Summit of Awesome Day Two Part One: Continued Awesomeness

This post was guest written by Christiane Knight of Three Ravens and The World of Xiane. 

After the Summit of Awesome is over, I’m going to have to find a way to make more room in my brain, because it will be filled to overflowing with crazy amounts of crafty-making and crafty- business knowledge! It’s a good sort of overflow, happily.

I started off the morning perfectly, by joining some friends in the Make Something Awesome area with creativity, bolstered by a light breakfast of croissant, delicious fresh grapes, and coffee. What an invigorating beginning!

And I needed it, because I dove right into the deep stuff, courtesy of Megan Auman and Tara Gentile, who gave an inspiring talk on Pricing Your Work. The title of the session doesn’t even begin to hint at the valuable information that was offered to us in great amounts; Tara and Megan are both incredibly skilled at pinpointing and destroying the myths that plague indie business owners. 

Tara talked about one of her favorite topics, that making money is a beautiful thing, and actually is part of our contribution to building a New Economy, one where small artisan-based businesses are a valuable part of the whole. One of the things she said that struck me the most is this: by adjusting your prices to ensure that you don’t just break even, but are actually making profit, you allow yourself the ability to spend that money in ways that change the world. You can use your profit to contribute to your causes, or to support other indie business folks by purchasing their art.

Tara asked us to think of us and our businesses as a way to create change... and that was a breakthrough thought for me. It’s easy to put off one’s needs as being greedy, too demanding - even though we all have the need to pay our bills, too! But by keeping in mind that our crafty businesses influence much more than just our own lives makes it bigger than me, and that’s very inspiring.

Megan then brought her deep insight into Pricing For Profit to the mix, teaching us base formulas for calculating a price that is profitable at a wholesale level, and calculated to generate profit - not just a break-even point. She stressed that making sure that one’s wholesale prices are profitable is super important, because so many of us set our prices up to reflect where the profit is at a retail price point... but that profit can disappear when halved or more, as wholesale prices often are. 

Stress was put on the idea that when someone purchases your item, they aren’t just buying the piece, they’re also buying an image or feeling that they get from your work. That’s where the value for them lies, and that’s what makes it possible to demand more money for your work. And the sad truth is that, too often, we underpay ourselves [I’m guilty!] and that means that we have to work much harder than we should have to work.

Did I mention that this was a breakthrough session for me? 

If you’re interested in reading more about their ideas, it’s your lucky day! They have this info available for you! Their websites are both regular reads for me, because they’re full of insight like what they offered today. You can find Tara’s work, including the concepts that she covered today, at TaraGentile.com. She also writes for and is editor-in-chief of Scoutie Girl. Megan’s website, Crafting an MBA, has much much more on her concepts of Pricing for Profit and many other useful discussions. You can also find her gorgeous jewelry at MeganAuman.com.

After cramming my brain to overfull with so much inspiration, it’s hard to believe that I had another session to attend, but it was the perfect change from thinking about pricing! Tina Seamonster, who is a podcaster extraordinaire - including the Hello Craft podcast! - and a story-collecting enthusiast, took some time to teach us about Storytelling in Marketing and Business Creation. 

The idea is a simple, yet compelling one: we all have a fascinating story about what we do and why we do it. The trick is finding an effective way to tell it and captivate our customers with it. 

I found this really interesting on a personal level, because storytelling is something I do around my products to explain a bit about what inspired the color and texture choices. Just as I use music as the inspiration to build upon my stories, each of us has a personal story that we can spin around ourselves and our business - capturing the attention of those who resonate with those stories. And since the sort of customer/maker relationships that the indie business world often attracts is a very personally involved one, this makes perfect sense to cultivate. People want a specific, emotional attachment to their handmade items - of course, because if not, why bother buying handmade? The attraction includes the idea that we can know the creators of our favorite purchases a little better than we ever could know the folks who made big box items. There’s a bit of romance in that idea, a personal connection that is missing from our lives in this day and age. 

Tina really got us thinking about looking for ways to make that personal connection through sharing stories about why we do what we do. 

After all this heavy thinking, I was ready for lunch, then a Craftnote talk from the ever-fabulous Jay McCarroll. The tasty vegan wrap-rolls were just what I needed!

If you don’t know about Jay McCarroll... I don’t know. You need to fix that. He’s endlessly interesting - along with some of the experiences he had as the winner of the first season of Project Runway - particularly how things went after the cameras went away - he also shared that he has a deep affinity to the indie crafter scene and feels that we are “his people” and he wants to be an advocate for us. Yay! He has been appearing at local craft shows and events; one of the last ones was DC’s own Crafty Bastards.

These days, he says that he is more interested in working with designing fabric (which is a big bonus for we crafty-types) although he still has a wonderful line of clothing and accessories available. He also admitted that he’s jealous in the best way of our ability to take his fabric and make all sorts of amazing things with it; inertia can be a problem with the best of us, it seems, as he revealed that he felt like he could be doing more than he does. Of course, I’d say that most of us feel that way! [though it’s good to know that even the successful, well-known artists feel the same way.]

Jay is also terribly funny. Here’s a few of the choicest quips:
 

• “Thank god I was born fat, so that I learned to sew.” [about learning to tailor his “husky” clothes as a kid].
• “I have a conjunction on my arm!” [about his tattoo, which he used as the branding for his business at first, until he found out what the kanji actually said.]
• “I might never get to the barbeque sauce. Maybe just ketchup.” [about his ultimate gauge of success: having his own barbeque sauce line, because that would mean that he’d achieved everything he could in his current field. Evidently he will settle for a ketchup line instead.}