PhotoPoint alternative. For anyone with some free web space wanting an alternative to PhotoPoint there is a wide variety of software available for creating your own web based photo album. One program I like is AutoGraphics HTML available here:
http://www.fcodersoft.com/products/autograph.htm
This will take a folder of pictures and generate a page of thumbnails each linking to another page with the full size picture. You can add titles and descriptions for each picture and it comes with 32 templates which can easily be changed to suit yourself if you have some basic knowledge of HTML. Price is $29.00 including free upgrades. There are many other similar products available.

Colin Bird

My unscientific results : photohosting sites

After playing with 3 different photohosting sites, I'd like to let you know what I have found out from my experiences and feedback from other people.

Bonnie Gibson

Finding a good show:
1. Finding a "Good" show- may be harder than it sounds. There are many 'good' shows, but some are not so easy to get into. A lot depends on your merchandise for sale. Like most of us, you may have to do little local shows first. and as they say 'pay your dues', just like starting out in show business. If you are good, the show promoters will find you!
2. What is a 'good' show? That is subjective! A good show is any show where you make what you consider an acceptable amount of money! There are shows with good reputations, however, and these are often the ones it takes time to get accepted to.
3. Pricing- You are right, pricing is a huge issue. A lot of what you charge depends on what you want out of this business. Is it just a way to supplement your mini collecting money, or the income from another full time job? Do you want to make a living at it? Do you intend to wholesale somewhere down the line? If so you must 'build in' a discount to your retail price, usually 50% off of retail.
4. Cheaper Prices- You asked if selling a comparable product for less money than others would anger them. my answer is, only your competition! Your customers would love it! Just remember this, taking into account that ethical behavior only serves to further your reputation, business is business. Just make sure that you don't make your prices so inexpensive that if you are asked to make a few dozen of something, it is still worth your while! The first one, or few are fun, dozens can get pretty boring!
5. Odds and Ends- The odds and ends you bring to a show depend on whether the show is local, or you will be staying over. For any show you may need things like: bags, order pad with your name and address on it, pens, a calculator, tissue paper, a garbage bag, money box and sufficient change, a pad for notes, a catalog or price sheet, business cards, a cooler with drinks or lunch and the like. Obviously, if you are traveling, you need clothes, toiletries, makeup, any medications you may need etc.

Alice Zinn

"Good" shows- How well you do often depends more on your costs than your sales. We did extremely well at a major show but after hotel, travel, and table costs our profit came out to be about the same as we do at some of the smaller shows close to our house.
If you have a web site, you may not do well at the show itself, but you may pick up new customers for your website. When customers see you at a show, and the quality of what you sell, they are more likely to buy from you from your website. Make sure to have plenty of business cards with your website on it.
Don't judge a show based on one time. We had very good sales at a show and the next year it was a bomb and the following year it was good again.
I have a checklist of things to bring to shows which is very useful (providing I go over the checklist before we leave). Other dealers are helpful and we have been both a borrower and a lender. Don't forget about lighting and extension cords and packing materials and a table cover. If you're going out of state make sure to check with the promoter regarding sales taxes. In some states you need to have your own tax license, in other states the promoter will get temporary ones.
Our first few shows were definitely learning experiences.

Carol

For the person who inquired about shows: I'd like to add to the comments made so far. I would say to start with a small local show. They tend to be so friendly and easy on the nerve. You will build up clientele and get a chance to ask questions of your neighbors. My best source of knowledge when I first started. Usually these are more cost efficient since you can save on the extraneous costs associated with doing shows...travel, shipping of stock, hotels, etc. In addition, at these shows you can usually find other dealers that can recommend, first hand, other shows to do. Many will be able to give to contact names of show promoters and the pros and cons on doing these shows. You can look around and see what others are using for their displays, packaging, etc. A wonderful way to certainly eliminate "guesswork" for a newbie.

Pearl

Dealer Receipts at Shows: Alice wrote answers to Linda's post about getting started selling minis at shows. Among other helpful things, she said: >>The odds and ends you bring to a show depend on whether the show is local, or you will be staying over. For any show you may need things like: bags, order pad with your name and address on it ....<< This is a very important point.
Having been caught up in the excitement and crowds at shows, I haven't always remembered to pick up business cards (if they were provided). Very often, when I unpacked my goodies I've found that my receipts had no date, no name, no address, no phone number, only the price, and there was nothing else in the bag to identify where I made my purchase.
It is not that difficult to design even the simplest business card on the computer, nor is it that expensive to either have a rubber stamp made or purchase self-stick labels from mail order catalogs. Not to provide vital information for possible repeat business seems very self-defeating to me.

