To Anyone Thinking Of Selling Handmade Physical Products
And Three Ways to Avoid Repetitive Task Burnout
Article Voiceover
Imagine signing your name to a canvas that you spent the last week obsessively painting to perfection. It’s beautiful. You love it. And so does a stranger on the internet who saw your post on Instagram and bought the finished masterpiece from your website. Time to pack up the canvas and ship it out to a new, loving home.
Congratulations, you made your first sale!
Sounds like living the dream, right? Long hours spent focused with your creative energy burning like a bonfire, and actually making money doing it? What a rush! That first sale feels like a high that couldn’t possibly lose its punch.
Here’s a heads up on something I learned the hard way with a handmade specialty fabric business I started in 2019:
The initial challenge of designing, testing and refining a product is an entirely different job than being the one who replicates that product going forward.
Let’s look ahead a few years in this creative business scenario. After testing several styles of art you have found a niche that makes consistent sales, and your business is financially successful. It’s your own thing, completely under your control, no boss checking your work, no employees to supervise, and you pocket 100% of the profits. Sure, you work 7 days a week fulfilling orders and making basically the same product again and again because that’s what your established customer base wants to buy. And true, you can’t take a vacation or spare energy for maintaining hobbies or friendships, but hey, at least you’re free.
Each morning you wake up trying to keep you mind focused on the chores at hand while ignoring the creative rebellion growing in your gut. You eat a good breakfast so that you can work through lunch and hopefully meet your quota by 7pm, if the caffeine does its job helping you can maintain that brisk pace.
Walking into your production studio, defeat and depression hit as hard as the lingering paint fumes. You face the same tasks yet again. The same production, packaging and paperwork. By the end of the work day your creativity has been thoroughly beaten down. Over time you have learned to not want things beyond getting through the day at hand, because to want something and not have the ability to pursue it is worse than never to have wanted anything in the first place.
Seeing a new order pop up on your website dashboard is no longer the thrill it used to be. Instead it feels like another weight tethering you to this dependable stream of income. Your own business now feels like working any other 9-5 job, except you pay more in taxes and health insurance costs and you don’t get any days off, let alone paid ones.
It feels like if you could just get a break from all these orders, you could take some time to explore new potential products and ways to earn an income that would feed your creative fire instead of stamping it out. A secret part of you wishes the demand for your product would just… disappear for some reason… maybe a style going out of fashion or a good copycat product coming on the market for cheaper… anything to be free to explore again.
When planning your creative business, it’s important to keep in mind:
A task that is initially exciting and energizing will become mundane with repetition. Humans adapt to the status quo without the addition of novel experiences, just as flames die down without fresh fuel. Work becomes drudgery. Embers turn to ash.
If exploration is what energizes you, then you will become bored with work that is infinitely repetitive, even if that is a job you made for yourself, your own business.
Of course, there will always be some less-than-fun parts of operating a business. You cannot, and wouldn’t want to, eliminate all struggle from your creative life. Our brains need the contrast of facing challenges in order to feel good about the end results. Just don’t let the the soul crushing stuff take over the majority of your time. Create a business plan that allows you to focus the bulk of your attention on whatever aspect of your business energizes you the most. Monetize the passion, not the production.
Here are 3 ways to avoid repetitive task burnout so that your creative business will be set up for long term success:
- Develop a successful product then pay someone else to take over production and order fulfillment.
- Offer product development services to other businesses.
- Create digital products.
Let’s look at each of these options in more detail.
Develop a successful product then pay someone else to take over production and order fulfillment. Create a limited run of the design that you want to sell, with the intention of hiring someone to make it for you once you have confirmed that there is sufficient demand. In this scenario you can easily tolerate making duplicates of an item and shipping all the order yourself, knowing that you only have to push through the repetitive process for a finite amount of time. Here are two examples of how this might look:
- Example 1 - You want to sell prints of your paintings, so you make a few prints yourself (or have a small batch professionally printed) and offer them for sale on your website, to be fulfilled by you when they sell. If the prints sell out quickly and get good feedback, then you know it’s worth putting in the effort to find a business or individual with whom you can negotiate a flat fee or a percentage of the sale price to do the actual printing and shipping to customers for you. Then you are free to do the creative work of making additional paintings.
- Example 2 - Your 3D printed Halloween mask takes hours to sand smooth before applying paint. You make a few using this manual process to see if people want to buy them. Then once you sell out of the test run and perhaps even have a wait list of customers, you hire someone with injection molding or vacuum forming expertise to produce a large run of the masks so that you don’t have to waste time sanding out the print lines. You then have the option to also pay someone to paint the masks, or you can paint them yourself if this provides the personal touch that your customers want. Same with order fulfillment, it’s completely up to you to decide if that’s worth hiring out or if you want to do the packing and shipping yourself.
The key is to plan from the beginning for your end goal of eventually passing off the production process. You must design a product that someone else can accurately reproduce for your customers without that change affecting the value proposition of your product or costing more than you can afford to deduct from the profit.
If you were to try and sell prints of a painting that incorporates 3D textures as an integral part of the design, that style may not transfer well to a simple 2D printed format. You would need to develop a custom method for reproducing the artwork. This more complex production process would cost you more to hire out and comes with more potential quality control issues. As another example, if you were to market your test batch of Halloween masks as pieces of art painted specifically by you, the original designer, then passing off that painting process to someone else would alter the essence of the product. The potential customers who were waiting to buy as soon as you got the masks back in stock may not be interested in purchasing what is essentially a knockoff of what you originally offered.
