Establishing a Crafty Making Future: What Does a Career in Craft Look Like Today?

Abstract

This chapter outlines the diversity of ways that project participants have developed and structured their working lives and enterprises. Within these conversations we will gain an understanding of the range of people, personal acumen, skills, and public and private investments that are garnered by these creative entrepreneurs to develop and sustain their practices. Through the lens of Milanesi’s three forms of ‘passion entrepreneurship’: lifestyle, accidental, and hybrid entrepreneur (Milanesi 2018, p. 425), why makers pursue this work, despite the often relatively low levels of income to be derived from creative self-employment, is explored. The chapter concludes with a reference listing of some of the key practical advice offered by the research participants.

It was not so much a hobby but an enjoyable pastime for me. I mean being a visual art teacher I mean I’ve obviously got skills in drawing and painting and I love that, but I started doing the craft side of things for more practical reasons like my small children’s painted T-shirts and that type of thing. I was under no illusion that I could make a living at it. I made a living as being a teacher so in that regard the silk painting that I do has always been something else on top of my real job. […] I never saw it as a business and still don’t. So it’s unusual in that 35 years ago when I decided to try knitting as an art form I saw myself and for the next 15 years through the 80s and into the mid to late 90s I only ever knitted artwork. I only ever knitted work for exhibitions for galleries for installation or for artwork. It’s only in recent times and a lot to do with being part of Craft New South Wales that I’ve actually created a retail range. I never had a retail range until the last 10 years, whereas now because I’m a full-time knitter I knit on average 8 to 10 hours a day and therefore I now mix the three things. I now combine the artwork with the installation art with the retail line but, sort of, it is while I have had an ABN since 2000 as a maker, as you would be aware you have to earn a lot of money before it really clicks in in terms of paying tax on it, I never saw it as a business and I’m only aware of one textile artist or textile maker who earns a living from textiles—it is a craft form that’s almost impossible to earn a living from. You need to have a supplementary income from whatever form it’s coming from, if you are working in textiles, if you are a maker in textile. (Jude Skeers, textile artist/Arts and Crafts NSW, established maker, December 2015)

As we have already noted, few if any of our interviewees indicated that they were motivated by an entrepreneurial desire to ‘get rich’ or ‘make it’. With this in mind we were curious to examine how our research participants viewed their making enterprise, given they were all selling what they made. Were they doing this as a hobby, a vocation or a ‘self-defining’ or redefining career move? Did it evolve from a lifestyle transition? Were they consciously avoiding traditional employment and wage-earning structures, or was it as dispassionate as a moneymaking enterprise? Or was it an unplanned next step as they emerge from higher education? What we found through the project was that regardless of the motivation for starting their making enterprise, none of our research participants were waiting for opportunities to fall into their laps. As one of the emerging makers stated: ‘You’ve just got to trust in yourself, […] keep your direction and go for it’ (Phillipa Julien, textile artist and designer maker, emerging maker, February 2017). But as we have heard from our interviewees in the project, while ‘going for it’ looks different to different people, there are many common experiences shared between those that work in the creative industries, and the craft sector more specifically, including their persistence and commitment to a making enterprise that most would consider ‘economically aberrant’ (Knott 2015, 51). Regardless of the level of economic reward, the skills and entrepreneurial acumen to negotiate such an individualised pathway is challenging yet a clearly rewarding (enough) task, given so many persist (Fig.4.1).

Fig. 4.1

Tiff Manuell (https://tiffmanuell.com/) working in her studio, with shopfront through door on right of photo. (Photograph: Rosina Possingham Photography)

This chapter outlines the diversity of ways that project participants have developed and structured their working lives and enterprises. Within these conversations we will gain an understanding of the range of people, personal acumen and skills and public and private investments that are garnered by these creative entrepreneurs to develop and sustain their practices. Most of our research participants could be described by Milanesi’s notion of ‘passion entrepreneurs’, pursuing their creative practice as either, or a combination of, lifestyle choice, accidental entrepreneurship and/or hybrid entrepreneurship (Milanesi 2018, 425). Despite the often relatively low levels of income derived from their creative self-employment, we hear from makers why they pursue this work and often supplement their income with other sources of paid employment. The chapter concludes with a reference listing of some of the key practical advice offered by the research participants.

