The Challenge of Selling with Intention

I’ve been so grateful to be able to work from home and not have to worry so much about being somewhere to do a job. But it is pretty dang hard to do my job AT home, with the baby that’s so unstoppably curious about my laptop.

It makes things like having to research, take notes, and actually do the day job so much more difficult—but I’m trying to stay positive.

After all, if I didn’t have this day job, we’d be in a lot of trouble. Now it means that any other endeavors get to just work toward helping add to my income, versus before when it felt more dire and needed to be successful.

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A constant thing I experience is my endeavors going well whenever I’m not pursuing them from a place of frantic-ness, or desperation. Whenever I come to things with an energy of curiosity, problem-solving, exploration, and then just sharing what I’ve discovered and created, with all of its mistakes and lessons—THOSE things do well.

This pattern often puts me into a weird cycle of

Makes and shares about the thing > the thing does well either in content views or in sales > gets excited and realizes I should work on better marketing or makes a lot more because previous things sold out > thing does okay > starts to kind of freak out and thinks I failed and tries harder > thing does worse > gets into a wholly spinny cycle of doubt until I remind myself that

I make things for other reasons—not just to sell them. Yes, it’d be cool to sell them. Yes, I think it’s nice when people care about the time and skill it took to make a thing and they actually like it and think it’s beautiful and want it. But I’m not a salesperson. I don’t make things with the intent of getting rich.

It’s an ever-present lesson: how to respect the craft, respect myself in the doing of the craft, and keep the energy that of whimsy, charm, creativity, productivity, whatever it was that struck that day—and not the energy of a company or factory.

I am not a factory. I cannot provide things in the way a company that feels mass consumerism can. So then I should not try to create things the way a mass-producing company can.

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I recently made a cute as hell crochet harness. Because if there’s one thing I love, it’s pockets. I saw that the creator of the pattern was selling hers for $260. I thought, “wow that seems so high,” when I thought I was nearly done with mine.

I remembered how I spent DAYS making my junk journals and then days filling them with handmade ephemera, often out of papers that I also hand treated and dyed.

And then I would be wracked with guilt over charging $150 for them.

Once I completed the crochet pocket harness, I realized that the time to assemble all of the parts took about as long as it took to crochet them. And now I’m still in the “cleaning up” phase of weaving in ends and burying tails.

I went back to everyone that I had said, “Man I dunno how this is $260” and said, “nvm I know why it’s $260.” 😅

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I think it’s good to occasionally have little reminders like that from reality, and other creators. I think her cost is yarn + time (at a living wage) + hardware and other materials, and then probably a fee to make up for the Etsy fees, and materials that she might include for shipping, as well as gas to the post office and whatnot. Who knows. I’m just sure that it’s probably justifiable.

And I need to treat my own things that way. Things can take a little longer to sell. Things can be not really for everyone.

I have some things I made recently that I love and can’t wait to share because I’m pretty proud of them.

And I haven’t even told yall that I’m doing henna now! But I’ll save that for next time, 🖤🌿🪴