Selling Through Galleries vs Selling Online vs Selling at Events | Tim Kowalczyk, Curt Hammerly, Sean Roberts

Tim Kowalczyk, Curt Hammerly, Sean Roberts | Episode 549

Sean Roberts

Curt Hammerly

Tim Kowalczyk, Curt Hammerly, and Sean Roberts have all been on the show in the past with their own episodes. Today they have all teamed up to discuss the various approaches to selling pottery through galleries, online, or events. With their backgrounds and approaches, Tim, Curt, and Sean have their own track records that they draw from for this conversation.

Tim Kowalczyk

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What are the pros and cons of working specifically with galleries?

Tim: Working with galleries I guess I look at it, it’s the connection and the network and the community that comes out of being in the gallery situation. I guess when it comes down to it the con of it all is that I end up losing that face to face customer interaction. I get a little bit of it through Instagram. I try to answer as many messages as I can or comment on people’s posts that they share but I lose a little bit of that face to face interaction with the customers.

Tim Kowalczyk

What are some pros and cons for wholesale work, Sean?

Sean: I mean pros, the best thing about wholesale is that they have already bought it. It is not consignment, you are sending it off. They have to like the product enough that they are confident that they are going to sell it. It is one and done, you know. When you relate it to consignment, there are a lot of places that are fifty percent consignment also. They are buying it upfront at fifty percent, which is great. And the cons, there’s a lot of them, I mean I really like wholesale the least of the ways that I sell because it is great the first time that you meet the business owner and they buy your stuff and they are like, Yes, this is going to work. But I have had to learn about educating them how to display, you need to reorder early enough, that’s the biggest thing. I have a lot of stores that I have worked with that have never reordered and you have to check back in with them. Hey, do you want to reorder? And they don’t know how to sell your stuff. I only have a couple of wholesale clients that are really amazing and are consistently reordering. I have a lot that order once a year and I know that they could sell so much more if they have information about the pieces but anyway, that is the big con, working with the business owner who is also a business owner and extremely busy and you have to try to wrangle them to get more stuff.

Sean Roberts

What are the pros and cons of selling on Etsy?

Curt: I would just rather do it by selling online because my Etsy and Instagram work in tandem. One would not work without the other. I don’t get any sales from Etsy itself. No marketing comes from them.

The pros of selling online is that you get to keep the highest percentage of your sales. Which is great and what every body looks at when they want to sell online. Another pro is that you have access to the whole, kind of world and you can get your stuff out in front of a lot of people. The cons though, I have two big cons. One is that you have to be a jack of all trades. I had to learn how to be a photographer, I had to learn a lot of social media marketing, I had to learn how to package my stuff, I had to learn how to ship my stuff. I had to learn so many different things because I have to do it all. The other con to it is that you have to bring the audience yourself. So you can’t just expect to put your work on Etsy and put your work on your personal website, you can have the best work in the world and if you just put it in a store on the internet it is not going to sell because no eyes are going to get on it. So for online selling you have to bring the audience and you have to do all the work.

Curt Hammerly

So Sean, what are the pros and cons of selling in person?

The pros are that you get to meet your customers in person, they get to pick your work up and fondle it, and you get the full retail price and you don’t have to ship it. I wrap it in a little tissue paper and send them on their way. And they pay the full retail price and it is my favorite, really because I get to interact with my customers. The con is that it takes a lot of time. You are traveling to shows, compared to online where you can just be in your studio. You do have to ship but you are staying in a studio instead of traveling and setting up a tent and setting up tables and set up shelves and put all the work out and have that amount of time upfront that you put in. But I definitely prefer that to wholesale.