I recently took an important step and changed the pricing for most of My Woolen Friends! I did this after careful consideration and after “sleeping on it” for the past couple of weeks. The last two participations at a craft market have helped me tremendously in terms of feedback and understanding what I want from my small entrepreneurial adventure, where I want to go with it and what is important to me, within it.
I was pretty much living in my own bubble before having had these chances to interact with people face to face and see in real time how they react towards my work. At that point in time, what mattered to me the most was: 1. doing something that brought me joy; 2. have my work be valued through proper pay. I held on to the last one rather stubbornly, backed by some personal insecurity or frustration. Now, however, I feel like it’s the right time to let go of that and re-evaluate the entire picture.
Despite them being successfully different (yet successful!), each market participation was a very enlightening experience for me. Seeing people’s reaction towards my work in real time is such a precious source of information, that I would otherwise hardly have. Especially the last time, people were just so happy and overjoyed when they would come around my stand! I even had a few fellow sellers from other tables coming by just to get some joy from my little, woolen friends.
The pleasant chit-chat and smiles on people’s faces put it all in perspective for me, as many had to walk away without affording a woolen friend. Despite sales having been good for me that day, I was somewhat sad for not being able to bring more joy to more people and that got me thinking. I make a big point about joy, when it comes to My Woolen Friends and I want that to be a two way street/ feeling. So, I re-evaluated my reality and started thinking of a compromise in how I can make my work a bit more affordable, so that more people can enjoy it – because if my joy can bring them joy, that then brings me joy back, which I then put back into my work and so on…
So, I sat down and re-evaluated the designs and the time it nowadays takes me to create them and came up with some price changes, that still feel fair to me and hopefully will result in less people walking away without a woolen friend. This really just raised the question for me: “what’s more important? knowing that I can bring some joy to someone or rather just bring that/ those item/s back home instead?”. Fortunately, the answer wasn’t a hard one for me and I hope you can all understand where I’m coming from.
Of course, I won’t be able to make everyone happy, nor am I trying to do that. I just wanted to compromise where I felt like I could and so it ends.
Thank you everyone who took the time to read this.
Sending you all joy and good vibes only!