You Were Sold A Dream. Nobody Showed You the Small Print.

Hello, and welcome to the Crochet Business School podcast. I'm Kelly Thomas, and today let's talk about why running a crochet business feels so hard. 'Cause if you're selling what you make, there are times where it can feel absolutely exhausting and so frustrating. So let's talk about why that is and what you can do about it So when you are selling what you make, you have to crochet an awful lot.

You've also then got to spend a huge amount of time promoting your crochet, being on social media, sending out newsletters, optimizing your shop, deciding what products are coming next. There's a lot of work involved, and often you never expected it to feel this hard. You didn't expect sales to take so much work. I mean, the, the idea was simple.

You crochet something, you post it online, and someone buys it, and it sounds so simple. There are millions of people using social media. There's millions of people in your country who can buy what you make. It sounded easy, and yet it's turned out to be this mammoth learning curve that takes up so much of your time, and it's not producing the results you expected.

Either you're not getting sales at all, or you're getting sales, but it's almost like it's not enough sales to make decent money, but too many sales for your time, and you're in this frustrated middle place. How do you get out of it? And when you're stuck there, it starts to feel really personal. You've put so much work into this, so much effort.

It's become part of your identity. It's part of who you are, and every time you get, uh, a comment s- that says something along the lines of, "No one will ever buy it at that price," it feels like a personal attack. But that person who's saying that, they're just revealing something about them. They are not and never were your customer because they do not value what you make.

And yet despite that, these negative comments can really get under your skin and really challenge your confidence, both in yourself, in your abilities, in how good your crochet is, and your thoughts on whether you can ever make this business dream come true. But the thing is, it's not your fault. It's... Although every one of these little comments, everything that doesn't quite go right, maybe a launch doesn't sell as much as you'd hoped, it feels like a personal failure.

It's not. It was never your fault because there's a truth to this, and it's like, like you were sold a dream, but you were never shown the small print Everyone tells crocheters, "Oh, you should sell that. You'd make a fortune from that." But what they don't take into account is how long crochet takes to make It's, it is possible to make a living from selling what you make, but it's incredibly difficult.

It's not easy. It is certainly not the easy dream that you are sold. It can take a ton of effort, it takes a ton of confidence, and it does take some upfront cash to do it as well. Because the ways that you have to go down are to turn into a luxury brand, which you've got to have all the, the kind of luxury look behind it and that does cost money.

You have to do it as an art form and essentially turn yourself into an artist and get artist grants and go down that route, which is also quite difficult. Or you have to build a collector's piece. So, and that takes a ton of work from building a backstory to creating characters that people care about. It takes a long time and a lot of work going into the story side rather than the crochet side.

You didn't know any of this when you started. You thought you could just post your crochet, sell, and it'd be nice and simple It's not that simple. However, it's not the end of the game because there are a ton of other ways to make money from your crochet other than selling what you make. It's just one of the ways.

Selling what you make is one of the ways that you can create a crochet business, but it's also the hardest one and the one with the least profit involved. And yet, that's where the vast majority of us start out. We all start by trying to sell the crochet that we make because it just makes sense. You know, you love to crochet, so make a living from it.

And it's the path we automatically go down with no thought attached There are other directions to go, and it's not a failure to switch direction. The only way you can fail is by quitting, and it's not quitting to just change direction. All this work you have done, it's been a huge learning curve. You will take that learning with you.

By changing direction, you are not giving it all up. You are not having to start all over again. You've learnt so much so far, and all of that can be used by changing direction a little bit. Because the thing about where you are stuck now in that not enough orders to make real money, and yet too many orders that you can't deal with the time, how do you get out of that?

It's a trap. You are trapped because you need more orders to make more money, but you don't have time to make any more orders. There is no easy way out of this. No missing piece of, uh, marketing hacks or, um, promotional doodahs that you find on the internet is going to fix that fundamental problem.

You cannot fix the money problem with more orders because you don't have time to make them But you, that's what you need. The problem here is, is that the profit you're making from what you sell is not enough How do you s- how do you fix it? You've got this really heavy weight on your shoulders. It feels like everything's pulling you down.

You're exhausted. You're crocheting so much every chance you get. You're missing out on family time. You're missing out on life.

