Valley Oak Paper - Handmade greeting cards & gifts

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Crafty Business Update

Cecilia Huster

Silicon Valley in-person shopping

  • Unique Boutique is open 10.30 to 2.30 Monday through Friday at the Sunnyvale Senior Center

  • De Anza Flea Market: October 7th, next and probably final day.

  • Unique Boutique Craft Fair: November 3rd - 4th, Sunnyvale Senior Center

  • Fairwood Explorer Elementary School Craft Fair: November 18th

  • Fremont High School Craft Fair: December 2nd - 3rd, Fremont High School in Cupertino

If you’re aware of any other local holiday craft fairs, please let me know.

Unique Boutique Halloween Products

Potential revenue streams

Here are the different ways of earning money from papercrafts and my current evaluations of them.

  1. Selling handmade products: Does not scale well.

    • Online: 👎🏻 Net negative revenue so far. Not worth investing more time and money into right now.

    • Offline:

      • 👍🏻 Unique Boutique and craft fairs are likely to be profitable by the end of the year.

      • 👀 Wholesale deals may be worth researching at some point.

  2. Content creation: Scales better

    • Paid by social media platforms: 👀 Unknown, worth researching

    • Paid by stamp companies: 👀 Unknown, worth researching

  3. Affiliate marketing: Scales better and is supported by content creation

    • Share A Sale: 👍🏻 Already profitable

    • Amazon: 👍🏻 Already profitable

    • Individual stamp companies: 👀 Unknown, worth researching

Selling products

The fundamental problem with selling physical products is that it doesn’t scale well. So with the exception of the Unique Boutique and the other venues I’ve already signed up for, I don’t think I’m going to pursue this.

I’ll leave my Etsy store up, but for now I’m not going to put a lot of effort into it. Same with my SquareSpace shop. I’ll continue to sell to friends and family and participate in local craft fairs for now. At the end of the year, I’ll reëvaluate.

Creating content and affiliate marketing

Creating content and affiliate marketing support each other and scale much better than selling physical products. I’ve already had a very modest income from these, so I’m going to double down on them. Stay tuned to find out what that means for Valley Oak Paper!