50th Anniversary – Make your Basketry Business Profitable with Patricia van den Akker of The Design Trust

Celebrate the Basketmakers’ 50th Anniversary with the 3rd of 3 workshops with Patricia van den Akker of The Design Trust

Are you struggling to make a living as a professional basketry maker? Do you need to improve your marketing and look at your numbers for your products or art work? This half day online weekend workshop is for you.

In this workshop:

• We will start by looking at the specific challenges for basket makers to make a living, incl. the slowness of the craft, the pricing challenges around functional items, the perceived value (of natural/free materials), competition from cheap labour countries, and many amateurs who are undercharging too.
• Patricia will show you how to calculate the cost price, wholesale & retail price of your work. Is selling to shops & galleries a viable option for you?
• We will then look at the 3 Financial Question exercise to see if your business is viable, and what to do if the numbers don’t stack up. Patricia will share alternative income streams for basket makers and artists.
• What is your hourly/daily rate? With some top tips to make commissions more profitable too (as often they take up a lot more time than anticipated!)
• How can you charge more for your products, art or commissions? What is stopping you from charging more? We will be looking at positioning and professional branding/presentation, with some inspiring visual examples of relevant designer makers who present and charge professionally.
• And we will finish with the essential question: Do you undersell and undervalue yourself? With Patricia’s advice on how to become more confident to charge professionally and promote yourself better.

This 3-hour morning workshop is aimed at professionals, who have been in business/self-employed for at least 2 years, and who want to make their basketry business financially stable or pay themselves more. This will be an intense but practical workshop, with some homework exercises in advance too. There will be some discussions/break out rooms to share with others.

Tickets: £35.00

This workshop is run in partnership with Patricia van den Akker of The Design Trust – the online business school for designers, makers & creative professionals, which are offered at a highly reduced price to The Basketmakers’ Association members only. Normally these kinds of sessions would cost twice as much.

Please sign up and pay asap for these online workshops. Some workshops have a max. number, so book soon to avoid disappointment. We highly recommend that you try to join sessions live. Can’t make it live? No problem! Each session will be recorded, and participants will get access to the recording & presentation for 3 months.

About one – two weeks prior to your selected training, you will receive an email from The Design Trust with the details of how to register on Zoom to join live. The Basketmakers’ Association will share your contact details and email address with The Design Trust, who will be in touch with you about the online training.

One ticket allows you access to the live training + recording + presentation for one person. Please do not share the recordings or presentations with creatives who have not paid for this training as they are the copyright of Patricia van den Akker. The training is offered at a highly discounted rate to make it affordable for everybody. If you are in a partnership or work with an employee or freelancer, then you can both access the session for one ticket price.

Please note: By purchasing a ticket you agree that your name and email address will be shared with Patricia van den Akker to facilitate this workshop.