pacopoe

Beautiful! I aspire to your level of beveling.

A few weeks ago we took a trip to West Texas and I brought all my leather tools. While staying at a house in Terlingua I was inspired to carve a javelina skull that was used as a household decoration. While out there we found out that our friend died in an accident so this piece was therapy. I did it still-life style, freehanded on the leather, and have yet to dye/paint/antique anything. I may just leave it as is and affixed to the stone, time will tell. I used the hair tool to create cross hatching to add texture if i do antique it so that's why it looks rough in some parts, and I cleaned up the beveling around the nose. There is room for improvement but I'm happy overall. Though I have to say that it's hard to keep leather good and cased when working outside in the heat!

Pretty cool! Never knew those things were customizable until my friend had hers painted with her dogs.

I make a living from leatherwork but I have to say the key to doing so is that you have to love business more than you love your hobby. I mentioned it in another thread but there's a book called "The E-Myth" that is really good at explaining the different hats one must wear when creating a business. If you solely love leatherworking but don't like business planning, marketing, or bookkeeping then you're probably better off working for someone else. If you do love all those things, however, then it can be a truly rewarding experience. I've had my business for 9 years now and it's been my primary source of income for 7 (though I should also mention that I'm perpetually broke ). Pricing is a biggie if you're going to stay competitive. We sell wholesale and retail so our model is Cost of Goods Sold (materials + labor + % of expenses [internet bill, rent, etc]) x 2 = wholesale price Wholesale price x 2 = retail price Of course, you have to balance that out with what customers are willing to spend but if you start higher then you have room to bargain down, versus starting low and having people walk away with product for next to nothing. Growth is something that you have to account for from Day 1. If the business is to be you and you alone, then it can only grow as large as you can handle. At some point you will need to scale back (if things are going well, that is). I love delegation (my bf calls me Tom Sawyer ala the whitewash fence) but if you don't then you need to calculate how much time you have to spend on your business daily (x amount of hours leatherworking, x amount of hours emailing/calling, x amount of hours shipping, etc) and make sure to charge for your time accordingly. Remember, if you weren't doing that emailing and shipping yourself then you'd be paying someone else to do it, so the price of that time needs to be factored into the price of your product as well. In our case, we've taken one product (dog collars) and streamlined the process. We do every step by hand, choosing to have skilled labor over a machine. I've met a few companies who have made large machine purchases to increase volume but are simply spending all their earnings paying back loans, which is not good business (and then one of those companies started mass replicating one of our designs... also not good business lol!). By keeping the offering down to one product that can be customized we've been able to target marketing and keep our customers happy. Just because you *can* do something does not mean that it's profitable for you to do so. We also regularly turn down jobs that are beyond our means. For instance, right now we don't have a leather sewing machine so it would all have to be by hand, it takes someone about three times the time to produce a stitched collar so we'd either have to charge accordingly (which the customer doesn't want to pay) or just pass, so we pass. Right now we're doing a line of hand-tooled collars which I have to personally make (and I love doing them) and while I think we're charging a fair price, my employees are arguing that we should charge more since I could be making 4-5 regular collars in the time it takes me to do one carved collar, but we only charge about twice as much for a tooled collar. It's a delicate balance. Ebay is a terrible platform for selling, people are just in it for the bargain, and Etsy isn't much better. Word of mouth is the best kind of advertisement, but you still need a steady influx of customers. We dabble in a wide variety of advertising but have found the two most profitable avenues by far are in-person trade shows and Facebook. Since we don't have a huge advertising budget, it's key that we ask customers for feedback about how they heard about us so we can concentrate our efforts there, and those two places are our far and away winners. Our one magazine advertisement is also a steady producer (we've tried several publications over the years but only one pays off so we pulled back on the others and sunk more $ into the winner). They say the key to business is risk-taking but I'd have to amend that to "educated" risk-taking. I know of new businesses who put all their eggs into one basket just to see it flop. Since my company has always been self-funded from our profits, I've never had the luxury of making big ticket mistakes. Instead, it's all about sending little feelers out in many different directions, seeing what hits, seeing what doesn't, and then concentrating efforts in the winning area while retreating from the dead ends. You won't know if it works unless you try it, but no sense sticking your whole neck out on the line.

What great luck to catch that moment, and what joy it brings to others. Thanks for sharing!

