Do you know what your crochet business is costing you? I don’t mean in terms of how much your yarn costs you and what you spend on craft fair fees. I mean how much it’s costing you in profits because you’re not making enough with every sale.
Most crochet sellers never think about this. In fact an awful lot of you never look at your numbers at all. You make a sale, look at how much money lands in your bank account and think that looks pretty good for one sale.
That’s the end of the process.
You’re making sales and making money, so things must be going well right?
This is hoping that things are going well rather than knowing. We’re telling ourselves a story, and that story is – I’m doing everything the marketing advice says, I’m making sales, money is landing in my bank account, so everything is working out as it should.
You can listen in to the podcast version of this blog here
The Numbers Most Crochet Sellers Avoid
This is rarely the case though.
If you sold a crochet hat and make $10 profit from the sale, that sounds great. But when you work out that it took you 2 hours to make, that means you made $5 an hour. But these numbers are generous, it will probably take you longer than 2 hours to make a hat and then you have to spend time photographing and getting it listed for sale. So that $5 an hour is probably overstated, not that you can live on $5 an hour anyway.
So why does selling crochet have this problem?
It’s a problem fairly unique to crochet and it comes down to the method of production. In short, we don’t use machines in any part of the process.
Sewers use machine made fabric and then use machines to sew that fabric together. A sewer can make a bag in an hour and go away with $10 an hour in profit from that sale. A crocheter will take 10 hours to make the same bag and come away with $1 per hour profit from a sale with the same price tag.
When you see the maths worked out like this it becomes easy to see why looking at the total profit from a sale doesn’t show you the real value. The real value is when you break it down into the time spent, and then things don’t look rosy anymore.
This is why it’s so important to know your numbers and understand how the profit from each sale really breaks down.
What This Is Really Costing You
But what is not truly knowing what profit your crochet is making actually costing you?
That never ending grind of staying up until 1am finishing orders. The stress of the Christmas selling season while trying to get your own family’s Christmas arranged. Putting in endless hours even when you’re so tired that you want to take a day off, telling yourself if you just keep going the numbers will suddenly work and you’ll have the money you need to justify it all.
This is the true cost.
That cost is your tiredness, your exhaustion and your lost hours. The money is just the reason you feel this way, not the cause.
The cause is how difficult it is to make selling your crochet a career.
All this is only true if you want to make a living from your crochet. If your aim is just to make some extra cash, then if you’re happy with the profits you make, then all is well and you just carry on with what you’re doing.
But if you need to make enough to live on from your crochet, then you have a very real problem to solve.
Breaking The Time For Money Link
The key is to stop selling your time for money. That’s what selling your crochet is. Every hour you spend on your business, is time you need paying for by selling an item of crochet. You only earn when you’re crocheting and you get no income when you don’t. This is what keeps you stuck in that endless exhausting cycle of crochet as much as you can for as many hours as you can find.
There is another way.
Instead of selling your time for money, let’s break that pattern and sell the same product on repeat.
This means going digital and it breaks that cycle because you do the work once and then profit on repeat.
This is how crochet pattern designers make a living. The same for bloggers, YouTubers, course sellers, membership owners. All of them rely on profiting from one piece of work over and over again.
This is how we make your crochet earn you a living.
I know this strategy works, my entire business is built on recurring income. The Christmas selling season is fast approaching and instead of gearing up for endless promotion, booking Christmas craft fairs and wondering how I’ll find time to get ready for my own family’s Christmas, I’m just carrying on as normal.
With recurring income I don’t need to join the festive carnage, I just carry on at my own pace and see my income stream continues as normal.
My time and my sanity is protected and I’ll still make the money I need. You can have that too if you’re prepared to change things up.
If you’re ready to make that change happen for yourself and bring recurring income into your crochet business then I can help you. Download my free Map Your Path Workbook here now to get started and discover what your future can hold.
If you are ready for a deeper level of support, then take a look at my 90 Day Blueprint Programme here which is where we re-shape your crochet business around recurring income and what that looks like for your aims and your way of working. The Blueprint only opens a few times each year, so if it’s not open right now you can sign up to get a notification the next time the doors open.
I’m Kelly Thomas, crochet business owner, pattern writer, blogger and coach. I started my crochet business selling what I make and made all the mistakes along the way. Let me show you what I learned so you don’t make the same errors.
You can listen to the podcast episode that goes with this article here. It is a bit different to what you’ve just read, but the message is the same.
You can check out the rest of my podcast here to discover more about how to turn your crochet into a successful business.
I also have this free workbook that you can download to Map Your Path and work out what your next step in your crochet business is.
