HOW TO: Price Your Toys and Products (Retail = 4x Manufacturing)

This HOW TO is very simple. We get a lot of solicitations from companies who want to sell us their merch (toys and otherwise). So, here's a really simple pricing guide for producers:

Retail price should be 4x manufacturing cost.

That's it. Here's why:

When you produce your own products, you want to be able to turn a profit whether you sell your items at wholesale to a shop, or at retail direct to a collector.

So, take the total landed cost of your product, multiply by 2. That's your wholesale price. Multiply wholesale price by 2 to get your retail price.

We've been hit up recently by manufacturers who want to sell us products at "wholesale" where the price they are offering us is 80% of retail. Our margin would then be 20% minus all of our costs, which are numerous: domestic shipping, marketing, warehouse receiving, picking and packing, shipping boxes, postage. A 20% margin, for us, is really a 0% profit margin.

NOTE: This is just a rule of thumb, your own profit margin on manufactured products may be more or less. 

NOTE 2: This doesn't really apply to handmade products, only to items produced in factories (IMHO). Some resin casters may be able to go by this rule, many won't. Customers definitely won't, since your costs to create an item are usually close to what you sell it for.

NOTE 3: If you can get more than 4x, good for you, cowboy.  Minimum should be 4x.

Thoughts?

The Toy Chronicle Presents: Pricing! The Experts Viewpoint

Great article by TTC taps a few experts (including Benny) to weigh in on how to price your custom toy work. What's fascinating is how different all of our responses are, based on our differing roles in the custom toy game! Excerpt below:

...we often hear the biggest question on artist’s lips: “How do I price my work?!” We hear it more in the run-up to conventions – whether that’s ToyConUK, DCon, Five Points, as a lot of newer artists who are working out of their bedrooms are starting to venture into the big, wider world of Designer Toys for the first time and are looking for guidance. Some artists get it right, some horribly wrong. The question still remains.

Read more on the TTC site here!

Benny's Crowdfunding Tips

Thinking about running a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaign? Read my personal tips that I've developed over several years of running campaigns:

Before

Be Honest With Yourself:

Is this a viable product? Ask 20 people you know who ARE NOT FRIENDS AND FAMILY. F&F will support any stupid thing you do, but that only gets you so far. You need a widespread thumbs up from strangers. Try to get this info in advance. If no one likes the idea, move on to something else, or refine it according to the feedback you get.

Be Honest With Yourself 2: Time

A crowdfunding campaign is approx 30 days long. During those 30 days, it is a FULL TIME JOB. This is not an exaggeration, I’ve run several. Trust me. It’s 10 hours a day, 7 days a week for 30 days. The month before and the month after the campaign, it’s a part time job (figure 20 hours a week). From the time you start the project until delivery of your product to backers, it can be a year or more. You will work on it between 5-20 hours a week for that ENTIRE YEAR. Sometimes more (shipping to backers) sometimes less (let’s say, the month the project is being sea-shipped to you). At NO TIME is it OK for you to not keep updating your backers weekly and checking into the back end of your campaign daily. That only ends several weeks after you've shipped your last reward to your last backer.

Be Honest With Yourself 3: Is This for You?

I have heard from several people in my industry that crowdfunding is pandering, and that if you really believe in your project, you'd self-fund it. While not all of us are rich and successful like those detractors, they have a point: Crowdfunding isn't for everyone. It's ton of work, it opens you up to extreme public scrutiny and pressure, and basically, your reputation is on the line every time you run a new project. The campaign could fail. Can you deal with that? Do you have ANY other options for this project that don't involve such a time-consuming method of acquiring funds?

Good categories - here are a few categories of projects that tend to do well on Kickstarter:
- games (card, tabletop and online)
- electronic devices
- high-tech apparel
- small non-electronic gadgets

Start Early: 

Buy an easy to remember domain to support the project. Build a simple website or even just a landing page that shows the item you’re making. Backstory, design details, illustrations, general info about item/project help people understand more about what you’re doing. If you don’t know how, get someone to create the site for you. This is not optional. You don’t have to fully reveal the item, but definitely get some info up on the web about you, the name of the project, the type of project, background info, preliminary sketches. Literally, if you have a sketch of some sh*t in a notebook, snap a picture of it with coffee stains on it and your jacked-up pencil in the shot and post that. People love that sh*t.

Social: 

Also start social media accounts. Build community early, before launch. Twitter is good for contacting journalists and writers. IG good for sharing pics. Gotta have a FB page too. Building community early is the best way to generate buzz before launch.

