This may not be the right community to post this in; it’s at least obliquely involved with woodworking.
I intend to hang a shingle as a furniture maker. Yes I know I know “Beware turning a hobby into a job because it’ll suck the joy out” before the pandemic I was working in a custom build shop, about the only thing I didn’t build for customers was furniture, and I kinda miss the pipeline.
In fact, I’d kind of like to find several other craftsmen of various flavors and open an “artisan shop”, where, say, a table I built is used to display vases the potter made, and so on like that.
I got, or rather built, that custom building job at a makerspace in the city, and I could get this venture off the ground with a quick message to the General Slack channel. Not only was the place full of craftsmen and artisans but it was plugged into the entrepreneurial world, people would pour out of the woodwork to either join up or point me to resources. Where I’m at now there’s just none of that.
I think I’m at the point where I just have to build something and put it up for sale. Just…before we bother with business plans and branding and logos and social media and all that crap, I need to open a personal Etsy account or walk into a local consignment shop and sell a thing I made out of wood just to prove I can actually do it.
This may wait until spring at this point; between a family member in hospice and the winter…
Can it be someone else’s turn to talk now?
It’s certainly possible to do this. Just beware that building furniture and woodworking is a very different skill than running a business.
Running a business means endless sales and marketing and customer service and follow ups and dealing with vendors and stocking supplies, managing inventory, doing taxes, handling finances, managing partners and employees, renting space, maintenance, payroll, etc.
Just be realistic about how much of the job is actually building things and how much of it is going to be about… everything else.
Dealing with vendors, stocking supplies, managing inventory, this stuff I’ve done before and in fact would take back up vendors I used to use in my previous line of work.
I figure it would be awhile of selling on platforms like Etsy or local consignment shops or swap meets, working out of my back yard wood shed by myself, before taking on a lot of that other stuff. I don’t want to do much in the way of custom building; I’m not setting foot in a customer’s house to build cabinets or “accent walls” or whatever else, I’m not going to sit down and try to understand what it is you’re asking of me, I will accept “Could I have this table but 2 inches longer so that it fits perfectly in this space I have?”
A lot of people talk about Facebook and Instagram as sales vectors. I would rather not have a business than open an account on any of Meta’s platforms. The first thing anyone tells you anymore “Spend 94 hours a day posting on Facebook or Instagram about it.”
NO.
Youtube, Bluesky, maybe what arises to replace Tiktok when it’s banned next month, but absolutely not Facebook or Xitter. That’s a hard, veiny, throbbing, deep purple NO.
I’m sure there’s different ways to generate sales, hopefully you can find something that will work for you. Some kind of platform to get the word out will help. Maybe you can find a niche and develop a reputation through word of mouth. You’ll need some kind of sales and marketing strategy, whatever it is.
It sounds like you have experience with the back of the house stuff. Logistics, supply chain, production, etc. Customer facing side is very different. Just be realistic about what that’s going to take.
My job title was project manager. There were times when I WAS the back of house. I usually did communicate with customers as to what they wanted us to build, communicating with customers as their project progressed and such. I wasn’t really involved much in the business’ marketing efforts though.
I’m not opposed to a social media presence in general but there are specific companies I will not work with because they are baby punching evil. I’ve been thinking about what a Youtube channel attached to this business might look like. I consume a lot of shop videos, from the usual Woodtube suspects to old episodes of The New Yankee Workshop to This Old Tony, but I imagine the people who spend $1600 on bedside tables don’t care about my opinions about parallel jaw clamps or router table lifts. I think I can do shop shenanigans because that’s who I am, so what kind of shop shenanigans would the Pinterest crowd be interested in watching? There’s that guy who does the space planet spray paintings, the “Shasha!” guy, do I make my version of that? Vlogs of customer builds?
Yeah I get it, I don’t really have personal social media accounts, but I’d open them for a business.
If you’re going to go the content production route then that’s another whole ball of wax. Can be very good for business if it takes off, but you’d have to figure out your strategy for that and execute on it. Customer builds or just stuff you’re building in general can be good. It shows off the process and generates trust/desirability. If someone buys a custom piece, it’s kind of nice to have its story fully documented.
But content production, editing, publishing and social media interaction takes time, skill & effort. It can be quite the commitment to do it right.