If you're creative and enjoy working with your hands, a crafts business could be your path to financial independence. With a minimal investment, you can start grossing up to $100,000 a year doing something you love.

This guide starts with an overview of the industry, looks at some specific crafts businesses, and then walks you through the step-by-step process of setting up and running your new venture. You learn about basic requirements and startup costs, daily operations, and what to do when things don’t go according to plan. You gain a solid understanding of the sales and marketing process, as well as how to track and manage the financial side of your business. Throughout the guide, you hear from crafters who have built successful operations and are eager to share what they learned in the process.

This guide makes a great homebased business. Add our e-Business guide to your order, and learn how to take your business online.

WHAT IS A CRAFT?

In this book, craft refers to any handmade item that can be given as a gift or sold—and if you've attended a crafts fair, you may have been surprised by what craftspeople sell and what people are willing to buy. The unpredictability of the crafts market is one of the intriguing and challenging aspects of the business.

In Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical, Paul J. Smith writes, "In its broadest sense craft refers to the creation of original objects through an artist’s disciplined manipulation of material. Historically craft was identified with producing objects that were necessary to life. Modern industrialized society eliminates the need to make by hand essentials for living. The term craft now must be defined in the context of a society that focuses on greater efficiency by technological achievement."

The question of whether crafts are art or a separate medium may never be definitively answered. In The Crafts of the Modern World, Rose Slivka writes, "Throughout their long history, crafts have produced useful objects which are later considered fine art. Time has a way of overwhelming the functional value of an object that outlives the men who made and used it, with the power of its own objective presence—that life-invest quality of being that transcends and energizes. When this happens, such objects are forever honored for their own sakes—they are art."

Of course, for someone wanting to start a crafts business, the question of whether the products are art may not be particularly important. A more critical question is whether you can make money.

Click Here to Download Chapter One