Sell Handmade Crafts at 12: Bracelets, Stickers and Small Things

What you actually do

You make one small thing, over and over, until you can make it fast and make it well. Then you sell it to people who already want it. Friendship bracelets in the school team's colours. Stickers of whatever your grade is into this month. Clay earrings, keychains, painted rocks for people's gardens.

The word that matters is "repeatable". A one-off painting is art, and art is wonderful, but it's a very hard business. Forty bracelets that each take you six minutes is a business.

What it costs to start

Enough materials for your first batch, about $25 to $50 depending on what you make.

• Embroidery thread for bracelets is cheap. About $15 buys enough for fifty.
• Sticker paper for a home printer is about $15 for a pack, but check who's paying for the printer ink, because that's the real cost.
• Polymer clay, findings and hooks for earrings run about $30 to $40 to start.

Before you buy anything, make three of your thing from whatever's already in the house. If you still like making it after the third one, buy the materials. If you're bored by the third, you've found that out cheaply.

Ask a parent before you take over the kitchen table for a week, and before you use their printer. Clay in the oven is worth asking about too, because polymer clay bakes at a low temperature and the smell hangs around.

Find your first customers this week

Your first customers are the people who've already told you they like your stuff.

1. Make ten of your one thing. Wear one or carry one.
2. Tell the three people who've said "you should sell these" that you now do, and that they're $5. See what happens.
3. Ask a teacher about selling at a lunch table, a club fundraiser or a holiday craft fair. Most schools run at least one a year and are glad of a student who wants a table.

If ten sell in a week, make forty. If two sell, make something else or change the price. Either way you found out for $25.

What to charge

Work out the cost of one item, then add your time. A bracelet with 60 cents of thread that takes six minutes is not a $1 bracelet. Ten of them is an hour of your life, and an hour of your life is worth something.

A simple rule that works for small handmade things: materials, times three. So a 60-cent bracelet sells for at least $2, and honestly $4 or $5 is normal for something with a school's colours on it. A pair of clay earrings with $2 of materials sells for $8 to $12.

Then check. Look at what a craft fair table near you charges for similar things. If everyone's at $10 and you're at $4, you're not being nice. You're telling people your work isn't as good as theirs, and some of them will believe you.

Take an adult with you the first time you price something. Not to decide for you, but because the two of you will notice different things about the table next door.

Rules and staying safe

Show this to a parent, especially the part about other people's designs.

• Don't sell anything with a character, logo or team badge that belongs to someone else. Stickers of a cartoon you didn't draw, or a hockey team's real logo, belong to whoever owns them. Your own drawings, your own patterns, your own colours are yours to sell.
• If you sell to younger kids, avoid small parts that could be swallowed, and say so on the tag.
• Take money in cash, or by e-transfer to a parent's account. If you use the Hatchable shop page to take orders, nobody enters a card there, and customers pay you in person when they collect.
• Ask a teacher what your school allows about selling on school property. The answer varies between schools, and it is usually "yes, at the fair".
• Keep a list of what you spent and what you sold. It takes two minutes a week and it's the difference between knowing you made $60 and thinking you probably did.

What Jenny would do

Jenny is 16, lives in a small town, and has been drawing since she could hold a pencil. Her thing is sticker sheets of the town: the water tower, the rink, the diner sign, the one traffic light. Nobody else is making those, and everyone who grew up there wants them.

She'd print a first run of twenty sheets and sell them at the rink during a tournament weekend. The rest would go on a shop page she shares with her aunt in the city, who knows everyone who ever moved away. She'd keep the earrings and the bracelets for later. One product, done well, first.

When it stops being fun

The forty-first bracelet. A batch of stickers that printed with the colours wrong. A craft fair where you sit for four hours and sell six things while the table next to you sells sixty.

That last one is the useful day. Walk over, look at what's selling, and ask them how they priced it. Most people at a craft table love talking about it. Then decide whether to change your product or change your price, and go again.

The kids who keep going are usually the ones who kept a list. Forty bracelets at $4 each adds up to $160, and it only starts to feel like a business when you can see that number written down somewhere.