Wanna

Dealer Receipts at Shows: I am always amazed at the dealers who don't put their name & address on a receipt or at least include a business card in the bag. What if the buyer wants to get more of whatever they bought??! (or has a question or problem that needs resolving?)
I've had that happen to me when I've purchased things at shows and luckily I hadn't thrown out the show schedule with the vendor's contact info on it.
What I do before each show is to use the white Avery return address labels and print up a couple hundred and I stick them on the customer's copy of the receipts in the receipt books while doing something like watching TV. I've seen other vendors use a inkpad & stamp. Either way, let your customers know how to reach you! :)

Debbie Jones

Address on Receipts; About dealers putting their address on receipts, etc -- May I also suggest you do it in a legible type face on your receipts, business cards, stationary etc. When you use fancy script lettering, numbers are sometimes difficult to read. I would suggest you ask someone who is not familiar with your name/address/phone number to read it. A friend is going to have no trouble interpreting a number or letter but a stranger may. I have tried to contact a miniaturist from their business card with the phone number in an elaborate script and after dialing two wrong numbers, I gave up and they lost the order.

Dean Jenson

Business Name: Before you spend a lot of money on searches and lawyers, you need to ask yourself some questions.

1. Do you plan to trademark your name?

If you want to trademark it, then you have to do a thorough search and your best bet is to hire an attorney or agent who specializes in this. There are specialized databases for this purpose which the general public does not use because it's by subscription and is expensive and complicated to use. If you do decide to trademark the name you will have to pay an application fee and a yearly fee to maintain it plus keep a watchful eye to make sure nobody else uses it, and then be willing to spend to sue them if they do. The fee schedule is at http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/1999/fee2000.htm#tmfee and they're fairly hefty.

If a business name is not trademarked or copyrighted it is legal to use it even if somebody else is already using the name. The purpose of trademarking a name is to prevent others from using it and if a business has not paid the fees for this right, then they have forfeited it. Of course you don't want to duplicate a name that's being used if it's in a similar business because that would cause confusion.

2. Is your business name fairly unusual?

If it's Tiny Treasures or Carol's Miniatures or something like that, it probably is being used. But if you named yourself something like Carol's Miniatures of Hightstown, NJ you're probably safe. If the name you choose has been used by more than one business for several years, it probably isn't trademarked. If it was trademarked one of the businesses might have blocked the other one from using it in that time period.

3. Does the business name reflect the business, i.e. does it have "miniatures" or "enterprises" or other generic term in the name? If it doesn't then it's probably safe to use even if it's trademarked. Although this statement doesn't sound right it comes from my experience as a patent searcher for a large corporation. We ignored patents in areas totally unrelated to our area because those companies weren't watching what we were doing and probably wouldn't care enough to spend on court fees. . There were many, many times, I came across more than one patent for the same chemical compound but they were from companies engaged in very different types of business such as pharmaceuticals and photography.

My point is that if a sewage treatment company had your name trademarked, they probably wouldn't bother to spend the legal fees to stop you from using it. It is a chance you take.

In conclusion, do the freebie searches and then decide if not spending for a professional search and then paying the fees for trademarking is worth the risk of not doing it. Remember that the trademark is only good in the U.S.

Carol

Business Name: There are various ways to find out if a name you are thinking of using in your business is already in use. (Although that doesn't necessarily mean that a prior use precludes your use. More about that in a minute.) None of these is foolproof:

1.The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has an online searchable database of all marks that have been registered or have registration applications in progress at the federal level. It does NOT include marks that are registered at the state level or marks that haven't been registered at all. The site is http://www.uspto.gov/web/menu/tm.html

2.If you have the time and patience, you can check with every state's Secretary of State for names that have been registered as company names, trade names, or trademarks. Many states (if not all) have online searchable databases.

Because neither of the above will turn up unregistered names (and there are plenty of them) or names that may be confusingly similar (and there are even more of them), you'd need to do a more comprehensive search to feel secure. So, how do you do this?

