A lot of my friends are artists and craftsperson’s and for the most part they do not want to wholesale.

They say, "why should I cut my price when I can do an arts and crafts fair and get the full price for my work"?

If you do shows or have a retail space, you are paying out money to sell your work. In the case of shows, there are show fees, travel, lodging, food and fuel. If you have a retail space you have rent, utilities, insurance and possibly part time help.

I figure with either shows or having a retail space it costs me 30% to sell my work. So when I wholesale I price the items at 30% off my retail price.

There are several advantages to wholesaling. An example of a wholesale account I had. Their orders were usually from about $800.00 to $1000.00. That meant that I could pack it up in several cartons, ship it to them and in 30 days I would have a check.

This is better than consignment in the sense that the work is definitely sold rather than waiting around hoping it will sell. The same is true of retail, when I had a retail shop the walls were filled with pieces, work that had been made anticipating that they would sell.

The key here is to get yourself setup with a number of wholesale accounts.

The way I first started was having wholesale representatives (reps) show my work. Back in 1973 my wife started showing my work in furniture stores. There she met a sales reprehensive who said that he would carry my work, if I did the kind of pieces he suggested. At that point we were rather desperate, so I agreed. What he wanted was old buildings, like covered bridges, train stations, barns and old houses.

It's amazing what you can come up with when you're desperate. I quickly learned how to make the type of pieces he wanted. To this day I can't remember a time when I learned so much so fast. This rep was covering Ohio, Illinois and Michigan. We next found a rep who was covering Indiana and Kentucky.

We were only in business 9 months and sold that company to Cosco, the makers of house wares and baby furniture such as car seats and highchairs. They had a decorative division and wanted to add a metal sculpture line.

After selling the business, I went to work as a designer for Cosco. Three years later I left Cosco and opened a retail shop.  I still wanted to do some wholesaling. One of the advantages of having a retail shop was that I met a lot of people thus there were people who wanted to know if I wholesaled.

Generally people who are buying wholesale want 50% off the retail price. They then will double the price to sell retail. This is called "keystoning". An example of key- stoning; the wholesale price is $50.00 and they will keystone the price to $100.00. This is standard.

There is also keystoning +10 or keystoning +20 which means that they raise the retail price even further than the $100.00. For example, if a shop or gallery is in a very affluent area and can get the higher prices, these areas usually come with very high rents, so they need those extra percentage points to make a profit.

Personally, I've never concerned myself with what others sell my work for. I set the wholesale price that I feel comfortable with and they can do as they wish.

My retail prices are very reasonable and I can not take 50% less. I set my wholesale prices at 30% off my retail price. If the person wanting to buy wholesale objects, then so be it. My explanation for only taking 30% off is that if I take any more off it is not worth my time to make the pieces.  Getting the price down, is mostly a matter of better production methods. We'll talk more about that later.

I set the 30% off because as I stated earlier I figure it costs me 30% to sell my work retail, whether it is a retail shop or an arts and craft fair.

Some people wouldn't buy at 30% off. Which was okay, because I didn't want to be solely in the wholesale business.  Five or six wholesale accounts was all I needed. I didn't want to be completely retail or wholesale.

I tried to stick with 5 or 6 accounts.  What I wanted was accounts that ordered on a regular basis.  If I had an account that didn't pay on time, I would drop that account and add another.

Later in my career I could be more selective.  It was and is important that I like the people I'm selling to.  I remember one account that was very demanding.  They soon got dropped and was replaced by and account that was easy to get along with.

I do not go out of my way to create grief!

When I was doing the bicycle shows, an especially good show was the "Midwest Tandem Rally".   These were especially good shows but sometimes they were in Minnesota or Wisconsin.  Further than I wanted to travel.

At one of the rallies there was a couple who had bought about every piece of bicycle sculpture that I had ever made.  They sold tandem bicycles.  At one particular show I saw that they had some tandem gift items along with their tandem bicycles.

I went up to their booth and said, "since you've bought so many of my pieces, you obviously like them - so why don't you carry them".  From that time on they carried all my pieces that had tandem bicycle in them. 

Wholesaling to them meant that I didn't have to travel to tandem shows, along with the related expenses.  Plus, they had an excellent following among tandem riders, meaning that at a show they would sell more of my work than if I was exhibiting.

At the time I didn't know that they had a retail shop.  They also carried the tandem sculpture in their shop which even increased my sales to them.  In addition, they were great people to work with.

I learned in the bicycle trade there is far less mark up than I would have presumed.  If you are going to wholesale to a business find out what the standard mark up is. 

There are wholesale shows which are strictly for people buying wholesale. These shows are quite expensive. If you want to do wholesale, it is less expensive to do some arts and craft fairs which will probably in itself generate enough wholesale inquires.

You can also do colored catalog sheets and mail out with a price list. But with the internet there is perhaps even a better way. If I was interested in wholesale today, I would build a web site that was solely wholesale. Showing the pieces for sale, their prices and a required minimum order.

If you can build the site yourself it should cost you no more than $70.00 a year including your own domain name.  This is much cheaper than any other form of advertising that I'm aware of.