Describing a Creative Career

Since the late 1990s, across the Global North we have witnessed the rise of what has been referred to as portfolio work. Portfolio work involves simultaneously working on a variety of projects in different places of employment (or self-employment); in this way, the ‘individual becomes his or her own enterprise, sometimes presiding over two separate companies at the one time’ (McRobbie 2016, 20). Tepper (2002) observes that many who work in the creative industries have multitrack portfolio careers—for example, our research participants’ work portfolios included designer makers who also teach, produce works for exhibition, create limited-run production ranges, undertake public art commissions and design for manufacture. Hall (1996) described this process as the protean career: ‘a career that is driven by the person, not the organization, and that will be reinvented by the person from time to time, as the person and environment change’ (8). Our conversations with Australian craftspeople and designer makers did indeed confirm that most are needing to pursue a portfolio career to generate workable incomes. They also highlighted the passion that drives many makers to persist balancing these multiple roles. Thus, while few if any of our research participants would ever describe themselves as ‘entrepreneurs’ (see Luckman (2018)), Milanesi’s definition of the ‘passion entrepreneur’ nonetheless seems to offer appropriate typologies to describe our research participants’ creative enterprises without judgement on the income they generate through their practice. For what was evident through our research is that self-employment specifically, and by default the need to be enterprising or entrepreneurial within the creative sector, is an increasingly normalised social and economic assumption regardless of whether you are starting out on the creative career path upon exit from a higher education degree or entering as a ‘career changer’ (Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2

Stephanie Hammill (http://stephaniehammill.com/) in her studio. (Photograph: Rosina Possingham Photography)

In a paper exploring passion entrepreneurship, Milanesi (2018, 425) summarised the discourse on atypical pathways of the passion entrepreneur who is motivated by reasons other than solely business opportunity and resource optimisation. She outlines the following passion entrepreneur typologies as identified in the business entrepreneurship literature:

• The lifestyle entrepreneur is motivated by [economically] irrational personal needs, such as self-realisation and enjoying life, and considers the company as a means of supporting a certain lifestyle in which business objectives are secondary to personal goals (Henricks 2002).

• The accidental entrepreneur is the result of specific processes where entrepreneurship often happens when people are on their way to something else (Aldrich & Kenworthy, 1999).

• The hybrid entrepreneur has parallel business-employment careers with a particular focus on passion as the main motive (Thorgren, Nordström & Wincent, 2014) (as cited in Milanesi 2018, 425).

Interestingly, many or our interviewees could be considered a hybrid of all three of Milanesi’s entrepreneurial typologies listed above, often transitioning from one to the other as personal goals and life circumstances shift, as they inevitably do. For example, textile artist Jude Skeers, whose words open this chapter, never saw her making as a business and still doesn’t. With the ability to earn a wage through teaching, she focused her making on the production of artwork, only more recently developing a retail range upon retiring from teaching and becoming a ‘full-time knitter’. Other interviewees were clearly accidental entrepreneurs, spurred on by family to venture into the online marketplace:

Q::

What led you to wanting to do this and setting up a business?

A::

Well, I’ve always wanted to have a go at leather craft, but it’s quite expensive to get materials so I just […] bought myself half a cow and had a go, but then I thought if I make and sell I can generate income to buy more supplies. So that’s how it happened and my youngest suggested I try selling on Etsy which I did put the time into putting that all up and then a local lady contacted me to say they were establishing an Etsy-based market for Darwin-based people, would I like to participate? And I said yeah I would and so that’s where it started.

[…]

Q::

So, you’re running this as a small business?

A::

Yeah taxwise it’s not really emerging as anything to consider as far as income goes at the moment, but I am trying to supplement my husband’s wage.

Q::

So, is it mostly paying its own way?

A::

It’s breaking even.

Q::

You’re not getting any return for your own personal time quite yet?

A::

Probably not. (Leather, established maker, July 2016)

Similarly, Jax Isaacson’s interest in making started as an ‘accidental’ making enterprise which grew from a need to keep her creative brain active while caring for a young family (see Feature Interview). Her experimentation with resins and jewellery making has evolved from a ‘hobby’ to what is now a successful microenterprise.

Feature Interview—Jax Isaacson

Q: So, when did the resin jewellery start?