3. The best way is to engage the services of either an intellectual property lawyer or a company that is in the business of doing trademark searches. (Both will cost money up front, but as I tell my clients, you can pay now, or you can pay later.) In my opinion, the better way to go is to have a lawyer do the search or, if you go directly to the search company, have a lawyer review and give you an opinion on the search results. The fact that a company has a similar name or trademark -- or even the identical one -- doesn't necessarily mean that another company can't use it. Without going into a discourse on intellectual property, the second company's rights to use the name depend on factors such as (1) the first user's geographic market and/or type of registration, if any, (2) the goods or services in connection with which the first user's mark is used, and (3) the strength (uniqueness, widespread recognition, etc.) of the first user's mark.

Rosemary

SEARCH at Large Web Sites: Since my web site was launched last year, one of the criticisms I receive by E-mail is that it is so big, with many, many categories, therefore it is difficult for them to find something they are looking for easily. Well, yes...the site is big with over 1300 items and over 900 photos (just at Pannikins alone).  I usually post this message back, but decided to post on SS because perhaps many of you do not know about the SEARCH feature....not just at my web site but at so many others also.  It is really very easy to find what you are looking for in less than a minute. Here is how the SEARCH feature works at my site http://www.pannikins.com, and I am sure it works just about the same at other large sites also: You click to the catalog pages (where the Shopping Cart system is). There you will see a clickable box that says SEARCH phrase.  Now let's just say you need a HAM for your country kitchen setting.  In the Search box, you type in HAM. The system will do a speedy search and will list any hams in the catalog.  On that list you will see Country Ham and all you need to do is "click" on the entry, and the picture and description will come up.  (The search feature is so sensitive that on that HAM list, you may find HAMentaschen,  cHAMpagne, etc.) I hope this information helps...when you go to a large site, look for that Search feature.....none of us likes to get stuck at web sites for a long time, and still not find what we were looking for in the first place.

Mary Eccher

Wholesaling: Wholesaling depends on whether or not you want to have a bigger business or not. Selling on the internet has added a new dimension to the problem! The way business is done will change radically in the next few years. I started out 25 years ago doing both wholesale and retail shows. For the past several, I've only sold at wholesale because I need the volume that creates to make a living. If you are doing this only for some extra money, and want it to be controllable, don't wholesale! To be able to do that effectively, you need to be able to price your merchandise in such a way that you are happy with the wholesale price. Then, the occasional mail order from a person who does not live near a miniature store will be "gravy"! It is a matter of tailoring your business to suit your time and financial needs.

Alice Zinn

Wholesaling:

The first one is a manufacturing concern which makes a product and sells it at wholesale. The second is a retailer that buys the product and sells it at a mark-up. Each business should be able to economically stand on its own.

The first business has all the expenses for materials, tools, working space (if you are working at home, you may think the space is free, but you are paying for heating/cooling, lighting, taxes, phone, etc; you could use that space for something else if you weren't working there) and of course, your time. Pay yourself whatever you are happy with (some people work for $1.00 and hour, some want a LOT more). Make sure your wholesale price covers all this and makes a profit beside. The profit is to reward you for the risks you take - like the cat jumping up and ruining half of your product. If you aren't making money at this point, either you prices are too low, your expenses too high, or it just isn't a viable business.

The second business has the obvious expense of buying the merchandise, storing the product, and then depending on the type of business, it has shipping costs (including the time it takes to travel to the Post Office of UPS), boxes, tape, invoices, catalogs, web site (no, the web site isn't free - you have to pay yourself for the time it takes - remember, you could be making more product to sell if you didn't have to update your site, and read your mail), or travel expenses to the shows, table rentals, and again you have to pay yourself for the time ALL of this takes. Don't exclude the travel time, you could be making product rather than sitting in a traffic jam. There are also the credit card costs, check costs, and the cost of returned items.

Many artisans say "I can't sell wholesale because my prices are too low". They are absolutely right. By setting their prices so low, they are expecting the second of their businesses (retailing) to subsidize the first one. As it turns out, usually neither of the business are making enough money to warrant their existence. This gives you some idea of what to consider. Your local library will have books on selling crafts, which should go into much more detail. Remember, you don't have to think about all this: just consider making and selling as your hobby, and then it is no longer a business decision; rather just do what makes you happy.

Tom Berkner

Wholesaling:

The biggest pro is that your wholesale customers, if they have success with your product, will order in quantities and over and over again. A retail customer may only want an item or two and then may never need to buy from you again.

There is no way in any business that involves handcrafting that you can figure your hourly worth added to your materials and charge that price. That usually puts it beyond most buyers' reach. So figuring that, if you have a quality item sooner or later someone is going to want to buy wholesale from you. When people ask me what to do, I tell them to figure the very least they will take for an item, wholesale price, then double it, retail price. (40% is okay too, wholesale for less than that and you may not find many wholesale customers.) If your work is just too labor intensive to do that then you shouldn't sell wholesale.

