Mostly, growing your handmade wholesale business is not a place for cheats or tips or tricks. 

Mostly, growing wholesale is a long-term game where “boring” things like consistency, follow-up, respect, thoughtfulness, and gradual improvement of your product line are what work.

Since we spend all day everyday working with makers who are doing wholesale outreach, sometimes we’ll come across a fun tip that just is so simple and works so well that we think, “Gosh, I wish everyone knew about that.” 

As one maker friend put it: People were saying for months that a shift was going to happen with Etsy Wholesale. And, well… Shift happened.  As you’re probably well aware by now, Etsy Wholesale is closed its doors: July 31, 2018 was the last day of the platform. While few people are surprised -- since Etsy Wholesale had been quietly withdrawing for months -- many makers are understandably frustrated, freaked out, or just… tired.

SugarSky is one a maker brand that has found the elusive balance of being very well-respected by peers and customers alike — but also scaling pretty quickly in smart ways.

So we decided to hop on the phone to hear how her business has evolved. What she shared was really inspiring, very actionable, and sometimes surprising.

This year, I was invited to speak about growing your handmade wholesale business at Makers Summit (by Makers Collective, in Greenville, South Carolina.) It was exciting, since I really admire the Makers Collective folks and the authentic, thoughtful way they do things. But I had some reservations, because it's hard to take time away from work and life to do something that may be awesome or may be meh.

In 2006, I was living in New York City and going to yoga a lot. I was going through a hard time, so yoga class served as a refuge, exercise, and social connection.

One day, as I walked out of class, I saw a stack of books for sale by the cash register. The handwritten sign next to the stack said the book was a memoir by one of the yoga studio’s attendees. I figured the book was terrible, obviously just displayed because the author went to yoga at the studio. But I bought it anyway because my life doldrums were such that going to an actual bookstore or library wasn’t happening. As the cashier ran my credit card, she mentioned that the next day, the author was doing a reading and Q&A at the studio. Since I’d be at yoga anyway, I decided to go.

We asked some of the makers that we work with for their advice. They thought about the early days of growing their handmade wholesale business and sifted through their experiences for the single piece of advice they think is most crucial.

Here’s what they said…

In 10th grade, I realized or decided that I was bad at math. During math class, I was simultaneously confused, bored, and overwhelmed. And doing my math homework in the evenings was so tedious and overwhelming that I buoyed myself with a huge bag of ginger snaps and Charles in Charge sitcom breaks.

Your story is the way you produce what you make, the specific art and design of what you do, the inspiration behind it, and what makes it special beyond what is immediately obvious at first glance. This could include your production process, your design, your sourcing, the design inspirations of each piece, perhaps why you make what you make, or a mission or ethos that the company embodies.

With our increasingly mobile and flexible lives, it makes sense that many of us are turning away from reading and towards more mobile forms of consuming good content. While we’re avid readers, we’ve been getting tons of inspiration from podcasts recently, and the medium for content sharing is exponentially growing. 

Whatever your politics, the present feels like a time of both destruction and creation. It feels like a time to make a stand - to actively participate in creating a world that we want to live in, a world where all people can thrive. To take ownership of ourselves and our businesses and our process. Something in Elysian Fields post of the James Murphy quote “The best way to complain is to make something” just rings true, especially right now.

For makers, the emotional aspect of reaching out to stores is often the hardest. If you have taken the leap and reached to stores to introduce your work, you know it can be scary and even harder is knowing how many times to follow up.