the rules of wholesale: part 1

Many ceramic artists face the dilemma or whether or not to wholesale. In some ways, it seems that getting your goods into a store is the goal. It's exposure, it's validation. When I did my first ACC wholesale show in Baltimore back in 2001, I couldn't imagine anything more exciting than having a store carry my work. But I didn't have a clue what I was getting myself into. My work back then was incredibly labor intensive and unique. I knew how to throw in a production schedule, but the finishing work was impossible to fit into a production mode without losing my mind from the repetition. But I didn't know this yet. I went to the show, was happy to come home with $5,000 worth of orders, and promptly burned myself down to a tiny little crisp in the following months as I filled the orders. I quickly realized my precious pots, priced to move, weren't going to begin to compensate me for the amount of time I was putting into creating them, nor would they cover my costs at the loony bin where my husband was threatening to send me.

First rule of wholesale: never wholesale anything you can't reproduce quickly and consistently. If you love making your labored artworks, believe me: the joy will be sapped right out of it when you are forced to make them over and over again at the rate of about $3 an hour. Consistency is also very important. If you are making work in a production mode, your studio will get overwhelmed with seconds if you cannot make a consistent product. I'm sorry to call your artwork a product, but if you are wholesaling, that's what it is.

So, where do you start with the fast and the easy when your work is neither? My hang up for a long time is that I did not want to work with molds or any other kind of reproduction method. I thought it zapped the magic out of my work. And there is some truth to that idea; the hand infuses an energy into your work that simply cannot be replicated by anything other than a human. At the same time, your idea also contains magic, and challenging your brain to figure out how to get that idea onto 200 pots in one week-- as opposed to 6 months-- also creates its own magic.

To answer the question for myself I created my Seed & Pod line alongside my more intense Flower line. It was simple to throw, easy to finish. And I loved giving myself something else to work on that reflected a different style. When I jumped back into serious wholesale again in 2006, I only took my Seed & Pod line. Simple, easy. In time the orders jumped over what I could realistically make by hand, and that's where Hector came in. Hector makes molds from all of my the work I want to wholesale. Over the past two years I've even been able to add my best-selling items from the Flower line and have them molded to expand my line and keep it interesting.

So if you are thinking about wholesale, you really have to answer "yes" to these two questions of efficiency and consistency. If you're saying "yeeeees", kind of slowly, or "most of the time", or "I don't mind working 60 hours a week!" then you are not ready for wholesale on a large scale yet. And by large scale I mean 50% or more of your income.

How you get to efficiency and consistency is up to you. I say listen to everyone, and listen to no one. The way I do it works for me, but it's not the answer. I've cobbled together my solution over the years by following only what I am comfortable with. I look at some people's work who want to wholesale and I think, "You make a mold of that bowl, a decal of that design, and you are good to go". But that person may not like decals. Or molds. They may need to come up with a new design that echoes the original idea so they don't feel they have to sacrifice some aspect of originality. Or they may just have to totally burn themselves out to realize molds and decals ain't so bad.

I am going to continue to write on this subject of wholesale, so if there is a particular aspect that you would like to have addressed, please email me or post a comment.