A: So, this is the easy one, so this time last year I had an […] 8-month-old and a [toddler] and they both slept for the first time. […] So they were sleeping and I had time during the day where they were sleeping both during the day and I started getting immensely bored; I’m not an awesome born to be mother anyway. So it’s not like that, that fulfils me completely but I started getting really bored and really quite miserable about that. I work on the block and once again that’s a physical thing and I do really enjoy that, but creatively I was lacking immensely and it was affecting my wellbeing. So I decided I had to start, had doing creative stuff again. So what I did is I started trying to workshops and stuff like that, because I thought I’ll just dabble in small amounts and I really enjoyed my print making when I, that I did when I was at Uni and there’s no workshops really around in the Riverland and I found it really difficult to find a creative outlet. I joined my local art gallery, thinking volunteering for them might help but that was not very much stimulation really. [But] it’s just a small gallery and I would be the youngest there by about 40 years. So it wasn’t exactly the environment I thought would be. […] So anyway, I thought I’ll start print making and I got all this stuff together to do a bit of print making and realised that you can’t do print making in 1½ hours while your kids are sleeping it’s a bit more, it’s too messy for that […] Anyway, I always wanted to try resin, thought I’d just give it a go, I just started playing around with resin and during that process I set some resin in wood and then I thought I’d carve it, and then I thought, well I’ll make myself a pendant out of it and I did and then somebody wanted to buy that pendant from me and that’s how I started. […] And then I made another one and then somebody else wanted to buy that one from me and all of a sudden, I’m making jewellery. […] it was purely just because I needed something to do and it’s fit in, and the best thing about it was it fit into my time; I could do it whenever I wanted and of course at the start it was really slow. So, I could just make a piece once a week and on my day that I, I could and, […] then […] in September last year I had a little stall at the local field days in Barmera and I sold heaps of pieces and got heaps of really great feedback and then that’s when I was like, maybe I should be taking this a bit more seriously. So, I started a website then and started looking at actually selling my stuff instead of just doing it for shits and giggles.

Q: So, pursuing your, what you’re interested in, you’re able to do that because of the income coming in from the pistachio business and your partner is that, is that how it works?

A: So, so I’ve been in the luxurious position where I haven’t had to work which has been amazing, especially with the little kids.

Q: You are working but you’re not in paid employment.

A: Well I am working and, and I’ve always worked on the block but I haven’t had to go out and get an external job […] So, whether I can stay in this position is, I’m unsure, we won’t know for a few months, see how our harvest goes and all of that. So, we’ve got an income coming in through the pistachios and being able to outsource my kids a couple a days a week, that gives me the opportunity to do that. […] my plan now that I’ve got a bit more of an idea and I feel like I can, my plan is to hopefully build what I’m doing to a point where it is a viable business and it could be my, it can be an external income instead of just paying for itself. (Jax Isaacson, resin jeweller and homewares, established maker, July 2017)

Jax’s story is typical of several women we interviewed for the project. Working from home today is a particularly attractive option for women accustomed to paid work but now also finding themselves with caring responsibilities within the household (see Luckman and Andrew (2018) for further discussion of this). Women’s craft production wherever it has been undertaken has long had to fight to be seen as more than a ‘hobby’ (Parker 1984). Despite women’s making skills for many previous generations being a primary way of making money for the family, this image of women’s craft as not art and largely amateur is reflected in common references to home-based microenterprise being less serious than the ‘real job’ of a traditional wage earner. Consequently, commonly undertaken as a form of home-working, often part-time and all too frequently for little to no financial reward, craft practice continues to suffer from the long shadow cast by stereotypes of middle-class domestic-based labour being ‘not a real job’. This certainly was still the case for some of the people we spoke to:

A::

I started the business in 1990 so I’ve been doing it a long time as a business. It was under a different name then, but I ran the business from home. We had a house that had a massive big room out the back that was totally separate from the rest of the house, so I ran the business from there, but because it was from a private address again it was difficult to get people to take me seriously that I really was—this was a business—this wasn’t just a hobby in my back room. I was a registered business and put a tax form in every year and the whole bit, and it really wasn’t until the GST was introduced and all that business happened that it started to become serious because suddenly the government let me have an ABN and all that GST business and everything you have to be a lot more accountable when all that happened as a small business. So, people thought oh yeah, she’s going to disappear, and I didn’t—I just got stuck into it even more and that was when I went out and went into a shop and that was difficult too—very difficult.