Not kidding, Start early. Start now. Build website and social media accounts NOW, today. The bigger your network is by launch date, the more successful you’ll be. Read up on how to get more Twitter and IG Followers. It’s not hard, it just requires smart posting (always incl images and hashtags) and non-posting actions like Liking and commenting on influencers’ posts, reposting/retweeting, and generally being active and engaging on social. If you don’t have time, get someone to do this for you.

Email List: 

Make one. Don’t care how. Use MailChimp, MadMimi, ConstantContact. Any way that you can collect emails is a good way, even if it’s a manual list on a spreadsheet (that can get time consuming though, better to install a signup form on your website). To encourage signups, include this link in press release and share on social. Possibly come up with a cheap reward for email signups: free digital download, access to insider info, or mail a 3” sticker. If you mail something, don’t forget you need the person’s mailing address. Many signup forms allow you to add that info as optional. 3” die cut sticker is maybe $0.25, and a stamp is $0.49 so you’re looking at cost of approx $0.75 to acquire that contact. Can be worth it if they pledge $50 to $100 in your campaign.

Get Your Sh*t Together: 

Make sure the financial details of your project, and your vendors, are all in line and ready. Solicit quotes from factories or vendors, get it in writing. Often this means an intial expense out of your own pocket to create a prototype / 3D print / working model / MVP. If your “vendor” is an individual (a resin caster for example), make sure you have 2 other resin casters lined up to take up the slack if your individual vendor flakes. If you have a factory making your product, re-confirm your quote after a month or so. The timing of your project can lead to cost overruns- if you ask factory for quote and then you actually go into production a year later (this is not uncommon) you don’t want to be surprised at a new, higher quote from your factory! Often producing in higher quantities is cheaper per unit. Plan for future sales. See #3.

Get Your Sh*t Together 2: Plan for disasters. 

Have a game plan for each facet of your project if something fails. Know the costs associated with your backup plans. Know the costs for EVERYTHING. What will you do if you’re a little short of the goal a week before the end of campaign? What will you do if you’re way short of the goal a week before end of campaign? There’s no right answer, what matter is that you have a game plan. Simply running a campaign is a big PR push so you can harness that interest and push the customers to preorders on your commerce website if the campaign fails. KS does NOT give you an email list of your backers if your campaign is not successful, so make sure you set about acquiring those email addresses somehow before the end of campaign

Get Your Sh*t Together 3: Plan for post-campaign. 

What will you do with all the extra items you have? In a campaign you might sell 400 items… but you may have to manufacture 1000 or 3000 as a minimum order. That’s awesome, what are you going to do with those products, where will they be stored, will they be sold in your ecommerce shop (do you have one?) or will they be sold wholesale to other shops? Can you move 90% of the overstock to a distributor and have them deal with it?

Get Your Sh*t Together 4: Understand What You’ve Signed Up For. 

Read the details and nuances of how your platform works. Participate in multiple projects (as a backer) on both IGG and KS. This will give you good info. It’s best if you are a backer of a wildly successful, huge project, plus a successful small project, AND an unsuccessful project. You will learn different things from all of those. 

As important: read all the documentation on the platform you’ve chosen. There are ways each company communicates w you, schedules to sending you money, ways they deal with issues, fee structures, etc. This type of project can move around $5K to $100K or more. Do you REALLY want to be responsible for $100K of other people’s money, and NOT understand how, when and why that money is transferred to you, and what happens after that? There’s taxes. Understand tax ramifications of moving that money around. It’s usually a f*ckload of money. If you’re not fiscally responsible, don’t run a campaign. End of story.

Get Your Sh*t Together 5: Images, Video, Copy

Great images, with branding, in a square shape, are best. Use them in your campaign. 

A video need not be long or complicated. Most people stop watching after 30 seconds. I’ve examined the stats on mine and heard the feedback too, this is standard. Make your video short (30 seconds) and you don’t need to be on camera the whole time. It’s nice to see your pretty face for a few seconds, but then you can just switch to a voice-over and video of the actual product. Everyone hates the sound of their own voice on camera. Forget about that. What’s important is: do YOU sound excited when you talk about the product??? If you don’t, re-record the audio until you’re f*cking Billy Mays. If you’re not excited about the product, no one else will be either. Do not drone on in a monotonous voice. Everyone hates that. Wrap it up, get to the point, ask for support. End of video. 

Copy MUST fully describe the project. DO NOT USE FIRST PERSON in the copy. Your first chance of copy in the campaign is the one bloggers will copy and paste. They can’t write in first person. Write about the product. Look at successful campaigns that generated millions, and replicate the format of their description. You can talk from your own point of view, but like in a press release, you should quote yourself as the founder/creator and use quotation marks. It feels weird the first time you do it but ignore that feeling and speak about yourself as if you are the most interesting person in the world and you deserve to be quoted.

