Jen Nedbalsky Talks About Running an Indie Business
Jen Nedbalsky of DoingItHerself.com is a crochet-enthusiast who sells her work at DoingitHerself.etsy.com . She is also a community organizer and activist. We asked her about her take on the indie crafts movement.
DIY City: What do you make of the indie crafts movement, is this a sustainable way of making a living for our generation? Are you involved in any crafts activism?
JN: I am so excited about how much the indie crafting movement has taken off. The best part, is that crafty folks saw pretty quickly how we could utilize the internet as a tool for organizing ourselves, finding support, ideas and as a way to find audiences for our work. Thanks to sites like Etsy, craftster magazines like ReadyMade, BUST and others - it’s become so easy to turn the little weekend projects that you dream about all week - into something bigger, something that can actually begin to provide a little cushion for you. It’s amazing to have an outlet to post up images of your work, a community for getting feedback and to find people who want to support your work.
I don’t know yet whether it’s going to turn into something that will help folks in my generation make a solid living. With health insurance as it is, rent, and all of the debt my generation has accrued from crazy college tuitions, predatory credit card companies and the very low salaries that are out there for creative types- it’s been an impossible dream. It crushes me, I’d love to find a way to make a living off of art, and doing something that really gives me joy. But, after the cost of materials it’s hard to actually make even $4 and hour for your labor. I don’t want to make objects that only people who shop at fancy boutiques can buy, I want to make stuff that people like me can afford. So, I chose to price my items pretty low. So, in a sense - no, it’s not yet a sustainable thing for me.
I find a lot of support from other crafters and helpful advice from designers who have made it, but I think that if you make your own work by hand - it’s kind of a catch 22. You can’t make a lot of income unless you can take the time off from work to make a lot of stock to sell, but you can’t take time off of work if the crafting isn’t bringing you a sustainable income. I’m still new at this, but that’s just my sense of things where I stand today. With wholesale rates and selling orders in bulk to shops, I barely can cover my costs and labor. If I decided to raise my prices I think it would get easier - but I’m committed to keeping my stuff affordable.