I've been there! Pretty extensive selection, good service, fast shipping... all around good experience and we do use them for certain materials. Wasn't too impressed with the white latigo I tried for there a few years back, got dirty before it even got worn but depends on what you're using it for. There's a good place downtown for lunch on the water and you can bring dogs there, and a pretty decent thrift store in downtown Napa so you can make a day of it.

We have credit card processing capabilities at the store but haven't had much success with signing up for mobile services or getting that darn Square to work (plus it takes over a week until you see the money, at least that's what I gather). Know what we do at events? Old fashioned carbon copy, handwritten forms that you use with the sliding machine (like this: http://support.shopkeep.com/attachments/token/07nnzpaxerw8org/?name=imprinter.jpg). You can even use a pen to make the card imprint like the pizza boy. We're pretty technology savvy but we found this is the easiest way to make custom notes about orders and keep track of stuff. Granted, you still need a way to process credit cards since you have to enter them into a machine at some point, but this is how we currently deal with mobile sales and it's worked fine for years. Just make sure you get a phone number and email just in case the card doesn't go through when you get home (though, if your customers are like ours, they're really not in it to rip you off and are more than happy to offer alternative payment should that card not work).

Sounds like a bad deal to me. Over the years I've found consignment to be more trouble than it's worth. There are a handful of places we'll do it and that's mostly as a favor to good friends who don't have the capital to buy our stuff outright. Sell it straight our at wholesale prices. If you're just starting out then you can't afford to have your stock just lying around not making money for you. If you do chose to do consignment, set up a log where you call and check in weekly/monthly with the business. A lot of times they'll straight up forget to pay you or spend your profit on keeping their heads afloat, especially if it's a new business. Good luck!

I took the big plunge from hobby to full-time about 7 years ago and it's a totally different mindset. You have to love business as much as your craft, if not more. Be prepared to strip down your offerings and make the same thing over and over. Your focus must be on growth and the future of your business years down the road as well as today, and wondering how you're going to eat tomorrow. Yes you have to take risks, but they need to be educated risks, you can't just throw all of your eggs in one basket and hope it works. For anyone seriously considering the jump, you should read "The E-Myth" before doing so... I can't tell you how many SBA business classes were half full after break time as people, arriving with dreams of doing what they love for a living, left after the cold hard truth. The flipside is there is nothing more rewarding than forging your own path, but you have to undergo a major paradigm shift in order to make it (and sadly, the part we love, leatherworking, may have to take a back seat).

Yep, with leather you can subtract but you can't add. Also figure out why it was uneven and, if you're pulling of the hide, then make sure the new edge is clean so you don't end up with a wavy strap next time.

I also think you could charge quite a bit more for your work... it's great! It's a fine line between what an item is worth and what the customer is willing to pay, but if you start with a higher price tag then it gives you bargaining room depending on each customer's needs.

My boyfriend has a laser cutter and I've used it a few times for custom orders. I like the precision and the customers are very happy, but my personal aesthetic runs a little more hand-made even if it's not quite as perfect . It's a pretty amazing tool, though!

Thanks for the warm welcome, everyone! Mijo, we may or may not see each other at Superzoo... we forgot to sign up early so are now on the waiting list. Sure hope they let us in because we have a few classes lined up to teach in Vegas!

Hey there, my name is Ana Poe and I've been working with leather for almost 10 years. I have a company called Paco Collars, we make leather dog collars and leashes (www.pacocollars.com). I've been doing that for 9 years in October. Even though I've been working with leather for a long time, I still feel like such a newbie in so many areas. When I started, I was mostly self-taught and focused on only the skills that dealt directly with making dog collars. Progress was slow, I learned by trial and error, most of my first works fell apart so I had to improvise or get out. Slowly but surely I figured it out, used sales to buy more tools and build the company. Now we're a full time operation, I've got about 6 steady people, we have a storefront in Berkeley, CA (but we're not hippies, I swear), and do it all by hand. We also teach beginning leather working classes and have teamed with our local Tandy to teach more advanced stuff. Of course, I've pretty much only learned to one thing and do it well, so now I'm trying to tackle other areas of leather working. My newest obsession is tooling. I've been learning so much lurking these past few months. Sometimes I'll see a technique and say to myself, "dang, that took me like 3 years to figure out... I could have just looked it up here!" Better late than never, right? My mentor taught me that knowledge is a gift that should be shared freely, so I'm excited to learn and pass on that gift. Glad to join you guys!