Selling Pottery for Studio Potters on the Internet
Jamie Morrison
Myself and my girlfriend, Roanna Creasey, who teaches pottery and glass
painting and has also had two businesses making and selling pottery and
painted glass, are about to set-up a web-site devoted to selling pottery and
glass painting.
I have recently given up my job writing for the Press Association to
concentrate on Web Publishing in order to produce a web site for this
purpose. I am in the process now of consulting with an expert in marketing
on the web, and particularly aiming at niche markets such as people who are
interested in buying hand-made pottery, and I have done lots of research
into the subject of marketing myself.
What we are willing to do for potters is this:
If you send me a recent picture of yourself, with a profile of yourself and
your work, and a dozen or so pictures of examples of your work (preferably
with a white background to make it easier for me to process in Photoshop
before putting them onto the web site), I will set up a section of the
website devoted to yourself and your work (assuming we consider your work to
be professional enough), and I will take orders and commissions for you. I
will work as the 'middle-man', if you like, in getting you orders and
commissions. There will be no need for myself or my girlfriend to ever
handle the goods (opening up the possibility of us accidentally breaking
them, especially with small china pottery-type items and the like). We
simply get you orders and commissions for specific pieces and you can send
out the goods using a courier.
All I ask is a commission of 20% on sales generated for you by us, which
myself and my girlfriend know is much lower than the standard commission
(40-60%, generally speaking), which you can send to us by cheque (no
e-commerce or anything as risky as that).
As you can see, we are working on the basis that the people who use our
service are trustworthy and will send us our commission, and in our
experience we have found the potters we have met to be just that: Earnest
and trustworthy.
To round things off, there is nothing to lose, and everything to gain in
tapping into a market of people that it would be almost impossible to reach
any other way than the internet.
We would like to get this business up and running as soon as possible
(preferably by the new year).
If you are interested, e-mail myself at jamim...@hotmail.com, with some
details about yourself and your pottery experience ( no amateurs, please.
Just professional studio potters) and I guarantee I will get back to you as
soon as possible. Let's get this thing started!
Yours Sincerely,
Jamie Morrison.