“Writing this blog post at 9AM on a Saturday morning seems a strange way to spend your first waking hours of the weekend,” Tenacious Toys CEO Benny Kline reveals. “But it’s like an itch I had to scratch - I couldn’t help myself. The rest of the day will not involve computers at all.”

Get Your Sh*t Together 6: Money

How much money do you have saved up? How much can you put on a CC or borrow? Factor that into your goal amount. Your goal should be as low as possible. The lower it is, the better chance you’ll have to hit it. Look at other successful campaign in your space. Make a list, write down how much they took in. Be super honest with yourself about whether you have a bigger or smaller network than those creators. If yours is smaller, you may take in less money. Make sure that your goal number is so low that you are super confident that you’ll hit that mark VERY quickly. It’s better to hit your mark and still not quite take in enough money for the production, than to entirely miss your mark and fail. You can always put an extra $2K on a credit card to get your vendors paid. You cannot go back in time and re-run the campaign with a lower goal number.

Get Your Sh*t Together 7: NO. 

If you plan on screwing up and not delivering for any reason, and not returning that money you took in, please do not run a campaign. Your choices on that front can actually f*ck up other peoples’ chances at success, like mine. Don’t be a d*ck.

Timing:

Don’t launch during any events that will distract your audience. Holidays, sporting events, elections and other time, money and energy consuming events will prevent you from reaching people. DO NOT LAUNCH OR RUN A CAMPAIGN BETWEEN THANKSGIVING AND CHRISTMAS. That whole stretch is off limits. No one is spending money on your stuff during the holidays if it won’t arrive for 8 months.

Reach Out: 

Make list of people/blogs/writers who have covered similar crowdfunding projects in the past. Email them a press release to get on their radar. Look up PR format and tips on how to write a good, concise press release. Don’t forget to include a SUPER engaging pic and all the details, incl launch date. Give them the link to your new website (cuz you don’t have one to the actual campaign yet). 

Plan Your PR:

I’ve heard from a successful KS creator that he did send press releases to a targeted group of journalists beforehand, but asked that the info be embargoed until his launch date. He communicated with them a lot and set it all up so everyone knew what to do. All 10 journalists posted article simultaneously on his launch date and ensure a HUGE kick-off to his campaign. All you need is EVERYONE in your space talking about you for one day- be unavoidable. Be everywhere for that one day. Everything snowballs after that. You can’t stop working, but it’s good to get a healthy start.

Embargoes on the launch info are NOT entirely necessary. They may or may not help. The other strategy is to just get the most # of people posting about the campaign as possible in the weeks leading up to the launch. Don’t forget, consumer attention span is very short. They need to be able to see the article, click the link and enter their CC info right away. Often, getting press on the web 2 weeks before a launch is useless. You might get some signups, or new followers, but what you REALLY want is backers instead. It’s easier to acquire a backer in the moment, right after launch, than it is to convert an early follower to a backer.

Launch Day

1. Post link to the Kickstarter on homepage of your website, in Twitter and IG profile, in button on your FB page. Send second PR to your list of writers with that link and the fact that the KS is LIVE now. Also email your general email list with the link. 

2. Be available. Respond to inquiries, be flexible. Add to your campaign’s FAQ or update the copy as necessary as questions arise. Add images if yours are not sufficient. Alter reward descriptions if people are confused. Add more rewards if people ask for them.

3. This is a full day of work. Plan for it. The whole day is spent on email, web and phone, communicating with influencers who could get the word out to a lot of people. 

4. The campaign is live, so make sure your website and social media accounts are updated to include ALL info about the project, the full reveal, plus links to the campaign. You can stop hiding all info now as it's publicly available anyway.

During

You need to monitor messages in the campaign and on social media and email daily, and respond daily. If people want to give you money but have a question first, best answer it fast and get that pledge. 

Like I said above, expect to put in a full workday on your campaign every day during the course of the campaign. Your PR work is not done until the campaign closes. Continue reaching out to industry contacts all through the campaign, tell them what you're doing. Get coverage. Web, TV, radio, outdoor signage, Google / FB ads, sponsored posts, etc etc. You better do as many of those things as possible, and start early. Once you are 50% of the way thru the campaign, is NOT THE TIME to begin panicking and setting up ads and outreach. The first week is the one you need to put some muscle and thought into outreach. 

Rule of thumb: No one cares about you and your project until you actually reach them. Do not expect people to just randomly stumble upon the campaign. Make sure you actively reach out and contact people every day during the course of your campaign. Make it your goal to contact 10 new people (influencers, or backers, or both) about the campaign every day.

Be Aware, Stranger Danger

Be aware that once your project is live, you will instantly get contacted by all sorts of snake oil salesmen via email, the campaign messaging system, and Instagram. There will be a lot of them. Do not pay them to "help" your campaign. Instead, act interested, reply to all of them, and ask them what exactly they'd do on IG / Twitter / web to generate sales and backers. At some point in the conversation, say, "Hey listen before I pay you to do stuff, I just want to know exactly what your plan is so I know how my money is being spent." Take the info they give you, and figure out how to do it yourself! Many of these people operate on IG, and they just go thru and like and comment on posts that include relevant hashtags (using your IG account of course). Well, you don't need them to do that, you can do it yourself. Spend an hour a day or 30 minutes a day on this yourself after you figure out what their tactics are! Haha, derpy lame asses!

After 

You STILL have to work! You need to communicate with backers daily for one to two weeks, then weekly after that as your project moves through production. You will also have to monitor communications / messages from your backers.

There should be a new tidbit of info or a new image to share with backers every week, even if production takes 6 months. Ask your factory / vendor for weekly updates. Come up with fun ways to engage your audience. Show them what you're working on, if it's related to the campaign. Anything. Just be there and communicate.

WORST CASE SCENARIOS:

You might encounter one, or several!

- vendor makes crappy product
- product delivered to you late
- product delivered to you broken / not working / imperfect
- project is more expensive than you anticipated
- you have to change what you're planning on making in some way
- product / project turns out to be impossible

In all cases, communication with your backers is absolutely key to survival. When something goes wrong, you WILL hear very vocal complaints in your campaign comments, in messages and online on other peoples' blogs! You need to work on accepting those negative feedbacks and use them to make a better product. Often your biggest complainers are actually your biggest fans. All feedback is valuable. If one very very vocal person is demanding some change, don't automatically make that change. Survey your other backers to get their feedback on the proposed change.

Depending on the issues you encounter, you may have to refund part or all of the money that some/all backers gave you. Hopefully not, but be aware that if you fail to deliver on some part of your project, your reputation is on the line. You need to do what's right and send money back to people if they are unhappy or if you fail to deliver.

The thing to remember about crowdfunding is that when you launch a project like this, and source your funds from the public, this becomes the public's project. The crowd owns it, you're just running it/managing it.

That's either a major downside, or a major upside, to crowdfunding. If you deal with the feedback in a reasonable manner, listen to opinions, and try to keep everyone happy as best you can, you'll do OK. If you make posts and updates that are dismissive of your backers and their concerns, people are going to get angry. Just remember....

Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Feedback welcome! Please comment!

SHARE THIS POST! 

I didn't write if for my own edification. I wrote it for you and your followers, so give me a share please! Danke.

- Benny Kline

PROTIP: Email Solicitations - A Guide to Effective Wholesale Via Email

I have to blog about this, I can't let it slide anymore.

Dear manufacturers:

I love getting your emails with new products being offered to me wholesale for my shop! It's great. I want to be on every manufacturer's email list.

When you send those emails, they need to have certain pieces of info in them in order for a shop owner like myself to make a purchasing decision.
I'm not going to drop $1000 or more if I have no idea what you're selling.

I can let these things slide when indy toy producers start selling wholesale for the first time. New and emerging artists have never done this type of solicitation before, so it's understandable if they miss some of this info.

HOWEVER, I would expect that a company with multiple product lines in shops, and a steady manufacturing process with several releases per year, and quantities in the thousands, would have this process down already. No excuse if you're a "real" manufacturer and you fail at the most important part of your sales process.

Things I must see in your email:

#1: Attach several good, clean JPG images of your product. Full product image, item in packaging, and some alternative side and back views. That's maybe 4 JPGs. Attach them to the email. Don't use a file sharing service, I'm not going to download a plugin just to view your product pics. If you do not want to attach JPGs to your emails, just provide me with a link to a page on your website which displays all of the images of the product(s).

#2: Minimum order quantity. 1 piece? 1 carton? Essential info.

#3: Wholesale price per piece/carton

#4: Tell me where the items ship from. US? Overseas? If it's overseas, how much is shipping to my location? Estimate shipping to East coast and West coast of USA per carton and friggin tell me in the email so we don't have to have the same stupid email conversation every time I get solicited.

#5: TEXT product description. Something I can copy and paste. STAAAAHP typing product descriptions/ backstories in Photoshop onto your product flyers and flattening them. I CANNOT USE TEXT THAT IS INSIDE AN IMAGE. I have to retype to whole fucking thing when I start hyping your product online. You're wasting my time, I'm not your secretary. In short, images should have ONLY products and logos in them. All info about the product should be IN TEXT in the body of the email. Don't attach a Word doc, that's just dumb. Everything you can stick in a Word doc can be typed in an email.

#6: When will the item ARRIVE if I order now? I don't care when you release, when you debut or when you start selling direct to your customers. The only date that matters to a retailer is the date the product arrives at their door.

Thanks. This has been a ProTip from Benny Kline.

HOW-TO: Photograph Custom Toys at Home, On a Budget (Part 1 - Setup)

Intro:

So I have this thing I'm doing called Rollin Gobis. It's a rolling online custom show featuring the Muttpop Gobi platform - a 3.5" vinyl humanoid (luchador) figure which is basically part of the lime of toys that the popular Tequila came from.

As I gather up my images for this release, I had one custom Gobi by Cash Cannon left to shoot, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to show all of you how to photograph a custom toy for the web. Initially I thought this might be a short tutorial but I realized that not all of you have access to the same DSLR camera and Photoshop like I do. So... those tools are great for me but maybe not a useful tutorial for many of you.

The reason I am doing this is the same reason I've been bitching and whining about your images for years: when you sell stuff on the web, the images are all you have to make an impression. They have to look pretty good and professional, even if you do them yourself.

Many of you seem to fall back on the good old "shot in dim lighting on my kitchen table with busy background" shot. Please stop doing that. I know many of you are working a day job and sculpting at night, and you're exhausted by the time you finish, but also super excited... so you snap the first picture you can of that piece, at night, on your table, in front of your bored cat and overflowing garbage can. And then you post it to IG because you're all proud, and some bloggers pick it up and run with it, and BAM - that's your actual official picture that gets circulated of that piece.

So your pictures look like you don't give a shit. And that's bad. Whether you want to believe it or not, there is psychology involved in selling your art to people, and you have to appeal to their inner sense of "must have this thing right now." Not giving a shit, in sales, leads to not selling shit.

So, to recap: your images of your custom toys should be brightly lit, against a white (preferably completely blank) background. 

MANY of you don't seem to think you able to produce images like this without hiring a photographer, but you can. In this How-To series, which I think will be 4 posts long, I will show you how to: set up your photoshoot, edit the images on your iPhone, OR edit the images in Preview if you have a Mac, OR edit the images in Photoshop if you have it. All with the intention of creating nice clean images that help sell your artwork. So, 3 different image editing options according to what equipment/tools you have available. I chose this particular figure to demonstrate because black objects (and sometimes white objects) are the most difficult to photograph. This piece by Cash happens to be both black AND glossy, so it's actually pretty difficult- all those reflections plus a high contract between object and background.

Part 1 - Setup of your Photoshoot

So here we have the awesome Vader Gobi

A "seamless" is a piece of equipment for a photo studio into which you place the object to be photographed. The intention is to give you proper light and a nice clean white background behind the object.

You can buy a seamless pretty much anywhere. Google that shit. They're not expensive.

I don't own a seamless, despite having considered myself a photographer for a while.

I make one every time I have to shoot a toy in my home.

How do I magically make a seamless? you may ask... well, I'll tell you, slappy: it's a piece of damn paper.

Yeah that's right, regular old printer paper works just fine.

So basically, I did this shoot at about 10AM today when the light was shining right into my kitchen through the window. I chose this time and location because ambient light (the amount of random-ass light in the room) is strong here.

On the floor I placed a heavy, clean, white envelope that is supposed to be used for shipping prints. It's big on purpose, just to give me more white space to work with. Taped to the side of the cabinet is a regular piece of white paper, low enough that almost half of it hits the ground and curves. That's a seamless right there. It prevents the viewer (the camera) from seeing a line between a floor and a back wall inside the frame of the image.

So you can see right at the bottom of the shot above that the patch of sunlight gets really close to my little shitty seamless.That's awesome and intentional. Sunlight (natural light) is great but being in DIRECT sunlight makes for really difficult photography. What you want is AMBIENT light bouncing all around the room, lighting up your subject from all angles (instead of hitting it directly on the top and making really dark shadows right next to really bright spots). The sunlight will get close to Cash's Vader but will not hit it directly.

If you or I owned a professional seamless, there would be one or 2 lights affixed to it that would achieve this ambient lighting effect. And it'd be better... but we don't have a seamless and this makeshift shit will work just fine for us to sell items on the internet.

From the side, the seamless looks something like this. You can slide the curve in or out as needed.

So I place the feet of Vader right at the edge of the paper to hold it down flat.

Above you see the subject right up at the edge of the seamless, approx 4 inches from the back wall. Feet of the toy hold down the edge of the paper. You can also do this with tape if needed. Keeping that edge down flush is key because we are doing a bit of half-assed editing after the shoot, and I want to keep the work as basic as possible so you can execute without having to use a clone stamp or some weird tool in Photoshop to remove the shadow that would be created if that edge wasn't flush.

This image shows a tiny shadow under the piece of paper near Vader's feet. I can edit this out in Photoshop but just try to do a better job than I did in eliminating that shadow and you won't have to edit it.

Above are the unedited shots from this photoshoot. They have not been cropped or adjusted. These were taken on an iPhone 6 Plus with the HDR setting turned on. All iPhones have decent enough cameras for this, and many of the Samsungs and other smartphones do too.

All that weird stuff like the edge of the paper, the shadow cast by the figure, the different colors of the envelope on the floor vs the paper, and the crap on the floor in the background will all be edited or cropped out.

That's it. In the next post in this series, I'll show you how to edit these images on your iPhone.
Good game.

Planning for the New Year: A Basic Guide for Self-Employed Toy Artists & Customizers

Ian Ziobrowksi painting a custom Dunny for the Dopevinyl 
Kickstarter intro video - image credit: Jordan Ahern

Happy New Year everyone! As we all look ahead to this new year, we are filled with hope and excited to build upon the successes of last year.

But what does that mean, particularly for self-employed toy artists?

This post is intended to set a direction for toy artists and customizers and give some guidelines about decision-making in 2015. Some of the points I'm going to make will also be useful for artists of all kinds, and other small business owners in general.

Here's what I think you should do:

1. SELF-ASSESSMENT - Assess your sales from this past year. Do you have a list of the pieces you worked on, with the amount of money you sold them for, and what you profited out of each one? If not, work back through your paypal and try to figure it out. Make a list of pieces you made, both sold and unsold. Create a spreadsheet, do it on a piece of paper. I don't care. Anything to better assess what you did in the last 365 days.

2. WATCHING THE BOTTOM LINE - Which pieces made you the most money? Did you make a series of pieces that were particularly successful? Why were they successful? Did you sell a piece for a higher amount of money? And if so, did you profit MORE off of that piece? What I am trying to have you do is figure out what made you the most money (profit, not just gross sales) with the least amount of time/effort spent. This is the type of project you should focus on in the new year. Not 100% of the time, but you should be aware of the types of projects that are best for your bottom line, and do more of them.

I frequently urge my friends to stop creating giant $1500 OOAK sculptural pieces and to start producing runs of 3" resin figures, for example. Why? Because normal people don't have $1500 to drop on a 3 foot tall sculpture. But 90% of collectors DO have $40 or $50 they can drop on a small pieces that have been hand-detailed by you. It's infinitely easier to create, promote, sell and ship 3" pieces, especially when you have 10 or 20 or 50 to sell. This is my businessman side battling with your artistic urges. I know you all WANT to make those epic pieces... but unless you have a buyer lined up, I'd try to keep the epic pieces to a minimum each year. 2 to 6 maybe, if you can sell them. The rest of the year, make sure you have items in the $20 - $100 range to sell. Remember, the buyer that has a great experience with you buying a $10 sticker pack might be the one that comes back and commissions a $1000 piece later.

3. PROMOTION - Which partners helped you the most? Did you collab with someone with a bigger network? Did you sell via a shop or gallery? Was it easy, or profitable? Did they promote you? Who got your name out there the most this year? If you don't know who provided backlinks to your site, try this: Go to Google, type linkto:http://www.yourwebsitename.com in the search box. Then, click on the Search Tools button, and choose "Past Year."

Poke through them, all of them. You'll see who's talking about you. This works for checking backlinks to your website, shop or blog. Any web address.

Backlinks also help you in terms of Google- Google likes sites with more backlinks. So try to get links back to your site / blog / shop on as many OTHER sites as possible. Do this simply by being nice and asking the owner of the site. Nothing underhanded here. Just ask. Any toy blog works, so don't be shy about emailing Andy, Jack, Spanky & Nick, myself, Gary, Chris, Ben & Travis and all the other people who write about toys. If you don't know who all of those people are, and you create custom toys... stop now. Go back to Google. Search for "toy blog" or "art toy blog" and make a list of which ones pop up. There's a limited number. Find an email for each of those blogs. Put the emails on the list. Create a "group" in your email system, or a mailing list, containing the emails of the toy blogs you wish to connect with. EVERY TIME you have pictures of a new piece to show, email the blogger group email list you just made. Give them: clean pics of your piece, description of piece, size, material, backstory, quantity, price and MOST IMPORTANTLY A LINK TO WHERE READERS CAN BUY THAT ITEM.

I can't believe how many of you don't do this regularly and it drives me batshit crazy. If you want to sell stuff online, you have to tell everyone that you have stuff for sale online. And the best people to tell are the people who post shit online all the time and have a big following. Read: the 10 most active art toy blogs. Email them.

Just so you understand the concept of networks, think about it this way: if you are selling your car, would you reach more people by handing out leaflets at the local CVS, or by placing an ad in a national newspaper? Take advantage of the bloggers' larger networks to help promote your work.

I've heard that some of you don't like self-promotion. REALLY? Do you like selling your art? Which one do you like more, cuz unless you have full-time management, or you're represented by a gallery, your ass better start enjoying, or at least practicing, self-promotion. No one is going to hand you success on a silver platter. You have to fight and claw your way into widespread recognition by yourself. Step one of that process is reaching out.

4. SOCIAL TIME - Do you have a personal Facebook page? Great, so do I. Do you have a business page for your art, or a fan page or whatever? You should.
What's the difference, you ask?
Well, say I'm an art collector. I find out about your art, but the only FB link I can find is to your personal page. You post pics of your artwork, sure, but also pics of you and your friends drinking, some fried chicken, how angry you are at your ex, how no one buys your art, and a picture of the street because it's raining.

WHO. THE. FUCK. CARES.

If I'm a prospective art buyer, I literally give zero fucks about your chicken and rainy days.

Show me the damn art. Gimme a link where I can buy it.

Start a FB business page, keep a FIRM divide between the types of stuff you post on your personal page (all kittens and chicken) and the art you post on your business page. Business page is ALL BUSINESS: new items, promotions, WIP shots, cons you attended (no fried chicken pics please, we all go out to eat after cons, no one cares), etc etc.

Many artists create a reality - an alternate personality or a whole alternate universe - online to support their art. I'm thinking: FriendsWithYou, tokidoki, Vamplets, shawnimals, Suckadelic... there are thousands of others. They do not post about their art products as regular people who eat fried chicken, they post IN CHARACTER as an entity that exists in a world they have created. I'm not saying all of you need to go this far, but I am saying that there can and should be a divide between your own personal life, and the worlds you are creating in your artwork. Unless your artwork is inherently tied to your physical person and your real personality in some way, there' no reason why your art clients need to know about how cute your kitty is and your thoughts on Obama.

On that note, here's one I need to practice as well: seriously stop dicking around on Facebook. Add up all that time, over a year, posting stupid crap to your personal page and surfing your news feed, and you've just clocked in your LEAST productive year ever.

Get on FB for 15 minutes a day: spend 10 uploading pics of your artwork to your business page and captioning/tagging them properly with LOTS of info and links, spend 5 minutes responding to FB messages, then log off. Any more and you are seriously wasting your life away.

See what I'm doing right now? I'm making a valuable blog post. I AM spending my time on this. Guess what? As soon as I hit Publish, it's sent to my FB business page! Automatic update. So easy. It's also sent to my business Twitter, my Tumblr and Google+, and packaged into an email that's sent to my blog email list subscribers. If you don't understand how to have that done automatically, let me know in the comments and maybe I'll make another blog post about just that type of system.

The benefit of making this post on a blog as opposed to on FB is that Google searches my blog for content and does not search Facebook for content (April 2015 edit: Facebook business page info is now searchable on Google). Blogs are inherently more useful than Facebook for that reason. The Facebook search feature (for content associated with keywords) sucks. So no one ever uses it. Everyone searches Google.

TL;DR - 

1. Analyze your sales.
2. Figure out what made the most money with the least effort and do more of that.
3. Figure out who promoted you and court them.
4. Get serious about harnessing social media and web content to steer your business.

I hope that helps you focus a bit in the new year. Sorry I got all ranty. (edit: I am no longer sorry) Please leave a comment and let me know if this was helpful, and if I missed anything you wanted to hear about.

Monster Kolor hosts Pinstriping 101 class on May 18th in MA

Class will be from noon to 4pm on May 18th at the following address:

Monster Kolor

54 Center Street

Middleboro, MA

Purchase tickets online here.

How-To: The Making of the B5100 by Tesselate

The B5100 is a sweet original figure (it's almost more of a playset) by Tesselate. Ever wonder how he makes his amazing and brightly-colored figures? Here's a guide he just published! It takes you from concept, to 3D renderings, to finishing, to silicone mould-making, to pouring resin. The whole shebang, from start to finish. Fascinating!

http://madebytesselate.com/guide-a-one-part-mould/

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How-To: Image Management for Artists Selling Online

TENACIOUS TUTORIAL

One issue in my line of work that pops up more often than most is image management. I deal with a lot of images of artwork (in my case, toys) coming from artists. And so I spend a lot of time fixing those images up for use on the web. One image is easy. But editing 100 images becomes an all-day affair.

I want to remind artists that if your intention is to sell your artwork on the internet, your work is only half done when you have completed your piece. The next half of the process is taking proper images and sending them to the proper people in the proper manner such that they might be efficiently posted to the internet to sell the item.

Many times I will get an email, and just opening that email up in my mail program will take forever.

Why?

Well, for one thing, my computer is a little outdated. And until our new one arrives in a few days, I'll dealing with a machine without a lot of RAM or disk space. But the real reason this type of email opens slowly is that it might contain 10 images which are are 10MB each, so my poor old machine is trying to open up 100MB of images just to show me the email.
Not an issue for many people working on brand new machines, but certainly an issue that many people deal with. This week, it's me. (edit: working on my new computer now, but principle still applies)

The second downside to these giant emails comes when I start working. By working, I mean I need to take those images the artists send to me, and I need to change them in several ways to make them web-ready.

Common Issue #1: The images are huge.
I cannot upload images bigger than 2MB to my Blogger blog, or pics above 1MB to my website. Each of those sites has a limit to the size of the images it'll allow me to upload. If you send me an image that's 180dpi (dots per inch) and it's 25 inches tall, guess what? You just sent me a 45MB image. Too big. My next step, therefore, is downloading all those images to my hard drive and opening up Photoshop, and opening ALL those images in Photoshop. I then have to individually change the image sizes for all the images. I could do this en mass in iPhoto, saving time, but when I'm in Photoshop, I need to do a few more things, so Photoshop is my tool.

Common Issue #2: The images do not have titles.
This is the problem for me: the images are all of different pieces, and each piece has a title, yet all the images have filenames that have been unaltered from the time they left the camera. Images titled "IMG_0934.jpg" tell me nothing. And if I am putting many items up for sale at once, I'd have to retitle the images so I can figure out what is what. I have tens of thousands of images on my hard drive. Their titles must be descriptive.

Common Issue #3: Crappy photography.
The images are dark, blurry, too close-up, or have multicolored backgrounds. Please use sufficient lighting, step a bit away from the piece so your camera can focus, and use a seamless, even if it's a makeshift seamless made out of a piece of white paper. That works fine, and it's what I use. I don't own a "real" seamless. It's very hard for me to fix blurry images. For distracting backgrounds, I can sometimes remove them but that takes me 5-10 minutes per image if no seamless is used. Do not take pictures on your lawn, outside with complicated backgrounds, or standing on something dark colored when the wall behind is white. Help me sell your art and give me clean backgrounds.

I can lighten and adjust color balance and contrast and a number of other factors, but all of those steps take time. Repeat them 40 times a day and a significant chunk of my time is used up. If part of the cost of running a toy shop is calculated based on the value of my time, then my margins are SIGNIFICANTLY diminished or eliminated if I spend an hour editing images of an artist's work.

There's lots more to discuss but for now, that will help all of us sell more art online.

SUMMARY:
To sum up, for those of you who are taking pictures of art with the intention of selling it online:

1. All images MUST be 1MB or smaller if they are being used online. In general I find that 72dpi images measuring 6 x 8 inches work fine. That results in a 700MB image. Just big enough for web users to see the piece, small enough that it'll upload and download fine.

2. Title your images on your own computer before attaching them to emails. This will help you organize, and it will help the recipient of those emails organize. Give them a title like ARTISTNAME.titleofpiece.jpg or something to that effect.

3. Take good pictures. Mini tripods can be as cheap as $10. Buy one. No more blurry images. Use proper lighting, preferably from 2 angles. Use a seamless to remove the background and make it uniform.


We're trying to SELL your art here, and the image is all the customer has to go on. Let's make the images GREAT!

I understand that many artists cannot afford to buy Photoshop. But your computer probably came with some sort of basic image editing software (Macs come with iPhoto) so please explore that and learn how to use it. If you have no clue what to do with a digital image once it leaves your camera and gets to your computer, please ask one of your friends for a lesson.