To avoid getting stuck in the drudgery of ongoing production, be conscious of how you design your product and how you describe the value of that product to your customers. Ensure that no element of the design must be executed by you alone, unless you want to personally keep doing that thing indefinitely. Once the market shows support for your product, you can offload that tedious, repetitious production and packaging work to someone else who can potentially do it more efficiently than you at scale.
Offer product development services to other businesses. If the process of designing and improving products is what energizes you, then do that for other companies as an independent consultant. In this scenario you’re constantly working to solve fresh creative problems then turning over the resulting product design to the business that hired you. They handle ongoing production while you move on to the next interesting job.
A way to get started in this would be to document the process of making and perfecting a product, post that content on your website and social media and use it as leverage to get clients. The project could be something that you complete for yourself or for a client if you can find someone to be your first customer for free or for a discounted rate.
While posting your work on the internet does not guarantee that you will have clients seeking you out, it does add to your credibility and provides a place for you to send potential customers as you network in person and online. Make sure that people who see your project portfolio can easily determine that you are available for hire. Your website should clearly explain the services you are selling and how potential customers can contact you to discuss their projects.
You may also want include a Buy Now option where someone can purchase a 30 minute consultation or other pre-defined package deal. Not everyone wants to deal with the bother and delay of having to contact you just to get an idea of how much it may cost to work with you. Offering some sort of service product with a set price will both give customers an idea of your minimum pricing threshold and also provide a way for you to instantly capture revenue from businesses who are ready to work with you.
Selling your services directly to businesses may allow you to focus your energy on solving an ever changing list of creative problems. You will never get stuck in the drudgery of infinitely producing copies of the products you design. However, this approach does introduce a list of new responsibilities:
- Each potential job will require you to discuss and understand the parameters, asses if the project and client are a good fit for you and negotiate pricing.
- You must also establish systems to avoid getting stuck in a cycle of endless revisions and to ensure that you get paid for your work.
- Because you are creating a product based on someone else’s vision and specifications, you will need to interact with one or more new people consistently for each job you take. If you are a social person, that might a plus compared to working alone on your own projects. However, if you’re more introverted like me, those human interactions can be a huge drain on energy.
While the goal is to offload as much as possible of the work you don’t like, you will always have to do things other than your favorite job, and your business plan will influence what those things are likely to be. It’s a good idea to spend some time reflecting on what types of problems you are best equipped, and happiest, to face.
Create digital products. These could be templates, video courses, presets for design software etc., any digital asset that, once made, can be resold an infinite number of times without additional production work. This approach is highly scalable, even as a one person business, because the delivery of digital products can be automated.
All the effort to build the asset is upfront, but this does not mean that the revenue is entirely passive. You will need to provide customer support, as inevitably some customers will have a technical issue or be dissatisfied with their purchase. You also need people to find, and feel persuaded to buy, your product. Here are two types of written and/or video content that you should publish so that potential customers become aware of your product and how it could benefit them:
- Type 1 content - Teach people about things related to the problem that you created your digital product to solve. This helps to establish you as a trusted authority and resource while also making you discoverable through search terms that potential customers would be typing into Google or YouTube.
- Type 2 content - Demonstrate how to use your digital product. This type of content is not only another resource to populate search results to help people find you, but it also educates your customers and answers the questions that may otherwise end up in your inbox again and again from confused customers trying to use what they bought.
As an example, if you were to make a digital course detailing your step by step process for painting with acrylics, then you could make type 1 content discussing the merits of different paint brands or comparing the process of oil painting vs. acrylic painting. Type 2 content might show how to navigate the modules in your digital workshop, where to buy the supplies that will be needed and reviewing any suggested prerequisites that would be helpful to study before taking the course. Another example, if you want to sell LUT presets for Adobe Premiere Pro, then your type 1 content could be a tutorial for basic manual color grading in the software and explaining what are LUTs. Then your type 2 content would show how to install and use your LUT pack in a sample project.
Digital products are low maintenance after the initial work of making them. They avoid common problems such as shipping delays, defective units or labor and raw material shortages. There is no ongoing pull on your time and resources to make, or pay someone to make, the products. You’re free to focus your energy on educating people and solving the next creative problem. And every piece of public content you create will support and promote your existing and upcoming digital and/or physical products.
There’s no rule that you have to choose just one of these approaches. You can design and build certain products yourself and hire someone to make others while also selling consulting services, digital courses, tickets to live workshops, patterns and tools to help people get better results faster in their creative endeavors.
To see a blend of these ideas employed to create a thriving business, check out Blacktail Studio on YouTube. Cam Anderson, the creator behind this channel, started out using social media as a way to find customers for the furniture he made. Over the years his revenue streams have grown to include a range of both physical and digital products, in addition to ad revenue, affiliate links and sponsorships. He now pays a full time camera operator/editor to assist with the video production process, and I’m certain he is not the one mixing chemicals and filling bottles for his N3 Nano furniture coating. Here is Blacktail Studio’s most popular video with over 30M views: