broddhisatva

Also, they FOLDED my hide down the middle before rolling it up. Thanks for the little added "F-U" to my already frustrating and unpleasant experience. -B

FWIW, I won't ever order from them again. I placed an order with them and got the standard automated "Thank you" email. Weeks later my leather hadn't shown up so I call to ask what's up, only to find they were out of the hide I ordered and the replacements haven't made it through customs yet. One week later I call again to ask "Where's my leather?" The answer is that their shipment only just got out of customs and my order won't ship until later in the week. One week later I call again; this time the answer is that it should reach me early the following week. Nine days later the package finally arrives at my door. This begins a whole NEW area of frustration. They have set prices for their hides based on grade (A or and size (large = 20-24 sq. ft, x-large = 25-30 sq. ft.) The whole reason I ordered from them was that IF the leather was high quality AND they sent me a piece on the higher end of the size scale it would be a SLIGHTLY better deal than going to the local Tandy. Needless to say, the hide they sent was on the extreme low end of the scale for size and has holes and brands throughout what would normally be my main working area. To their credit, the areas of leather that aren't holey or scarred seem quite nice; all in all I'd rather go to Tandy. Really, I wish Springfield Leather still carried the weight and grade I most commonly use. So the Beastly Leather review of Leather Unlimited? Customer Service = Fail. Quality = Fail. Value = Fail.

For those who didn't know, which is likely most of you, I just received word that Drac (http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showuser=5673) passed away early yesterday morning. It appears he may have taken his own life. I honestly don't know what to say. I barely knew him but I can honestly say that he was one of the main motivators for me to improve my work, and I know he'll be missed by friends and several different communities in which he was active. -Beastly

Y'know, I tend to get quite a bit of these kind of messages too. "How much would it cost for ..." I spent quite a bit of time emailing back and forth with these potential customers about specifically what they wanted until I had a really solid idea and image in my head, then sent them my quote and got nothing but crickets in return, more often than not. If you're going to offer custom work, like I do, you're going to encounter a vast number of people who want prices LESS than mass-produced items, in which case you've just wasted a whole lot of time on emails and phone calls for essentially nothing. I've set up a contact form on my website for when someone wants a quote, and the first section of the form is "What is your budget for this product?" Better to know right from the start if I can help them, I think. The side effect of requiring them to think about price up front is that I get fewer "How much..." questions and more "Can you do that like this..." questions. -Brody

Making these (I refer to them as "coffee corsets") is actually how I financed most of my tools when I first got into leathercrafting. I work in a coffee house, so my customer base wasn't hard to find.

ROFL!

Sorry for going two in a row here, but I feel I should clarify something. I feel like what we're talking about here is not 'manufacturing' where you can take a straight formula like (X times material) plus (Y times hours spent) and come out with a price. What we're talking about here is selling our art, and art has entirely different rules. Yes, the quality of your craftsmanship will bear a direct relation on what your art will be able to fetch at market, but that shouldn't be the sole factor. Not everyone appreciates art, not everyone knows how to recognize quality craftsmanship ... hell, most people can't tell the difference between hand-tooling and die pressing. As I said earlier, you may have to invest a little energy in educating your customer base. You're not just selling a bundle of materials that have been manipulated into some other shape, you're selling your vision and your aesthetic as well as your technique and time. Paintings aren't priced by how much the canvas and paint cost, or by how long it took to paint them. If they were, the painter wouldn't be an artist at all but just another person working a crappy 9 to 5 job, and that seems to take all the fun out of it for me. Sure, my customer can go to Wilson's leather and get a very nice cookie cutter wallet for cheaper than they'd get one from me, or they could go to Mexico, or to a truck stop .... but then what they have is a cookie cutter Mexican trucker wallet, not my art, not my craftsmanship. Dig?

My point here, really, was that most of us don't, I think, realistically clock how much time goes into our projects. It was not my intention to say that anyone should get out a stopwatch. Really. *insert eyeroll here* Bree, thank you. Kind of what I was trying to say, but perhaps better worded. I have items that price out at 8-10x material, and I have no problem charging that, and most of my clients have no problem paying it. Works for me. I think any straight formula for arriving at a price is flawed, was my main point.

<br /><br /><br />Etsy is an online marketplace specifically for handcrafted items. www.etsy.com

Pricing is a tough one. First off, Tasha may be right about some of the people on Etsy. I've seriously seen $20 Tandy kit projects on there marked at 5x. Then again, I've also found a lot of leather websites where they take the kits, use the tooling patterns provided, and price the exact same way, so I don't think Etsy is to blame. I have found some of our board members on Etsy; some of their prices are literally through the roof, but most tend to at least try to keep it reasonable. I think "per hour" pricing is very much the wrong way to go, though. For one thing, it's hard as hell for me to keep track of how much time I spend on a project : how do you figure in drying time after tooling or staining, how do you figure in the time developing your artwork, or developing your designs? And what exactly is your customer paying for, a product or your play time? As you develop your own designs, material pricing also kinda becomes irrelevant, I think. What it really comes down to, in the end, is what the market will bear. I find that I get the blink-blink from a lot of folks when I tell them what I get for my work (as in, they stop speaking entirely while they process what I said, and stand there blinking for a few), but there are honestly a large proportion of my customers who think that for custom artwork I'm totally undercharging. Helping to educate your clientele will be a huge help in this regard. If you can show them the qualitative difference between your handiwork and that of mass producers/lesser talents your value goes up instantly. Starbucks was genius at this kind of thing, getting people who were used to paying 69 cents for coffee to pay 5 bucks.

Thus far the majority of my wallets have contained prefab inserts of one kind or another, but I'm trying to find a way to cut the major suppliers out of this part of my work and come up with something a little less, well, "mass market" looking. The question is, for those of you who make your own wallet interiors : what tips can you give. Bonus points for those who don't use sewing machines, as there's no way in hell mine will sew leather and being a bootstrap operation I can't afford to buy something more sturdy. (Apologies to KevinKing .... there's just no Juki in my immediate future) -b

Say, Kevin, I've been meaning to ask you .... for your fabric linings, what kind of weight fabric do you find works best and how do you attach it? Most of the cooler fabrics I've found tend to be lightweight prints that don't seem like they'd do well with things like leather weld or tanner's bond. -broddhisatva