A Different Selling Experience

Having related yesterday my less than stellar gallery experience of the last year, let me give you a different experience and you can make of it what you will. Some of the story has been discussed before but here's a bit more detail.

Three years ago a new 'farmers market' started up, not far from my home - on a retired military base. It was to be a bit more upscale than the usual market. I really hadn't paid much attention but my tennis partner had been over a few times and suggested I might want to consider selling my photographs there since they did in fact have a number of crafts on exhibit already. he even went to the trouble to talk to the manager and gave me some basic information.

With some doubts I decided I should at least check it out. On my afternoon off I wandered by and talked to the manager. The first thing I found out was the market was open Friday through Sunday which was impossible for me - I'm a full time family doctor. She did say though that a few of the booths were owned by hutterite colonies and one group didn't want to either work Sunday or hire someone to sell for them on Sunday - and a booth would be available Sundays only.

She liked my work and would be glad to have me at the market. We discussed amongst other things whether I should sell framed work and the consensus of people that day was that framed would sell a lot better.

I invested several hundred dollars in frames over the next few weeks (inexpensive Ikea wood frames) and got a matte cutting device (another $300) and mattes. I had a friend shrink wrap a starter pack of prints which I displayed in wicker baskets from Ikea. There were display cases for vegetables so I bought some cheap velvet curtain material and draped it over the benches and laid my framed prints on this as well as the basket of prints.

Not surprisingly sales were slow to get started. There was a fair amount of interest and it was quite pleasant right from day one talking photography with people who said nice things about my work, and every so often someone would buy a print. I started with a couple of prints a day and slowly sales picked up. After a year I was selling about a dozen prints a day and making about $500 for the day. My costs were substantial - it seemed like every few weeks I was having to buy another case (or two) of acid free foam core at $150 per 20 sheets, and more mylar bags, at about $1 each. I was purchasing ink and printing paper about every two weeks and spending about $1000 a month on supplies in total.

I sold 8.5X11 prints in the mylar bag, with foam core backing for easy handling at $39, 13X19 at $59. I quickly found that people much preferred to purchase the bagged prints, even though it was going to cost them a lot more to get frames and in the end I had a large quantity of unsold frames. Lugging them to the market was gradually marking them and after several months I gave up on framed prints entirely.

Rent for the booth was quite cheep $50 for the day. There came a day though that I had a tough decision. I was going to lose my booth and be relegated to the dark back of the market unless I went 3 days a week. I was getting enough requests for large prints that I invested in a 24 inch 7600 printer. The 7800 was already out but as I was doing most of my work with the 4000, I felt that it didn't make sense to purchase a printer whose main claim to fame was the ability to do glossy when I was using matte paper only, and which would require an entirely different set of inks - so the 7600. That cost me about $2500 (the Candian dollar was quite low at the time).

I debated and decided I'd invested enough by this point and sales were picking up that I'd go for the three days. Now I had to hire staff and I had to build display cases since the vegetable racks weren't there in the winter. I needed extra lighting so I did a deal with the Hutterites to share the cost of installing flood lights to augment the overhead mercury vapour lights.

At one point I purchased $600 dollars of 32X40 Crane Museo paper only to find out that under the mercury lights it took on a very yellow cast not seen at home - making sales virtually impossible - I still have it - unused exc. the first few sheets, and unreturnable. I needed more wicker baskets as I dropped framed prints and went to baskets for 8.5X11, 13X19, 17X22, colour and black and white, and also vertical prints. I was now buying foam core 3 boxes at a time (which at least got me a professional discount that helped) but my expenses if you amortized the new printer were keeping up with income.

By the end of last August I was pretty tired - I'd often be printing Saturday night until 3 am Sunday to get ready for the market. I'd often have to make prints Thursday night after working at the office till 10 PM, then deliver them to the market Friday morning before going to work at the office. My wife started to complain that I was exhausted and cranky and that perhaps I should end the market. Unfortunately she was right.

In the end I sold about $40,000 worth of photographs but if you include the cost of the two printers, my expenses were almost exactly the same. had I been a bit closer to retirement - doing the market three days a week by myself could have paid quite nicely (after all I didn't have a lot of capital costs any more) but it was all a bit more hassle and hours than I really could afford to put in.

Work around the house and garden had virtually come to a stand still because of the market and time to photograph was getting harder to arrange. Pressure though to have new work for the next Sunday did keep me going though so was a bit of a mixed blessing.

Meeting people at the market during that two year period did result in one gallery show at the University when I met an old sailing buddy, and a local publisher suggested that there might be a book in my work, if only we could find a company to underwrite the publishing costs - never happened but perhaps if I'd continued.

I have no regrets that I did it and some that I gave it up, but I know I made the right decision. I put in a hell of a lot of hours doing it to break even but suspect that in the end it would have produced a decent income had I only been working in my office 3 or 4 days a week. There were even days at the market that I made more money selling photographs than I did practicing medicine - I think that in the end I could have anticipated netting $10,000-$20,000 a year, not unreasonable for 2 days work a week but hardly generous.

Would it have led to greater things - possibly, but no gallery is going to touch you when you have established your reputation for selling images for $59 to $500. It might have led to some corporate deals - there was certainly talk - supply my entire company with artwork kind of idea - but it might not. I certainly wouldn't have had time for this blog had I stayed at the market. I wouldn't have had time to write those articles for outbackphoto or luminous landscape.

Perhaps this will make you think outside the normal markets for your work. Certainly when I wrote about galleries I got lots of horror story comments, perhaps this time someone can tell us of how they made a fortune selling their work.