You're missing out on taking care of yourself, and you can see the evidence of that all around you. You can see what you're missing out on. You feel that weight of not being able to take time off, and it feels like you're always wound or always on the go, always needing to do something, that you can never relax. And if you do take time to relax, you feel really guilty because you should be working on your crochet business.

This dream isn't gonna build itself. That is going round and round. I know because I got stuck there myself, and I got stuck there far too long. It took me months to really realize the truth of the situation.

And the thing is that, is that when you do finally make the decision that you need to change direction, it does feel like a major relief. It feels like this massive weight has lifted from your shoulders. It's like, "Okay then, this is what I knew all along." I just wasn't telling myself because when you put all that work in, when you've poured so much of yourself into it, it is really difficult to admit that this isn't working.

Something needs to change. And it's not just a little tweak, that little missing piece of the puzzle that you've been searching Google for. It's something much more fundamental a, there's an idea for you. If this is where you're stuck, if this is what you're feeling, then write a list.

Write a list of all the different things that you've done to try and get extra sales for your crochet business, to try and fix this problem that you know you're in. What have you done to try and change that? And then think what you've done to kind of sabotage the success because what I found was when I was stuck in this trap because I felt so tired, because I didn't know where to go and what to do, what I found was that I actually stopped promoting my crochet. And I...

It wasn't really a conscious decision. It just felt like I just couldn't do it. Like I couldn't open that social media app on my phone, so all I had to do was get on there for 30 seconds, post a picture, write a few words just to feed the algorithm and post it that day. And yet I found myself forgetting.

I found myself with something far more important to do than to click on that app. Or I'd open the app, and I'd end up scrolling through my feed for far too long. It felt like hours. It probably was.

Just wasted time. Anything but promoting it because if you don't promote your crochet, you don't sell it. And if you don't sell it, there's no more orders coming in. And if there's no orders coming in, you don't have to spend every minute crocheting something that maybe you don't want to crochet anymore because the thing about turning your crochet into a business is, is that it's very easy to lose the love of your crochet.

It's very easy to lose that relaxing side of it that you enjoyed for so long, and that's hard. When your crochet turns into a chore, it's really hard th- to then keep making these orders that you are not choosing what you make. You don't choose what you make. You don't choose when you make it.

Someone is ordering from your shop, and it could be anything. And it's, it's hard work. And when it's that hard, maybe you should be better with a nine-to-five. At least then you've got set hours you can walk away from.

But we keep telling ourselves that we can fix this. It's temporary. We will find the solution and get out of it. But we end up subconsciously sabotaging ourselves by not doing what we need to.

Because the thing about running your own business is that there is a million and one things that you need to do every day or feel that you need to do every day, and so it's really easy to miss one of them, some of the essential ones like promoting your crochet or not answering that message of someone asking a question. Write a list if you've done that. Have you sabotaged your own success recently? What effect has that actually had?

It's very frustrating. You get frustrated with yourself. Um, you start arguing with yourself, telling yourself off for not doing these things 'cause it seems so simple and so logical, but it's really your brain craving a break and saying, "This is not the right way." Write that list.

Write the list of what you've done to promote your business and try and fix your way out of this kind of trap that you've been sat in for so long of everything staying the same, too many orders, yet not enough, and if you've actually been sabotaging yourself. It does take a bit of honesty to write these lists, 'cause if you wrote the one from last week, you've just seen some hard numbers. Writing the one from this week, you're gonna see all the different things you tried and that haven't worked, and that's gonna feel personal.

It's going to feel like you're failing. You're not. It's something that you never realized was a- the case, and that thing is that this is really hard, and it's something that crocheters have been trying to make work for decades, and very few manage it. That is not a personal failing.

It's not that you're not working hard enough. It's not that you don't know enough. It's just that this m- this idea of being able to crochet all day and sell what you make and make a living from it is very, very difficult. Very few people manage it, and then only under very particular circumstances Make those lists because they are going to tell you the truth about where you are and what the next, the next route is, the next direction.

Because this just doesn't mean that your dream is over. It just needs a rethink. It just needs a redirection. Next week, I'm gonna tell you what I did when I found myself in this position, how I got there, what finally made me realize what the truth of the situation was, and what I did next to get out of it.

And I suspect a similar journey happens with a lot of crochet sellers. It's not one thing. It doesn't happen overnight. It is not a quick light bulb moment.

It's something that takes a bit of a journey, but I will tell you about that next week. So thank you for listening, and I shall see you next week for the next episode.