You’ve been selling your crochet to help top up the family finances or to be able to treat the kids and save up for that much needed holiday. It’s worked well and you’ve made enough sales to make a real difference to your purse.
Now you want to turn that side hustle into a full time income. After all it worked so well to make a bit of extra cash, you enjoyed having the excuse to crochet as much as you want and you can see the possibilities to be able to get away from the soul crushing 9-5. But something isn’t working out and you can’t figure out what you’re missing.
Let’s take a look at why a crochet side hustle is so difficult to turn into a full time income and solve that problem you’re having so you can make your crochet business work for you.
You can listen to the podcast of this blog here
Why A Crochet Side Hustle Works
So why does selling your crochet as a side hustle work? It works because any money that you do make is a win.
The smaller the target, the easier it is to reach that target. If your goal is to save $2000 towards a family holiday and you’ve got 10 months to do that in, then you only need to make $200 a month. I say only, that target can feel like you have a mountain to climb, but it’s a much smaller target than someone who needs to make $2000 a month, every month.
$200 in profit can be made at a single craft fair or by selling 15 hats or 40 pot holders. That is doable in a single month.
What profit you make per hour doesn’t matter. What matters is that you feel that you have made a reasonable amount for each sale and that you’re happy with what you earned towards that savings target.
Selling your crochet as a side hustle works simply because it doesn’t matter how much you earn per hour. It only matters that you’re happy with how much you’ve earned towards that savings pot because that money isn’t needed to pay your bills. It’s extra cash that you’re not reliant on to live.
Why Selling What You Make Doesn’t Work As A Full-Time Income
So why doesn’t selling what you make for a living work?
Simply because you now need to make enough money per hour to pay the bills and live on it. That is an entirely different calculation.
Someone with a side hustle will probably be perfectly happy to make a $20 profit off the bathroom rug they sold. But if that rug took 10 hours to make, that means they only made $2 an hour.
You can’t live off $2 an hour.
To make $2000 a month, working 5 days per week, you need to make $100 a day IN PROFIT. Not in sales total, but in profit.
So what we worked out before for the side hustler making $200 a month, you need to do that every 2 days.
It’s simply not possible for you to make and sell 15 hats every 2 days. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.
Traditional marketing advice tells you to just raise your prices. Well, that now makes you so much more expensive than the side hustlers that you’re going to find it incredibly difficult to get people to understand why they should pay you 4 times as much as them for the same product.
Traditional marketing advice then says to get more visible. Well now you’re spending even more time marketing, less time crocheting and even more people know that you’re 4 times more expensive than the side hustler and you’re not making any more sales than before.
Traditional marketing advice now says to go for the luxury buyer. But that means spending money on luxury packaging, getting professional level photos with models and you need to create a luxury feel and experience every step of the way. This is out of reach for most crochet businesses because the packaging alone will cost a fortune.
At this point it feels like it’s just not possible to make a living from your crochet at all.
But that’s not true. It just means challenging your way of thinking.
Why does a crochet business mean selling what you make? Why is that the only option that’s come to mind. What if you’re writing off some very profitable and less time consuming alternatives?
The 3 Ways Selling What You Make Can Fund A Full-Time Income
Before I go further, I want to tell you about the 3 ways that it is possible to make a living by selling the crochet that you make. Because it’s not impossible to do, it’s just out of reach for the vast majority of crochet sellers because they do have very specific criteria to make them work.
I’ve already mentioned a luxury brand, and this can work. If you create a luxury brand for your crochet, then you can sell 1 bag for $4000 and that’s your monthly target met.
Seriously, check out the price of bags from brands like Birkin – they sell for tens of thousands of dollars. But to make this work, everything you do, say and show has to feel like luxury. It’s not just a look, it’s an experience. From the photos, to the social media, to the site you sell on to the packaging that you use. Everything has to be in fashion, up to date and have a yearly line to keep up with the changing fashion seasons.
This can get expensive and time consuming to pull off very quickly, which is why it’s out of reach for most crochet sellers.
The second option is collectibles. Collectibles are huge business and people are willing to spend a fortune to complete their collections. Think original Marvel comics, Pokemon cards, Lego sets, vintage couture clothing. But to create a collection people want to snap up means creating a story. People aren’t just buying random items, they’re buying into the story behind the items.
This takes a lot of time to put together and get out there. Not only do you need to crochet the characters or items that you want to be collected, you need to be an excellent story teller to hook people in and make them want what you’re making.
Not everyone is going to be able to pull off the story telling element or have the time to let the story do its work to get to the point where people want to buy the collectors items.
The 3rd way is to become a crochet artist. This means entering the art world and turning your crochet into exhibitions. Crochet artists have been hitting the headlines in recent years for a huge variety of installations. But this is not anything like selling your crochet, this is a new world entirely and will take time to get your name known and you’ll have to learn how to navigate the art world.
The Alternative: Recurring Income
So if selling the crochet that you make just isn’t going to work for you, how can you make a living from your crochet?
You need to dive into the world of recurring income. You have so many options here and they are all less time consuming and far more profitable than selling the crochet that you make.
Think crochet patterns, blogs, e-books, courses, memberships and YouTube. At first thought this looks worlds away from what you’ve been doing, but really it’s not.
You’ve probably been promoting your crochet on social media. Maybe you’ve made some videos, maybe you create your own designs to sell and show people how you crochet the things you make. All of this is the first step to something in that list above.
You already have so much knowledge to make these things work, you just need to learn a little bit more and act with intention to turn what you already know into a crochet profit making machine.
It Worked For Me
I know this works and that it is possible from where you are now because I did it myself.
I started my crochet business by selling what I made and eventually realised that it was never going to give me what I wanted. So I started writing crochet patterns instead. I made my own designs when I was selling what I made, so I just needed to learn how to convert them into patterns that made sense to everyone else. Since I knew what I looked for in a good crochet pattern, I knew roughly what I needed to do, the rest was just detailed.
It turns out that you sell a crochet pattern much the same way as you do a physical product, so there was actually very little for me to learn. But it was so much more profitable. Within 6 months I had tripled my income and was working far fewer hours than I had been. I’ve never looked back.
If you’re ready to explore the alternatives so that you can make a living from your crochet then download my free Map Your Path workbook here that will take you through the steps you need to start this path or if you just want to get stuck in, then come and join my 90 Day Blueprint programme where we will transform your crochet business together and create the profitable business you need it to be.
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.
