Slight Change of Plan...

Instead of spending the £250 budget on painting phone cases, printing artwork onto phone cases etc., I am going to be spending it on creating a set of new paintings from which I will create giclee prints, greeting cards and postcards from. The ideas for the paintings remain the same - mainly watercolour, small, local landscapes.

Presentation Feedback

Business presentation from Kirstin816

People thought that I was undervaluing and underpricing my work - my hand-painted phone cases that I wanted to charge £15 for, people thought were WAY too cheap and someone mentioned her friend that waited for 4 weeks and spent £100 on a phone case, and referred me to hand-painted phone cases on zazzle. So I need to think about charging much more for my hand-painted phone cases.

Also, people helped me come to the conclusion that markets are a waste of time and money because people just DON'T want to spend more than £10/£15 and they just go for a browse. People suggested approaching local shops and cafe's, local attraction information centres for selling my paintings, prints and greeting cards.

I need to clean up my website and Etsy and try to improve my branding and photographs because it is too "busy".

Also, thinking about it... I think I would like to keep the focus on my artwork like my paintings, giclee prints and cards for now, maybe put my paintings on postcards...

Searching For Where to Print my Products...

Printed phone cases - the cheapest I have found is from Vistaprint... The cost of the product "on offer" is £8.74, shipping is £2.99, and if I were to sell them for £9.99 each, I would have to buy about 5 at a time to get profit out of them...

Mugs - I have found mrnutcase.com to print my mugs; it has no/little white border, dishwasher safe, and costs £4.95 to print! Delivery is £3.95 so all together it costs £8.45, and if I order more than one, it would be better, but I will order one for now to test it... I will be selling my mugs for £9.99 each.

Week 3

Unfortunately, I missed last week's session because I went to an induction at the University so I felt a bit lost this week with what to do. I had started the Business Proposal and SWOT Analysis that was shared on the group Facebook page for those of us who weren't in the session to complete. I started trying to fill it in but I got a little bit stuck on it... I'll figure it out.

I had a one-on-one with the tutor this afternoon, I showed her what I already have - a website, an Etsy shop, logo, etc. We decided that I could do an Open Studio event at my shared studio space, the shoestring budget of £250 could go towards that - advertising, making products to sell, etc.

I need to update the About page on my website, I need to take some better photos on Etsy and get some consistency on there with the photos and branding.

We also discussed my idea of phone cases which she thinks is a good idea - if I were to hand-paint them, I could use second hand phone cases and upcycle those, and the designs of them could come from sections of my paintings to be more abstract, for example a section of my Twisted Tree painting below.

She suggested the idea of scarves and I really like the idea of printing my paintings, oil and watercolour, on scarves.

I think mugs might be a good idea, I have had one mug printed but there was a white border round the top and bottom so I'd like to find somewhere who can print it where there is no white border.

I also had some other ideas:

For now, I will explore the phone cases, small paintings, prints, cards, scarves, and mugs...