Q::

Have you found the attitudes to working from home have changed?

A::

Very much so. In fact, it’s quite acceptable it seems nowadays not just for crafts people, but it seems like office work from home is not at all frowned on anymore. It’s very—in fact a lot of houses that are marketed now are marketed with a home office and all this sort of thing so yeah, very much more acceptable than it was in 1990 when I started. (Textile artist, established maker, May 2016)

Fortunately, this growing normalisation of small-scale, and often home-based, self-employment was clearly reflected in the taken for granted attitudes towards microenterprise encountered by many of our emerging makers.

Others articulated their choice to develop their making enterprise as a conscious decision to create and live a better lifestyle and thus are arguably more classic ‘lifestyle entrepreneurs’:

Know why you’re going into it as a sole trader, I think. You have to be making that decision because of what you can get out of having your own business, not just because it seems like a good way to make money directly or to kind of be in control or not have to have a boss, or yeah, you have to see it for what it can give you. So, for me, it means I can ride my bike when I want to, I can knock off that afternoon and spend the afternoon with my wife instead. It’s really for me is about being flexible and enjoying my life. It’s not about, I’m not being a sole trader and have my own business so that I can made loads of cash. I don’t think many people do. You have to run multidisciplinary or companies that involve employing lots of people to really make money, there’s no-one really on their own making loads. Some people I know are still doing markets 10 years later because they have to keep going back. So even the most successful, they’re still just doing every market. And you never are really going to be making lots of money, so it’s not about that. Go into it because you enjoy living life, that’s really what it’s about. (BUCK!T Belts, established maker, October 2017)

Many makers we spoke to are perhaps more obviously what might be called hybrid entrepreneurs, pursuing their creative practice within a hybrid suite of jobs in the classic portfolio career model as discussed earlier in this chapter. For example, when asked about her plans following graduation, glass artist Briony Davis is clearly committed to generating an income within the creative sector, no matter what:

Q::

… because you’re still studying, do you consider that your practice is or is about to be a small business when you finish?

A::

I’m hoping to go that direction but I’m also very much aware of the fact that bills need to be paid. And so, I will work on the side but I’m hoping I can still continue with my practice and bring that up alongside so that I can actually afford life.

Q::

Are you working—are hoping to get a job that’s more related to your practice?

A::

Yeah. I would love to—I have a lot of retail experience and so I would love to actually work in the shop side of art, either working in the shopfront of the JamFactory, or working at the art gallery, things like that. I just want to be around art in whatever way I can. (Briony Davis, glass, emerging maker, March 2016)

Writing specifically of creative employment pathways, Bridgstock (2011, 10) refers to the ‘boundarylessness’ that characterises creative industries employment, which is largely individually navigated and generally offers few opportunities for stable employment or progression through a firm as was once ‘normal’ in the labour market of the last century. Certainly the precarity of portfolio working was familiar to, if not the current situation of, the majority of the makers we interviewed.

Given this lack of employment stability, it is worth adding a further category to those offered by Milanesi; Reynolds et al. have identified the category of ‘necessity entrepreneurs’, that is, those who develop an enterprise when there are no better choices for work (2003). Established furniture maker Julie Pieda’smotivation for establishing her practice was precisely out of necessity, as she explains below:

Because I didn’t have an interior or an architecture degree and industry was low at that time—the housing industry. I went I don’t have any choice. I’m never going to get a job in an architectural practice or an interior practice—maybe that wasn’t true but that’s how I felt and I went I don’t have any choice but to start my own business—there’s no other way to do it and I did a NEIS course and that was fantastic because they do this thing where they make you figure out what your competitive advantage is which took me weeks and a lot of tears and going no I’m no different to any furniture designer. How am I ever going to make a successful business? But what I figured out from that was there was lots of woody cabinet makers and people who did benches and tables and none of that has changed but there wasn’t many people doing upholstery. So that’s where I went; I’m focussing on the upholstery side of things and going from there and I still keep that upholstery focus and it’s interesting when I do work in—like I collaborate with architects all the time now and the fact that I do the upholstery side of it they really appreciate it because they can knock up joinery designs and stuff no problem but they all feel a bit lost on that upholstery side of that because it is a bit specialist. So it was a good choice 15 years ago. […] So I started it in a studio in Coromandel Place. That was hiring a space in there and every year my partner and I sat down and went, ‘did we do better than last year’. Like the business had to grow. She was working really hard in lots of hotels and I wasn’t bringing home much money and I knew I had that emotional and financial support for a year or two but basically we went we can’t go on forever. If it doesn’t work I’ll have to go back to teaching. Teaching ironically was always the fallback trade just like dad said and then every year we sat down before Christmas and went did we do better than the year before and for the first 10 years it was 20% growth every year and it was like fine, we will hang in there. And I guess 20% is a really big deal for a business but it was 20% of nothing to start with. So it took a long time. (Julie Pieda, interior and furniture designer, established maker, August 2015)

We also heard from our research participants that many had undertaken teaching (usually on a sessional basis) as ‘a fallback trade’.

The Realities of Maker Incomes (from Making)

These makers’ stories, as well as those outlined in Chap. 1, indicate a snapshot of the diversity of motivations and modes of creative enterprise developed by our research participants. With such diversity, accordingly, there are also differing notions of what success looks like (see Luckman (2018)). What unites these diverse experiences, however, are relatively low levels of financial return for effort. In this way, much like the Australian, Hawaiian and Californian surfboard makers Warren and Gibson researched, the majority of the makers we interviewed were more motivated by the rewards of the ‘emotional terrain’ of making, ‘not by a natural desire for profit’ (2013, 20). For despite the popularity of handcrafted bespoke objects around much of the industrialised world, and the ease of setting up a business identity and launching it online, the vast majority of both our emerging and established maker research participants are not generating significant net income from their creative practice (for further discussion on this, see Luckman and Andrew (2018)), as the following tables (Tables 4.1 and 4.2) illustrate. Many accountants would consider this level of income as a hobby; to our makers it is serious business that enables creative expression, defines their sense of self and in the most part generates an income to at least sustain the purchase of materials with which to continue making.

Table 4.1 Established makers: ‘annual income earned from craft practice’ (if two selected lower option counted)

Table 4.2 Emerging makers: ‘annual income earned from craft practice’ (if two selected lower option counted)

As we have seen, notably a fundamental way makers address income shortfalls is not through letting go of the making side of their practice and outsourcing this to others, but rather to take on outside employment, engaging in other aspects of their protean career ‘work portfolio’, ideally in a way that maintains a connection to the creative sector:

At the moment I work three days a week at a studio which is really so that I have enough financial backing to eat and pay the rent and have a little bit of fun and what not. And that way I can take the financial stress away from my personal practice. (Pip Kruger, illustrator, emerging maker, August 2015)

However, and it is important to note that precisely because of the ‘passion entrepreneur’ (Milanesi 2018) motivations driving many of the research participants, the discussion about relatively low income-generating capacity and outcomes was not all doom and gloom. That said, peak industry bodies and those selling the work of craftspeople and designer makers expressed concern that many creative aspirants have unrealistic expectations regarding the degree to which making a living from artistic work is not dissimilar to running a non-creative small business. So too, similar concerns were raised by some of the more established makers generating a sustainable income from their making, generally precisely because they do not avoid nor seek to somehow romantically transcend the small business realities of running a creative microenterprise:

The idea that you can make money as an artist while you know it’s really ingrained that you can’t […] I’ve always been able to say, well actually my parents are artists and they have been full-time artists you know now for about 20 years you know and I’d really like to be able to say that to people and say, it’s perfectly possible, don’t say it’s not. But you have to, I think, one of the problems is people actually don’t work hard enough, and I know that sounds a bit cynical but, and I say it a little bit I guess from my own point of view. I think you can have this idea of ‘oh I’m going to be an artist and it will be so lovely, and I’ll do a bit of work and oh my work, you know I can sell at exhibitions’ [but in reality] it’s like anyone who’s making full-time money at art is working full-time at least. […] I think if you want to get bigger you probably will have to hire staff eventually and I think about it myself, how do you make that step. Particularly just the simple thing of, so the way I’ve set up my business which again has come from my parents’ model that my mother always said to me, you need a bread and butter line, you need your bread and butter lines, you’ve got to get them going, get them out there and then you have time to do your creative fine art, you know whatever that is. And she said you’ve got to make sure you still can do that, you don’t want to just be a slave to that because that will drive you nuts, but you want to be able to have that space. But you need that income to be feeding into that. So that’s the model I’ve really been taught, and I feel like right now, and I have to say it probably took me a while to get my head around that. I did it with my painting a bit, when I came to the ceramics, I realised one thing that I wasn’t doing was I’m not very good at doing repetitive processes, I’m very easily bored. And so eventually I went, okay I have to really limit myself and so I said I’m going to come up with three designs and I’ve got a colour range of only three colours, you know and that’s what I’ve done. And interestingly you organically add lines over time. You know like the noughts and crosses sets are one of the first things I had, but they’re still there and you know they just tick away slowly but surely. (Ceramicist, established maker, November 2015)

The quote above is notable for the way it captures the other key ‘portfolio’ strategies long employed by successful craft makers: the studio model, whereby in addition to producing gallery-style work in their own name, the maker also strategically develops other lines of work, often under a ‘brand’ name, within their own practice (Fig. 4.3). Many high-profile critically and commercially successful studio potters in particular have long embraced such an approach. In our study, one of the country’s leading contemporary jewellers similarly uses these two strands of her work to support one another, using her production lines to inform the development of and also cross-promote her exhibition work and vice versa, depending on where she is at in the making cycle:

The two strands of work, the exhibition work and the production work, I alternate with each other; one-year exhibition work takes priority, the next year production work takes priority. For a long time, Miyuki Nakahara managed the production work for me, and that used to help, you know, that would provide her wages and manage it. It’s only recently I have been able to find other people that were willing to step in, in that way. […] I find that it’s a two-way street between the two. The exhibitions allow me to explore conceptual ideas and my thinking within the field, my philosophical thinking, as well as day-to-day things; production work either starts out in exhibition or ends up in exhibition. And when I have an exhibition it’s a kind of marketing; people will remember the exhibition […] one feeds the other. I have people come to the exhibitions who may have bought a pair of earrings, the earrings probably most of all because they’re the most prolific of my practice, who would never step into an exhibition, or they might come to the workshop and they suddenly see all this other work, and vice versa; people that go to an exhibition may not be aware so much of the production work, then it opens that door. (Susan Cohn, jeweller and metalsmith, established maker, November 2015)

Fig. 4.3

Adam Coffey, Future Shelter (https://futureshelter.com/), in his workshop. (Photograph: Rosina Possingham Photography)

For others perhaps less comfortable with the art-money commercial relationship, such a strategy subjectively isolates their ‘real’ (artistic) work from any classic Bourdieusian-style art field ‘contaminatin’g effects of serving market demand and thus losing one’s creative ‘integrity’:

I’m a bit fearful that if my stuff was really popular [and] it started to take off and then I’d become a machine and it would be like ‘oh, what was the point of doing this in the first place?’ I’d much rather be an artist and pursue other materials rather than just silver…. because I’m a one-person-band, I don’t want to—I mean, sure it’d be fantastic to take on an apprentice and in a way I’ve supplemented my whole world by teaching, I teach short courses in silversmithing at TAFE one night a week for four weeks and from that I’ve picked up some private students who want to pursue onwards, so that’s good, that’s a nice little—it’s really nice to see other people interested in handmaking stuff and maybe they’ll be the budding silversmiths of the future. (Curious Tales, furniture maker, established maker, February 2016)

As we have indicated, to differentiate these strands of work in the marketplace, some of our makers chose to adopt and trade under a business name other than their own name. For one emerging maker, having a business name made the everyday side of running a business flow more logically, without this ‘brand’ being tied up in their own artistic reputation as they balanced their work ‘portfolio’:

Q::

And so you’re running a small business and you see this as a small business?

A::

Yes, trying to anyway, it’s still new to me but that is the approach that I am aiming for.

Q::

Is this sort of full-time, is this what takes up most of your day?

A::

Right now this is full-time yes, so when I was working at the retailer that was full-time, so that was one of the reasons why I was moving away from that. Ideally I was always planning to have a part-time job and then give myself the time to pursue this but it didn’t work out that way, so it was really work[ing] full-time and then jump into this full-time as well.

Q::

Are you having at the moment to supplement this work with additional work to bring in enough money?

A::

It’s really all under the one name but I do several different things to sort of try to get my weekly income to a place where I want it, so I obviously sell, I’m starting to get some wholesale stockists in as well so that’s helping a lot and while I’m in the space I’m also, have been booking in private and small group workshops because I’ve got the space available to me anyway and it’s been a really great way to sort of get more people through the shop and build up a bit of a network of customers and followers and things like that. […]

Q::

And you identify as an illustrator, we’ve discussed what projects you produce and sell, is this shop the name of your business?

A::

Yes, that’s the name under which I chose to sort of have my own product range whereas as a freelancer I would use my own name still.

Q::

And that’s a very deliberate business choice?

A::

Yes, I think it helps to sort of have a brand name and be able to tie that to your products […] In my degree we were very much sort of encouraged to just go by our name. I think this was coming more from a freelance kind of a perspective I suppose rather than thinking of us as product designers or people starting up a small business and contacting retailers, etc., so certainly I would agree with that from a freelance stand point it’s much better to keep it consistent, go by your own name and market yourself that way, but coming from a product design and distribution aspect I’ve really found that having a different name helps a lot. (Illustrator, emerging maker, September 2015)

Creative Work and (the Lack of) Business Savvy

Reflecting the implications of the discussion in Chap. 2 of uneven business skills and educational outcomes in arts, craft and design degrees, other interviewees acknowledged their lack of experience and/or business acumen during the early days of developing their range of work and establishing their practice. This then set them up for some challenges when negotiating orders from retailers who may not see the subtle differences in lines of experimental and exhibition work as against retail production work when it is not differentially and clearly branded:

I find that they overlap quite a lot and maybe more than they should if I had been more business savvy when I started. They [my production line and artistic work] all came from the same place and from my materials that I loved making with, and sometimes it’s a little bit tricky because I get inquiries for shops about my exhibition work and I have to go, “Well I like to keep these more one-off pieces and spend more time on them and make them individual, but these other pieces that I make for production but they’re not necessarily always designed to be superfast.” It’s, I like to take the time in the making and labouring over them and how much I need to let go of that in the future I’ll still, I’m still working on. (Ulrica Trulsson, ceramicist, established maker, August 2015)

For craftspeople in particular, having a clear distinction in their work between a production line and artistic works targeted more for exhibition also helps in delineating between price points for the work: higher for one-off pieces and lower for higher-turnover and not unique design items. This is important as pricing work poses a particular challenge for many in the creative sector (see Fig. 4.4), especially those starting out, as makers are fearful, or forget, to accurately price all inputs (including time spent training and studying), in addition to incorporating a healthy profit. Commonly emerging makers under-price their work in relation to the cost of production, often deliberately for fear of being uncompetitive through being seen as over-priced. Pricing work is especially challenging for those who produce one-off or experimental pieces. It is hardly surprising therefore that managing sales, in particular, is an area in which our emerging makers indicated they would have valued more information while studying and continue to seek advice on once they establish their enterprise. As the makers established themselves and their work in the marketplace, they were much more able to identify markets and sales environments into which their work would fit and to design and price their work accordingly.

Fig. 4.4

Responses to the following question: ‘How easy or difficult do you find the following aspects of running your business: making pricing decisions/appropriately pricing your work’

Those craftspeople and designer makers that we spoke to who were fortunate to have professional practice or business courses embedded as core subjects within their creative studies or had participated in the NEIS (the Commonwealth government’s New Enterprise Incentive Scheme—refer to the discussion in the previous chapter) had been given useful professional advice around pricing that set them up well from the start of their career. These are the makers who had learned that in order to sustain and build a business, you need to price your goods with a percentage of profit; the more profit you generate, the more you can invest back into the business and spend on yourself. Within a non-art-related business, the aspiring small businessperson may well be more likely to invest time and seek advice to write a business plan to assist in identifying market opportunities and to inform product development and pricing decisions. However, and perhaps not surprisingly when reflecting on the previous chapters’ discussion regarding the lack of business or enterprise development content in many art and design courses, very few of our research participants had written a business plan. Of those that had written one, many had the opportunity to undertake the NEIS as discussed in the previous chapter. Others had experience of earlier government funding programmes that offered greater levels of individual funding, but in return necessitated makers familiarise themselves with being able to make a business case. Established makers such as Susan Cohn recalled preparing a business plan as part of the funding criteria for a previous grant programme:

With doing this grant, the Workshop 3000 grant, we had to show how we were going to manage it. [But] it’s always morphing, I think there’s a continual business plan […] After every major exhibition, there’s a re-addressing of the practice, both financially, because you’re in huge debt after a show like that and how you’re going to pay for it, pay it out, how you’re going to manage the next range of deadlines, and support [that is]—mentor two people in here—so, yes I do have to have a business plan. (Susan Cohn, jeweller and metal smith, established maker, November 2015)

This criterion of reflecting on the state of the business, promotional strategies and the development of sustainable market opportunities was a particular focus of many of the Australia Council and state-based funding programmes of the mid- to late 1980s, specifically the ‘Maker, Manufacture, Market’ and ‘Springboard’ programmes. These funding schemes not only focused on enabling recipients to invest in the development of new work, but an important element of the programmes mentioned above was that applicants also needed to focus on the enterprise development/business development side of their practice (Fig. 4.5).

Fig. 4.5

Gill Cordiner (http://www.gillcordiner.com/) in her studio. (Photograph: Rosina Possingham Photography)

Ironically, with the winding back of federal and state funding for the arts in Australia, acquiring this level of businessskills development is now largely de-incentivised within the contemporary craft and design community. For those not eligible or disinclined to put their hat into the ring for a shot at the ever-decreasing pool of arts grant funding, there are few options to attract capital to invest in their creative enterprise. Unsurprisingly, and as has been acknowledged in numerous studies focusing on the generally low incomes of the creative sector (Throsby and Zednik 2010), the sector is currently significantly propped up by family savings, partner earnings, other employment and for the career changers at least often retirement or redundancy packages. Regardless of the motivation for establishing their making practice, the products they create and sell, their business structure, hours worked or level of income, there is an element of entrepreneurial risk-taking in pursuing a career in craft and designer making. With more craft and designeducation now being conducted at universities in Australia, this remains as true as ever.

General advice arising from the research—What things can people creating small businesses actively do to keep their heads above water?

• Figure out your unique factor, and be able to explain and demonstrate it.

• A day job can provide stability, structure and variety, help establish/extend networks and connections and provide insights into the industry while you’re building your creative businesss (e.g. a job in retail can help provide insight into what people are buying).

• Have good systems in place from the start.

• Further study can be a way of having access to a studio.

• Before you spend money on materials, think about business registration, insurance, tax and how to make it work for you.

• Focus on products that are commercially viable (this can be liberating because you are not so creatively invested).

• Have both online and brick-and-mortar presence.

• Have a range of price points at markets.

• Focus on turnover but don’t undersell, don’t take it personally when people think a price is too high.

• Don’t undervalue yourself, take yourself seriously. Value your work and value the worth of being creative. Don’t set prices too low.

• Capitalise on economies of scale by selling in more than one place.

• Develop the business slowly over time while maintaining other forms of income.

• Join retail collectives/creative co-working spaces and also other collectives that offer access to facilities (so you don’t have to invest your own funds).

• Make connections by going to events, volunteering (if you can), joining professional organisations and committees and attending conferences.

• Explore residencies as spaces in which to further develop practice and networks.

• Learn from, and don’t dwell on, failures.

• Before leaving the studio/office be able to know what you’re going to do the next time you walk in.

• Know your customers—what they like, who they are, where they eat, what they drink, what they read and where they go on holidays; know as much about them as possible.

• Develop a practice that fits with the logistics and decisions of your wider life (e.g. markets and weekends—does this work for you?).

• Understand costs—be diligent in recording your time, weigh materials—use a spreadsheet for detailing costs of inputs and then calculate the final price.

• Keep applying for grants and entering competitions—look for grant opportunities outside the arts sector (e.g. small business grants offered by government and by businesses, commercial development grants to attend trade shows).

• Have one account for personal spending and one where creative business money comes in and goes out from so it’s easy to do tax.

• Develop strong self-discipline to make sure that making isn’t sacrificed for other family or work commitments.