I bet you’ve been told loads of times that “You Should Sell That” about your crochet. Well meaning friends and relatives who have seen the explosion in crafting businesses on social media, Etsy and Shopify and think it would be so easy for you to do the same. But before you jump into the world of crochet sales, stop and ask yourself one thing – Should I Start Selling My Crochet?
You see, it’s not as simple a thing as you might think.
Selling Is Hard Work And Complicated
It takes much more work to sell your crochet on a regular basis than just setting up an account, posting something for sale and then making that sale. It’s actually much more hard work and much more complicated than it initially sounds.
We’re talking about taking the hobby you love and use to relax and unwind, and taking it to commercialise, monetise and turn it into a commodity and potentially even your job.
It means putting yourself and your crochet out into the world and finding the people who will want to buy your crochet. Whether it be online or craft fairs, you have to get in your crochet SEEN to be able to make sales, no matter at what price you’re going to be selling at. This takes more work than you would first think.
Those well meaning friends and relatives probably have no idea how much time goes into each crochet piece you lovingly make or how much the yarn costs for each project. They probably looked at that baby blanket you made and thought “that will sell for $20 easy”.
But what would that $20 pay for? The yarn and not much else. It certainly wouldn’t pay you for the time you spent working on it.
And this is the thing about selling your crochet. If you want to sell purely to make enough money to buy the yarn for your next project, then great. You can absolutely do that by selling baby blankets for $20 each. You will have a nice little side hustle that means you will never be out of pocket for your yarn again. Your hobby will pay for itself.
But what if you want more than that? What if you want to make the money for your yarn plus extra?
Making A Profit From Your Crochet
Now we get into how much extra you want to make from your crochet.
- Enough to pay for your yarn and a bit extra for treats or to make your finances stretch further?
- Enough to make a living from your crochet?
You can do either. But one takes a lot more work and planning than the other.
You can listen in to my podcast episode on deciding prices for your crochet here for a more in depth discussion on the subject.
With both of these options you’re prices need to go up from that initial $20 we were talking about. With option 1 you just tag on the amount extra you want to make. So you could simply add on an extra $10, or however much extra you want and that’s the price you sell at.
However if your aim is make a living from your crochet, then we need to dive deeper and start looking at the numbers.
- How much did the yarn cost?
- How much time did it take to make?
- How much are you going to pay yourself per hour?
- How much does the postage and packaging cost?
- How much did it cost to make the sale?
It’s taking more effort already, and I’m sure you can tell that the cost of that baby blanket is going to skyrocket.
So lets work this out. If the yarn cost $20 and you spent 6 hours making the blanket, at an hourly salary of $12 an hour and your cost of sale and P&P comes to another $5, then your blanket is already up to a price of $87.
We haven’t even added profit on to it yet.
Your salary is not profit. Profit is what you have left over once all your bills are paid – and your salary is a bill. Lets add a 10% profit so you can build up a fund to pay for future training or new hooks or a new computer, and the price of that baby blanket is now $95.70.
Are you making the Scream face yet?
The Reality Of Starting A Crochet Business
This is what making a living from your crochet business means. It means doing the maths and making sure that your crochet not only pays for itself, but pays for you and your business needs too. It means working REALLY hard to make sure that your crochet is getting seen by the people who can afford to pay those prices and having the confidence in yourself and your skills so that you are able to project that confidence when making those sales.
It also means treating that hobby that you love so much like a job. You may loose the relaxation your crochet brings and find that it’s no longer the thing you want to do at the end of the day to unwind. Are you prepared for that to happen?
So far we’ve only delved into the issue of pricing, but there is so much more to consider too.
Making a living from your crochet is not easy.
But it can be done if you are determined and you’re willing to put in the work.
So What Comes Next?
Selling your crochet at any price point takes much more thought, planning and work than just deciding your price point and how much profit your going to make. You have to decide where you will sell, how you will get visible and then actually grow an audience of people who will turn into buyers.
This is what Crochet Business School was created for. If turning your crochet into a business is what you want to do, then I’m here to help.
You can sell your crochet for those high prices if you position yourself as an exclusive, luxury brand. You can also take the pressure off yourself by diving into the world of crochet recurring income. This is where instead of selling your time for money (which is what you’re doing when you sell what you make), you create an online recurring profit stream. Think patterns, pre-recorded classes, ads from blogs and the like.
The great thing about crochet is that there are loads of different ways you can make money from it, you’re not limited to just selling what you make. You may not have thought that these other income ideas are open to you, but anyone can venture into them if they have the willingness to learn and the determination to make it happen.
There’s a whole new world of career possibilities out there that you can use your crochet to open up and all of them can be utterly life changing.
I started my crochet career by selling my crochet, but I hit a point when I realised that selling my time wasn’t for me and I pivoted into writing crochet patterns – BEST DECISION EVER! I’ve never looked back and it opened even more doors once I got the confidence to make that leap.
Am I saying that you should follow my lead? No, I’m saying that you can create the crochet business that suits you the best. There are so many options available to you that you can choose the best set up for your personality, income goals and lifestyle dreams.
No matter what you decide when answering the question “Should I Start Selling My Crochet”, there is no right or wrong answer, just what is right for you.
But if you are ready to start exploring options for turning your crochet into a business, you can start by downloading my free guide on 12 Different Ways You Can Make Money With Your Crochet Skills here to get an idea of all the options open to you. The only thing standing in the way of you turning your crochet into a business that you can make a living from is you and your confidence.
You can also listen into my free podcast here with a whole range of episodes on everything about starting and building your own crochet business, but I recommend starting with Episode 101: Are You Determined To Start Selling Your Crochet?
Lastly, you can subscribe to my free Substack page here for daily tips and to hear more about my own experience starting and growing my crochet business.
