Start a Knitting Business

If you wish to start a knitting business, you will need to consider two very important factors; what would you create and how you will sell your creations. The key to the success of a knitting business is the ability to create great designs and patterns and the effectiveness in publicizing your work.

Knitting Business – What to Knit?

If you are good with knitting needles, you can actually make just about anything. Some of the items that you can create are:

• Clothing items such as sweaters, scarves, socks, hand muffs, mittens etc.
• Bags and backpacks
• More creative items such as well-designed iPod cover

The choice of what will you make depends upon the level of creativity as well as the skills that you possess. Some other factors that you consider before choosing the items that you will make are the market type and demand. Think about your prospective customers; are they teenagers who would like to show off their unique hand crafted laptop case or they are children who would just need beautiful clothing items.

How to Promote Your Knitting Business

You need to promote your business but you shouldn’t feel like you have to spend a lot of money doing this. Word of mouth is one of the cheapest but most effective forms of marketing. Hand out a set of business cards and you will be surprised at how many people come to you for various projects.  The business cards can either be printed professionally or alternatively printed yourself using a printer and computer.

Don’t just put your name on the card, also give a description of your business so that people will be able to look at it and remember what you offer.  Hand out a stack of cards and tell people to pass them around. You might be able to do custom work on commission where you show them a series of patterns that people might be interested in buying.

You could make it very cheap to do this by asking the customer to purchase the yarn; this then means that you only charge for your time. Although you won’ e able to mark up the materials required you will avoid the problem of cash flow problems.

Craft Shows

A great way to promote your business is at local craft shows. There are hundreds of different craft shows which start from summer until early winter. Visit these shows and take all of your promotional materials with you.

If there will be lots of different knitters at these craft fairs then you should find a way to differentiate yourself and make yourself stand out from the crowd.

Just have one show to start off with and see how much you sell. If you sell all of your items then you will be able to make more products before you book for another show. This will avoid you losing the fee required to join these craft fairs.

Displays

You can also offer some form of professional displays to make it easier to sell your products. You could display them on mannequins or use knitted cloths to cover tables. By displaying the products professionally it’s much more likely that people will like them and want to purchase them.

Sales

You need to be prepared for sales at these events. Take a calculator, receipt book, pens, change, business cards and bags with you. This will ensure that you can do everything you need as soon as a customer pays.

The booth should also be laid out so that similar colours are sitting next to one another; this will create a much more appealing look and will help to draw people into your store. You might even want to take a photo of this so that you can recreate it and maybe even improve on it next time.

Building on your success

After your event you will be able to assess whether or not it was a success or not. You can decide exactly what you want to change and make adjustments which will make it much easier to make a profit.  All your business needs is a bit of exposure and a lot of hard work on your part. There shouldn’t be any reason however why you can’t make your knitting business profitable.

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Posted by BETA Daily on Feb 17 2010. Filed under Craft Business Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry