What to build to sell????

Urns can be lucrative, but marketing is tough

Dick Coers

I know I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and making urns always stir me up. Even for strangers, I am flooded with thoughts during the whole process. Nothing else I've made does that. People that are shopping for a custom urn, likely expect to pay quite a price based on stories of burial costs. But for those grieving, shopping around usually doesn't happen. Watched the Big Lebowski? "Is there a Ralph's around here?" Maybe that will change based on this current pandemic if people plan ahead a little more. But once again, won't use up much timber.

Re: question

Yonak

Dick, what kind of "supervisor" (double-faced) tape is strong enough to hold that piece, especially when attaching the already-rounded side, when cutting it on a lathe ? Is it hard to get it off when you're finished ?

Re: question

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

never would have guessed that means to that end. They are pretty.

Re: Urns can be lucrative, but marketing is tough

Barry Irby

As an aside....

A friend's Dad walked down to the Appomattox River almost every day and fished for a while, for many years. He died and was cremated. His last request was to have his ashes scattered in the river at his favorite fishing hole. The son tried to get a permit and they said NO. I said, that would not have even slowed me down. First it would not have occurred to me to ask for a permit. If My Dad wanted his ashes spread in the river, they would be in the river. My friends Dad fishes every day. You just can't see him, but someday, after you pass, maybe you can join him.

Re: Something beginning woodworkers would buy

Ray Newman

Based on some comments that I heard, I wonder if "beginning" woodworkers are buying to copy the design and reverse engineering it then selling it themselves??

Re: Not hopeful

Ray Newman

CJ is on to it. And as my wife who had a successful business making porcelain dolls and doll clothes found out that the cheap Asian imports can and will kill a business....

Re: question

Dick Coers

The back side of the pendant is flat, up against a flat angled wood "faceplate". The tape is Polyken 105C, double sided cloth tape made in Franklin, KY. I buy it at Graingers under their part #15R504. $21.50 for a 1.9"x 36yd roll. It's so good that I get two clampings out of it. The first to round the blank and radius the outside, and then a second clamping to drill the hole and round it out. I have to separate the pendant off with an artist palette knife. It will sometimes leave a little adhesive, but a little mineral spirits cleans that right up.

Thanks Bill

Re: Urns can be lucrative, but marketing is tough

Dick Coers

I've requested my ashes be spread at Montgomery Woods State Preserve near Medocino, Ca. Went through there on the way to College of the Redwoods to hear James Krenov on a weekend lecture on design. I've been no place on earth like in a stand of old growth coastal redwood. That incredibly high canopy just puts a hush on the world. The most spiritual place I know. Wife is worried about flying with my ashes. She's the type to get a permit. LOL

Re: question

Yonak

Thanks, Dick. Do you think it would adhere wood to glass as a pretty permanent bond ? Is it very thick ?

Re: question

Dick Coers

It is sometimes called double backed duct tape, so about that thick. It will hold anything together! I first heard of it being used by some set up guys at our civic center. They use it to hold down the carpet in the displays and isles. So carpet to concrete for that.

This thread has been enlightening....

Barry Irby

I have spent a lifetime trying to accumulate wood to make things. Apparently I now have it and don't know what to do with it. Time to make stuff with wreckless disregard for the value of the stash.

Been some very interesting responses.

Never occurred to me to sell the wood. Hmm? Since I don't know how long I will be needing it and how much I am capable of using, I am struggling with that idea. Always been a buyer, not a seller. Wait, if I sell this piece, I might need it. This will take some adjusting.

Thanks for the discussion.

Crazy notion

Wiley Horne

Hi Barry,

Tiny homes are a thing now. Lot of the work is pre-fab. Some customization, I suppose like cabinetry. Maybe they’re in the market for wood.

Here’s a list of makers, by state:

https://www.homebuilderdigest.com/the-best-tiny-home-builders-in-all-50-states/

Wiley

Re: Mark may have been kidding..

TomD

Urns are crazy. My dad died last year, and the "urn", a tiny box, longest dimension was 7", cost 700 dollars. They live 1K from me so there was no practical way for me to be with my mom, and build the box. Then she died two weeks ago, and I was with her for several months, again 1K from tools, and I figured she might like the same box dad had anyway, so another one was bought from the home. The boxes were simple. Maple with an amber stain. Anyone on the forum could have made nicer ones, though there was nothing wrong with them either. I would say they would at most sell for 75 dollars at a craft show, if they were a small storage box.

Basic box, with a plywood panel screwed into the box for the ashes to be inserted from the bottom. At least up here there are no regulatory requirements as ashes (really ground up bone) are sterile.

Re: What to build to sell????

TomD

There are some good Youtube channels that pretty much deal with this question, with regular projects. The one I have watched a few times is a guy who does shows, which is a whole other life in itself. But there are other project channels.

I assume you are not looking to make a living. So many of the replies that talk about the difficulty of making and selling would not apply. One probably should not just sell on price, it affects people who are more needy, and it may not move your product faster if people get the idea you don't value your own work.

Are there any rich people where you live, ask decorators, home staggers what they want, what is hot. Look in local stores, or if you know such people talk to them. People may open up to you if you are not trying to sell them, and in the process, you may get some sales. One annoying thing one learns is that light coloured wood is in, and all you have is dark, or vice versa. Wood tones are a fashion thing, you can find you do not have what the market wants. Which would be a reason to accelerate the great sale of raw stock.

I get asked to do trophies, people are often in open check book mode over those. I don't do that stuff, but I have done a few when I could not get out of it. I always have a long list of what I want.

If I had thousands of bft, I would high grade it for myself, and then sell it off. I would put a time limit on the rest so that whether I use it or not, the pile goes down.

Re: Mark may have been kidding..

Barry Irby

Sorry for you losses.

I have thought for years about building urns. In fact I built two several years ago for a family member and his wife that died two weeks apart. They were walnut with a curly walnut panel and the bottom screwed in as you mention. The cremains' were in a heavy plastic bag and the funeral home just put the bag in the box. And they were buried.

So it occurred to me you could make these boxes and either get a laser engraver or connect with someone who had one and have a business. Locally they don't sell for much. At least not on the wholesale side.

What I meant....

David Weaver

...what are things that beginning woodworkers buy in droves that have some wood in them:

* dovetail markers (who couldn't just make those?)

* wooden squares or fixed square types with wood in them

* marking knives (there's no great reason to ever buy a marking knife - they cost almost nothing to make, even with exotic wood and a brass bolster)

* specialty planes or things like "push chisels"

* plywood shooting boards for >$100

I guess my point is that woodworking is one of those things where it can be very difficult to make something for the general public from wood as something like a basic desk with much solid wood will cost more in materials than the public will pay.

But woodworkers often get smitten when they first get in the hobby and buy a whole bunch of stuff that they don't need to buy.

Even the rockler catalog is loaded with things that cost more as a kit than someone other than a woodworker would pay for a finished product.

Kitsch of the right type does well, too

David Weaver

My mother just retired last year from her hobby job, which she held for a large portion of her regular job. She painted a style called tole (folks art). You can paint it on anything, the materials are inexpensive, and most of the types of shows where it's sold don't cost much.

My dad got to be dumb labor (cutting wooden bits out to paint or prepping antique tinware to be painted, and then sealing it).

Most of us would turn our noses up at it. I was really turned off by the style of stuff as a kid and try to prevent it from getting in my house, but my mother was able to make about $20 an hour equivalent on it after costs as a side hobby for 40 years.

What I'm getting toward is that I would never have an interest in making the stuff, nor would most other people. My mother wanted to sell pencil drawings and better art early on and there was no market and she naturally wanted to get paid and slid down the hill to folk art and then stayed there.

The keys to her stuff are that her prices are barely higher than foreign junk after that stuff is marked up by a vendor and she always used low cost materials. If someone tore down a barn, then she used weathered siding cut to shapes like santa claus stuff, and she painted them *swiftly*, well enough that a person sitting down for their first class couldn't match the quality, and couldn't come within a 10th of the speed.

I'm sure she'd have rather made something finer in small volume that would've ended up in a gallery, but it wasn't to be. Once she forgot all of that, I don't think it bothered her that she had to change lanes from what she really wanted to do. She got positive feedback, repeat buyers and the shows that she attended were easy to dump a HUGE amount of stuff at on any given day because the price was in "OK" gift range (something you might buy for someone you work with rather than something expensive).

Re: What I meant....

Barry Irby

Along the same lines....I was at a craft show years ago and guy was selling little tables made of pine shelving boards. A heart shaped top, three curved legs and a smaller heart down low to steady the legs. In raw wood they were $7. Painted white with a ivy vine stamped onto them they were $14. I asked the guy how he could do it and he said he was buying the shelving boards in huge bundles for something like $2800. Still had $3 in each table. My conclusion was I wanted to be the guy painting them.

you can see below what I mentioned

David Weaver

about my mother. I would be surprised if she and my dad didn't gross 7 figures over 4 years from what was essentially something she needed to have to keep her busy because she'd gotten efficient at teaching and wasn't otherwise good loafing in her spare time (let alone summers).

When I was too young to stay home by myself, my parents did about 10 shows a year, as in ten weekends. That means I got to sit under the display tables with a long cloth covering the one I sat under so that I could pretend I wasn't at craft shows for the entire weekend. Sometimes, those shows had something interesting (bulk candy at the ones not limited to hand made items, for example - not bulk like full price bulk now, but the stuff that breaks at hershey and back then they would sell it as discard for a fraction of unbroken candy price - we'd get things like 5 pound bags of broken fifth avenue bars and have a contest to see who could eat the most).

Otherwise, it was only interesting as I got older to try to figure out how other people were making money. I knew my mothers' costs were about 15% of her tag price. There must've been people at those shows who were satisfied to make $3 an hour for some of the things they were making and the bulk and setup costs vs. what they could make. My mother had the system figured out. Make things that aren't that big that would sell for around $5-$20, make the focus the painting, and paint on whatever you could find inexpensively. If wooden stuff is hard to find, raid the local auction and paint teapots, enamel bundt pans, whatever.

She made a killing given that it was spare time work. The people bringing gigantic router setups to make custom yard signs that sold for $10 - I don't think they went home with that much, but in their defense, I guess they were actually making the stuff people were buying on site and not sitting at home making stock like my mother did.

I think I could make tools for about $10 an hour and sell them on etsy. I think I could make some tools for a little more than that, but I don't think I could ever do what my mother did in terms of keeping it up for long and really sniffing out what people wanted rather than exactly what she wanted to make.

Re: you can see below what I mentioned

TomD

Does not sound as though Barry needs the money. So one would wonder why one would make anything that was not exactly what one wanted to make. I basically make stuff I want, and can't buy. I don't want to make stuff that will sell to people with questionable, if entirely legitimate, taste.

Living in Canada is a bit of a bonus, because it is still the case that you can't get all sorts of things that are overnight and cheap in the US. But even if one could, I would still ramp up the specificity of my needs to a a point where only I could provide for them. It is just what I enjoy.

The last three months of being down here taking care of my mother, and now dealing with her estate, have kept me busy and away from my tools. But I have made a few projects that are weirdly my own:

I needed a studio easel, and I needed it in a few hours, and it had to be made with 2x6, that was flood damaged, and "in stock". That was fun.

I also wanted a gizmo that is usually made of a few pieces of wire, in a factory. You force it into the ground and it holds your arrows and your bow for you when you go to the target . With the oddball pieces of wood I had it ended up a sidetable of very odd design, and it holds my keyboard when I am not shooting.

I also needed a wooden arrow spine tester, and I wanted to make an unusual one I had seen only once in a magazine.

These were all real hack projects, fun, fast, and useful. Something to think about compared to the stuff that I normally make and can stretch over years.

They were mostly made with a drill driver, a Japanese plane, and a toolbox saw.

People will bother anyway

David Weaver

My mother and father both had full time teaching jobs (in a rust belt state - PA - where the combination of salary and pension benefits means you never really need to do anything else, anyway).

Why my mother wanted to make money in the first place when she didn't really need to, I won't know, but I remember as a very small child, her attempts to do stuff and then try to sell it before she started to observe what sold and then start to make it.

She's wired different than me, and she often says to me "you might be able to make that and sell it".

I guess for her, the fact that someone will buy it is something that makes her feel good. She definitely hasn't had to make anything in the last 20 years, let alone 40 - but there's something about people buying her stuff that makes her feel proud of it.

Not everyone is one or the other, but I could identify with the idea of "it would be nice if I could make something with this pile of stuff and at least get cost of materials for it, then it wouldn't seem like such a waste".

Re: People will bother anyway

TomD

To me the main motivation was that if you persist in any of these crafts you end up with way more stuff than you can ever place in your own life. If you don't sell it, you have to stop making it. While I say that I just make stuff I want for myself (and hope others in the family will also enjoy), but my house is already full up. Living in one of the most overpriced cities in the world, and having purchased a place that had a shop, was 100 yards from water, and had a 30 minute commute to our version of Wall Street, the house ended up the short end of the stick and is super full.

But in my case, that kind of motivation does not yield the discipline to settle on one things and sell it like it mattered. I could even see figuring out what the market will bear, even if I don't like it that much. That would be a pretty big achievement. But I keep my nose stuck into my own business, pretty exclusively.

My will says ashes spread atop a mountain.

kneale brownson

Lived in Colorado when written and friends said they'd see to it. Now in MI, so maybe atop a hill?