Ideal Offerings

Saturday 11th May, 2024

What is it that you are actually selling?

Next weekend, the Sylva Wood Centre opens for Oxfordshire Artweeks. In the lead up, I am considering my offerings, those items I am going to sell on my stall.

As I said in last week’s journal, it is important to see smaller items not just as little “side-trinkets”, a distraction from the “proper” pieces that you want to sell, but as essential relationship-building items.

Which brings me to the purpose of this journal: it is so important to know what it is that you are selling.

This will be different for everyone. Of course, as a maker your offering would have been something that you have physically made, but beyond that, what are you offering?

Perhaps you are selling good functionality: a piece that works really well or fits perfectly into a space.

Perhaps you are selling quality that can’t be found in mass produced items. A quality that comes though in function and form, fit and finish.

Perhaps your pieces are design-led: a piece with a unique look, in a world where everything looks a bit…off-the-shelf.

Perhaps there is the idea of longevity. The potential to own a piece that can be restored again and again over time.

Or perhaps what you actually selling is deeper than all of this. Perhaps it is the chance for someone to buy into an idea: an ideal way to see the world.

Do people buy on ideals alone? Absolutely.

Apple’s Think Different advertising campaign in the late 1990s demonstrated this perfectly. A television commercial that spoke to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently”

The advert never once mentioned or even showed a computer, but it spoke to the highest ideal of the creatives that Apple wanted to buy their product. That of a free thinker, one who doesn’t fit in to the conventional way of doing things.

Apple is now one of the largest companies in the world.

Of course, your offerings don’t have to be ideals. They can be useful, beautiful, functional items, made to a high standard from high quality, sustainable materials.

But whatever it is that you make, take time to think about what you are actually selling.

And remember to communicate this to your clients.

Until next time,

Stay sharp friends,

~sh

Stephen Hickman
Studio Cabinetmaker