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Hourly Earnings, Part 3: Big Art Festival

7/20/2010

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Picture
This is one of my favorite scenes at the Artscape Baltimore festival every year ... the Parade of Art Cars. Someday when my Subaru is a 20-year-old rustbucket, it's gonna get this treatment.

This is the third installment of my Hourly Earnings Project, and the first to analyze the retail side of my business. 

(To read the first two installments, click on the category The Hourly Earnings Project)

I've wondered for a long time whether wholesaling or retailing is more profitable for a pottery business. There are clear advantages and disadvantages to both. In the long run, I think it makes sense to do both. Hopefully by the end of this year, I will have figured out which is really better, and therefore I can make informed choices about how to spend my time and resources. 

Artscape Baltimore is my favorite art festival, narrowly edging out my second favorite. It is produced by the city of Baltimore, and it is a huge and multi-faceted spectacle of a weekend. I am always impressed by the scale of the event, the shear number of activities going on, and the size and diversity of the crowd. I've done it for eight years now, and even with the churning economy of the past few years, my sales there have grown every year. I typically come home with less than one box of pots, and a money apron bulging with cash and receipts. However, in the context of hourly earnings, this show has a big disadvantage: crazy long hours. That's 10 hours each on Friday and Saturday, and 8 more on Sunday. 28 hours total. But on a different measuring scale, my income from this weekend now equals a busy month of graphic design work. So regardless of how it ranks on the hourly earnings scale, this show is worth spending all those hours in the scorching city heat, and I will continue to apply for it. 

Now on to the calculation of hourly earnings. It was a little tricky determining how many hours it took to produce the pots I sold. I didn't produce them all in one continuous time block like a wholesale order. Some of the pots were made last year. Some were made as demos in my classes. Some were rescued from a consignment gallery and were years old. So bear with me while I explain how I figured it out.

I used the data I collected from the three wholesale orders that I previously wrote about. From the total number of hours spent, I subtracted the time spent on wholesale-specific tasks: bubble-wrapping, packing boxes for shipment, and accounting. From the total sales amount of these three orders, I subtracted the expenses for clay, but not for wholesale-specific expenses: shipping boxes and Buyers Market expenses. 

I divided the remaining sales amount by the remaining number of hours, and I call this number the dollars-per-hour just to produce pots and apply hang tags, without factoring the time and costs it takes to sell them. I multiplied this number by two, because my retail prices are double my wholesale prices. Then, I took the total sales amount from the show, and divided it by this number, and this gave me the number of hours it took to produce and tag the pots I sold. 

(sidebar: notice that I am only counting my earnings for the pots I sold, not all the pots I brought to the show. This is an important point about my whole project ... no matter how hard you work at making pots, or how talented you are, you are not entitled to earn income for it. You only make money when you complete the cycle of finding customers and selling your work. For the unsold pots that I brought home, the time I spent to make those still has a value of $0.)

There are lots of other hours required to do a festival, so I added the time spent on the following tasks:
• writing and sending a blast email (surprised to realize I spent 1.25 hours on this)
• packing my pots and my display into my car, and unpacking afterwards
• setting up my display, and taking it down
• those 28 hours of selling
• accounting (takes much longer for retail; for wholesale I only write one invoice, for retail I spent 1.5 hours adding up receipts, counting cash, and processing the credit cards)

From the total sales amount, I subtracted the following expenses:
• booth fee and application fee
• credit card merchant fees
• parking
• some artery-clogging, but irresistible, festival food

Finally, I divided the remaining dollar amount by the total number of hours involved, and I made $35.05 per hour.

So after analyzing one retail show, even despite its long hours, retail is kicking wholesale in the butt. Hmmm. Maybe it's not fair to make conclusions now, let's see how the other shows fare throughout the rest of the year.

My next installment will be written in early September, titled "Little Art Festival." It will analyze a small and locally-minded event, with short hours and a tiny booth fee. 
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New Pots for Artscape Baltimore

7/12/2010

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I've been working on several new designs, to be unveiled at Artscape Baltimore this weekend. Click on the thumbnails for bigger photos and descriptions:
Fear not, I will also be stocked with old favorites like the Chopstick Bowls, Crab Coasters, and Personal Teapots. And I won't forget to bring Enormous Coffee Mugs, a whole herd of elephants, and a lot more. I will be in space E13, near the corner of Mt. Royal Ave and Lanvale Street (pretty much same spot as last year). This is my first show of the year, looking forward to getting outside. Fingers crossed for some good weather this weekend!
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Rescue Mission

7/7/2010

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I finally ended my last consignment gallery account. I felt like I was rescuing my pots from ARTFX Gallery in Annapolis. Some of them had been there for years, just getting older. I avoided this band-aid yank for over a year, because of the gallery's owner, Penny Harden. She is hard-working and responsible, and a sweet person. But that didn't justify keeping my pots there, they just didn't sell from her store. The end was awkward. It was like breaking up with someone who really likes you. Penny begged me to change my mind (no), then she begged me to leave a few pieces (no), then she asked for a few months, until after the July 4th weekend (ok). After I hurriedly packed my pots yesterday and headed for the door, she said "have a nice life, Mea." I said "thanks for understanding" and bolted.

Granted, this wasn't nearly as horrible as Artspring in Silver Spring (they forgot to keep track of the art they sold, then cheerfully maintained an "aren't we great" attitude during the months it took to untangle their mess, then scapegoated somebody else) or the now-defunct Baltimore Gallery 321 (crazy owner closed shop and disappeared with my pots, you should hear how I finally got my pots back, and here's a tip for art thieves, be careful what you put on facebook!). 

Boy, I wish I knew better earlier! Now I have the perspective of working with wholesale galleries, so I can see that consignment is a really bad idea. It's fraught with danger, as with Artspring and BG321. And even when I felt "safe" leaving my pots in ARTFX, the relationship was poorly-defined and unproductive.  

These are the fundamental differences between a wholesale gallery and a consignment gallery. A wholesale gallery makes an investment, of both money and judgement, before they bring work into their gallery. Then they try hard to sell it. A consignment gallery gets their inventory for free, and they don't have much impetus to sell it. Wholesale galleries treat artists like partners. Consignment galleries act like they are doing us a favor. Wholesale relationships have clear boundaries. Ending a consignment relationship is a real pain!!
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Good Vibes

7/2/2010

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Maybe it was the scrumptious weather ... I made a delivery of pots to Red Orchard in Bethesda, MD (just 10 minutes from my house, why involve a brown truck?). Red Orchard is located in a shopping center filled with other locally-owned businesses, kind-of on the fancy side. It took me forever to find a parking spot. Then I had to weave through crowds carrying large shopping bags. Inside of Red Orchard, it was just as crowded. I got caught up in the good vibes. I bought lunch at Balducci's market, then some yummy smelling (and pricey) soaps from a store called Celadon, which I felt compelled to explore due to its pottery-related name, even though there was no pottery inside. Signs that the economy is coming to life? Let's hope so. 
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    Mea Rhee (mee-uh ree),
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