmade business ideas you can start at home.
"The secret of getting ahead is getting started" - Mark Twain.
Handmade Products of Unique Value
Articles of unique value can vary from wall décor to showpieces and costume jewellery to hair bands with their multiple utilities, and each one has a unique market. Each category has a demand for those fancy articles from the students to the professionals and entrepreneurs to homemakers. They are cool and chic and contemporary yet personalized at the same time as per everyone's taste. So you already have a ready market out there for your labour of love. You only need to put a signature mark to your creations and find a way to connect to those who value your creation.
Developing an Identity for your Creation
Be it costume jewellery or showpiece, a flower vase or a cane basket, each item produced by you needs to have a unique identity. Those may bear some uncommon features which are representative of you. But a marked difference or unique mark that is created to differentiate them from the rest of the market always helps.
You can always develop a beautiful name under which you market those products, or you may even use your name. But always remember a unique name that is easily memorable and has a greater significance matching your category of products always helps.
Develop a Logo & Brand Identity for the Handmade Products
The best way to establish your products' distinct identity is to create a brand identity for them. You can start by developing a logo for them and push it forward with their packaging and means of distribution.
You can always add a tag for them that bears the logo, your production units address, and a brief product descriptor. It may also include brief instructions for safe use and long life of those products.
Developing Great Products
Remember that whatever you make irrespective of its creative brilliance is not a popularly marketable product until it fulfils some requirements of your target consumers. For example, if you are making cane baskets, they should be sturdy and useful to carry goods and be fashionable and affordable.
So matching your skills that require identifying products that are useful and valuable for your target consumers. Simultaneously, you have to keep an eye on the market and include unique features in your products that can compete with other products in its category.
Finding a Market for Handmade Products
As soon as you are seriously considering your hobby as a successful business, you have to understand your products' market and market dynamics along with the nature of the consumers who use them.
If you are producing handmade ladies' purses, it is always better if you can distinguish between the women who use purses from those who do not. Next, it pays to understand the price range of the purses used by different categories of women. Then comes the nature of the purse, raw materials needed for them, their availability within your reach, their price and time and effort needed to produce them.
Once you are done with all these, you need to understand how to reach your potential consumers. That you can do in two ways, you can sell them directly to the customers, or you may sell them to the retailers who in turn sell those to them.
Earlier it was essential to reach out to these consumers. Now, it is possible to draw the consumers to you with the advent of the internet and eCommerce. Nowadays, it is rather simple to develop an e-store or e-commerce solution to reach your consumers. With proper digital marketing techniques for innovative products, it will mark a strong presence.
Developing Individual e-Market Solutions
The best approach to establish your footprint in the virtual domain is to create a website for your handmade products. It may be individually designed from scratch, or you can buy customized websites from different e-commerce solution providers.
For designing an individual website for a business that is not theme or template-driven, available from popular website builders aligned for eCommerce, you have to hire a full-stack developer specialized in website building (as opposed to mobile applications, desktop software, or video games).
Suppose you are qualified enough to get it done at your level, nothing like it. But if professional assistance is essential, go for it. That is because this initial identity is going to be the most vital touchpoint of the world to connect you.
As an alternate option of avoiding the pain of explaining your requirements elaborately, you can select a convenient eCommerce website builder. They are website builders developed specifically for eCommerce. You can have multiple options to choose from suited to your necessity once you mention your objectives. It's much easier than building out the entire website yourself.
To know more about your website's final development, please visit the second part of this blog. How To Build Online Presence For The Handmade Items Business?
Comments