With shows and the advent of the internet, many stores are finding themselves in competition with their own suppliers. I know several store owners who are dropping many of these suppliers because sales of their products are dwindling or they prefer to not carry merchandise that is saturated in the market. I know store owners who have closed their stores and they themselves are now selling on the net. Their choice. In many cases I have chosen to sell artisan minis that are not my competition. However, with people like Brooke Tucker, Alice Zinn, David Krupick and several others, I continue to carry their merchandise because I can sell it retail even though they do. In other words, these artisans have the best of both worlds because their work sells well enough no matter how many people carry it. I know several people who sell W/R that feel their wholesale business can always be counted on which gets them through when retail is slow.

Another big pro is that your wholesale customer does all the advertising, promoting sales, etc. They push your product to their customers at their effort and cost. You then only need to produce merchandise and leave that hassle to someone else.

And I'm sure someone has already said this, but your wholesale customer has an enormous amount of overhead and shouldn't be begrudged for selling at twice what you do. We need that profit to keep our doors open. And there is no question that this industry can't survive without stores. There is no place else to go for the selection, personal service and daily promotion (mainly to people confronting miniatures for the first time). There is rarely a day that someone doesn't come into my store in wide-eyed amazement. Consider that that brand new customer is eventually going to go to shows and the computer once they are hooked So having your stuff in a store is a good thing (as per our favorite Martha). Some people just won't buy unless they can touchy-feely. Who would buy a car over the phone or internet without having actually seen it somewhere first?

Mary Kay Gentile in Ft. Myers, FL

Wholesaling:

1. There are many formulas around for calculating the retail prices of the items you make, but the basic one is 5x your cost (that's materials, shipping, advertising, packaging, and so on) I actually charge about 10x cost of materials alone to cover all the rest without having to calculate them! An item costing $.60 in materials would retail for $6.00 with my formula. If the items you make take a long time, you may want to use a "wage" formula; that is calculating how much income per hour you need to make and keeping track of how long your items take.

2. Retail is 2x wholesale, so you should be pricing your items accordingly--for instance, your $6.00 item will wholesale to a shop for $3.

3. Supply of goods you make and the market--if you have more than you can sell yourself, wholesaling is a way to have more income and expand your market. If you can sell all you make yourself, then you may not want to "share" the income with another retailer by wholesaling to them. You may also want to wholesale for a while to build your reputation by expanding your market, then switch back to retailing to have the income for yourself once you are established.

Jane Walker

Shrink wrap for packages: What you do is go to Wal-Mart or any other home type place and get the window shrink wrap that is used for insulating your windows. It looks like saran wrap. Wrap it around your product. Tape with the enclosed double-sided tape. Use your hair-dryer set on high to shrink it around your thing.

Marcie Van Deren

Packing For Travel: When going to a show (especially out of town) take a small box with those even smaller plastic boxes left over from previous shopping. This way you can put your new items into the proper fitting boxes and then all of those into the bigger box and into the suitcase for a safe trip. Also, take a glob of blu-tac - or similar - to stick the tiny things into the 1st box.

Elise

Show going Hint: Get a fanny pack or wallet on a shoulder strap large enough to put over your head and one shoulder. Carry a soft cloth tote for your purchases. Leave all that unnecessary heavy stuff at home or in your locked luggage in your hotel room. You only need $$, CC, Drivers license, Car and house key. In Hotel - eliminate car and house key.

Elise

Hobby/business and the IRS

You are supposed to report all income (that's obvious). You can deduct expenses and can take a loss if your expenses exceed your profit. However, I think that if you show a loss for 3 years straight, the IRS will declare you a "hobby business" and can audit the past 3 years and not allow the expenses.

If I remember correctly, we file a separate form for the business that is part of our regular income tax and the profits get rolled into our regular income as we are not incorporated. You should keep a record of all sales and have copies of all receipts for expenses. Ask your accountant how to best keep track of sales and expenses as that was my major mistake the first year we were in business and I had to do a lot of reconstructing.

Carol, S P Miniatures

IRS: dealing with the tax people when you sell crafts stuff.. I found an IRS website which spells out the official line. It requires adobe acrobat (which is downloadable from the site). http://ftp.fedworld.gov/pub/irs-mssp/art.pdf

Sue Meringolo