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Hourly Earnings, Part 3: Big Art Festival

7/20/2010

7 Comments

 
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. 
7 Comments
Clayton link
7/20/2010 08:20:52 am

Reply
Mary Zeran link
7/21/2010 01:05:30 am

I love how analytical you are about this. I am so new to the whole thing of making this a business and not a hobby. Thank you for your posts!

Reply
nathan
7/25/2010 04:00:19 am

where is your link to 'Shows'?

Reply
Chris Campbell
7/26/2010 12:48:22 am

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 2:10:35 pm

Did you consider factoring in the time spent packing, unpacking, setting up, taking down and selling from the booth as a detriment to what $$$ you could have produced using those same hours in your studio?

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Mea Rhee link
7/26/2010 12:49:40 am

But what value would those extra pots have if they were just sitting in my house? I'd still have to find some way to sell them. At least so far, putting the time into a good festival is better than selling them to a gallery at half price. Besides, when I calculated my wholesale hourly rate, I did NOT include the time I spent at the Buyers Market, which also includes setup, takedown, and 4 days of selling. I couldn't figure how to sensibly divide up the time per order. Sometimes it took lots of work to win over a new account. And sometimes an existing account walked into my booth and starting ordering before I even opened my mouth. So I just decided to call the time spent at that show "volunteer hours." But if I had figured out how to include that time, the hourly earnings for wholesale would have been even lower.

[

Reply
Suewhei Shieh link
7/27/2010 08:04:48 am

Dear Ms. Rhee,
I met you at the Artscape. I was impressed by your elegant pottery on display and for sale. I am delighted to connect with you and hope you are interested in participating in our Many Moons Festival as a vendor of Korean/Asian pottery.

The Many Moons Festival is a one day indoor festival celebrating the cultural richness and diversity of Asia. The past four festivals were so successful, with over 2000 people attending in 2008, we have made it a tradition to hold it bi-annually.

This year, our 5th Many Moons Festival will be on Sunday, September 12, from 11:00 A.M.– 6:00 P.M. at the Center for the Arts of Towson University. Each year the festival is larger in scope and scale and this year it again utilizes all the performing spaces (6 stages) and public areas. This vibrant and popular full day festival is filled with delightful activities designed for all ages. Our festival attendees are culturally and demographically diverse and this year we anticipate over 3000 visitors to attend the festival. (Please visit our website www.towson.edu/asianarts for info of previous festivals.)

Visitors to the Many Moons Festival always comment on how much they enjoy the Crossroads Marketplace where Asian arts and crafts are displayed and sold. We would like to invite you as a vendor of Korean/Asian pottery. Merchandise vendors will have prime location space in the Grand Hall which is easily accessed and heavily trafficked by attendees.

We hope you will be interested in participating in this year's exciting Festival (vendor fee is only $120 for first time vendors). Please e-mail or call me at 410-704-2807. I would be delighted to discuss this opportunity with you.
Sincerely,
Suewhei Shieh
Director
Asian Arts & Culture Center
Towson University

Reply
Victoria link
7/28/2010 06:51:16 pm

Crazy cars! Must say thought $35 per hour certainly isnt that bad. My experiences of craft fairs haven't been that great to be honest. But then I think there are a lot of contributing factors to successful fairs.

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    Mea Rhee (mee-uh ree),
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