KDR

First off, where you live is irrelevant. The internet Kind of put a stop to postcode marketing. If you want to make money through leatherworking, you need to increase your market range. One of the things that doesn't often occur to people getting into leatherwork is that if you do your job well, the gear you make will last a lifetime. Also, leather's a durable material that lends itself to repair. Compare that to Walmart, where products are broken *before* you buy them, and people are just resigned to having to go out and buy the same thing again, because it's not worth fixing anything! In a restricted market, you can hit saturation fairly quickly, plus people will often look to get leather stuff fixed, instead of scrapping it and starting again. A good leather belt will last decades. There's a limit to how many you can sell to your immediate neighbours. Sorry to be a bit facetious, but the leatherwork that brings in the highest rate of return will be the gear you can produce quickly at low cost and sell immediately into a vast, inflated market. I've seen beautiful leather buckets, but that's probably not what you need to hear! There is no single answer to this question, it comes down to what you know, what you can make, and how well you can sell. Buy low, sell high. If you can. The word handmade gives your work some cachet, for what it's worth. Lots of people do care about that and will pay more for it, but I'd say most don't. That's fine, most people won't be your customers anyway. You set your price and you make your case for your price. This costs this much because of this this and this. You can leave it to your kids, even grand kids, because it will still do its job in fifty, sixty years. This is the price because it's not just Some Product. It's a product of your creativity and expertise. Because it has been tailored to your customer's exact requirements. Handmade can be strong. It does cost more, and it does take more time, but it can work if you hit your niche. A globalised niche is a massive market. Be online, be visible. We make our customers wait for custom pieces. First, we have to, because there are only two of us working, and second because the stuff takes time. We find people are happy to wait for something they know will be good, will be just what they want. Anticipation is the best sauce. If you want to go handmade and make money, stay away from wholesale. Go to the end user and you will be able to charge double what a store will pay you. The store isn't trying to rob you, they just have costs they need to build into their price, just like you do. Work the internet. The internet is made for fake news, social aggression and niche craft leatherworkers. Hope this helps, and good luck

480volt, don't know if these guys would be of use to you, but they seem to be offering wet blue and crust. https://www.tasmanusa.com/services

I know. I'd be asked to do a discount for, say, a dozen whips. Handmade, multi tailed, braided whips. I'd try to be polite but essentially say no, plus you're lucky I'm not charging you double! And that speaks not just to the amount of time something takes, and the physical effort involved, but also to the work that *not* able to do in that time. The braided whips were the most expensive pieces we made for wholesale, but the time involved meant they were probably the lowest margin items, too. So the time it took to clear say 500 dollars making whips was time *not* spent making maybe 1000 dollars on faster, cheaper, higher margin, smaller pieces. And at some point you just have to pull the plug on that, or increase the price so that you won't sell too many of them!

I've done wholesale business for over twenty years, across Canada, the US and into Europe and Australia. The first thing is to make sure your pricing works for you and your customer. For the first fifteen years or so, we didn't sell direct to endusers at all, because we didn't want to undercut our stores. So you have to price your items out for wholesale, recognising that the store will typically charge double what they paid, and sometimes more. The markup is all about overhead and profit, paying rent, and paying staff. Most stores will not feel they should be provinding you any value beyond buying your stuff to resell, and they will only do that if they feel like they can mark it up high enough, and sell it often enough. . Don't underestimate low end when working with retailers We started out making only high end goods. Problem was, they take a long time to produce. They're expensive, so they take a long time to sell. Each inch of wall space is valuable real estate to a store owner; it all has to produce. If the section of wall with your gear on it isn't turning over fast enough, they'll stop buying it. Early in our history, we bought a clicker press and had a lot of custom dies made. That allowed us to make a pile of lower end products more quickly, and was ultimately what made our business viable. We kept our high end whips to impress the customers, which they did, following which the vast majority of sales were the lower end goods. Ironically, they were also our higher margin items. A good formula for pricing out work to sell wholesale is to take your material costs and triple them. Include everything, glue, thread, dyes, packaging. everything. Figure out what you want to make on an hourly basis, and factor that in, too. Don't underestimate your time; this is how many hobby crafters underprice themselves and find themselves essentially working for nothing. Include time spent researching, ordering and receiving materials. Add on a percentage for overhead. How much does it cost you to keep the lights on? Do you have professional fees associated with your business? Do you offer your wholesale customers free shipping? All that eats into your margins. Build a little into each product you sell. Understand margin. Margin is not mark up. It's the percentage of each dollar in sales that is profit. To calculate your margins take the selling price, subtract your total input costs, including overhead etc, and divide that number by the selling price. Eg. selling price is $85. Your total input costs are $20. 85 minus 20 is 65. $65 divided by $85 is 0.7647, or 76.5%. You should try and keep the margins comparable across your product line; it's super helpful. Keep them as high as possible. If necessary massage your selling price to keep your margin up. We found that it was not worth while to sell products with a margin of less than 50%. And somehow, those seem to be the ones that shop owners buy the most! Knowing your margin can help you plan your business. Say your total monthly over head is $3500, and your products have an average margin of 76.5%. Divide your overhead by your margin to get your break even point. $3500/76.5% means you need to sell $4575 worth of goods to break even. Less than that, and you are paying for your business. More than that, and your business is paying you. Getting paid is important. I don't like consignment. In our case we had to chase retailers, and there was no guarantee anything would sell. Hard to plan a business like that. So we decided early on, no consignment. Like countyholster said, life's too short. Do be picky about who you deal with. Bad vibes are there for a reason. In over twenty years, we only ever got stiffed by a customer once (Blowfish, San Francisco!). Early on, customers had thirty days to pay by check. We were chasing them constantly. Later on, we just shifted everyone to credit card, payable upon shipping. And we wouldn't ship till we got paid. I would highly recommend that approach. Customers will pay up front if they believe they can sell your gear for as much as they need to. Lots like to collect points on their cards, so they're happy to do so. Don't forget to build the cc fees into your margins! Someone mentioned scale, and that's a great point. Scale really only works if your gear is made overseas by someone else's machinery. We never offered volume discounts. If everything is made by hand, by your hands, even if it's just punching and assembling, there is a limit to how much stuff you can physically make in a given period. If it takes ten times as long to make ten as one, why offer a discount for ten? We used to tell retailers asking for volume discounts that we'd think about if if they'd sell every tenth piece at half price. Stopped that dead. Don't do it, you just end up giving your time labour and expertise to the storeowner, who will sell it in and put in his/her pocket. Lastly, my experience has been that you always have to file taxes! If you guys get away with it down there, great, but here in Canada it ain't optional!