At least Craft Inc. makes the process a little more understandable, if not any less annoying. Craft Inc., written by Meg Mateo Ilasco, is a handbook for the crafter who wants to start a crafty business. It starts out at the beginning, speaking first to the person who may have nothing more than an idea, then takes you through the nuts and bolts of setting up a business, to financial and legal planning, to market research and publicity, and on through production, pricing, wholesaling, hiring employees, and on and on. Interspersed among the business sense are interviews with other successful crafter entrepreneurs, focusing on their own business methods and featuring their own sage pieces of advice. I’ve been using Craft Inc. as my own personal bible while I struggle to make my own craft fair, Etsy, and consignment hobby a legitimate business, so I can tell you from experience that, although the book does lay out a step-by-step process, that process is still just about as clear as mud to this particular creative girl who doesn’t know a ton of math. Here’s why: [*Photo courtesy of She’s Batty and the Crafting a Green World flickr pool. Want your crafty photo featured on Crafting a Green World? Add it to the flickr pool!] Next » Continue reading A Review of Craft Inc. First of all, some of the step-by-step instructions are just a little tiny big on the vague side. It’s all well and good, for instance, to tell me that before I give my business its official name, I need to conduct a national search for other companies using the same name, and to check with state and federal agencies for conflicting trademarks, but…um, how do I do that, again? Google? Letter to my senator? Yeah, no idea. The other less helpful component of the book is the fact that those expert interviews are all waaaaaaay beyond my level. Instead of reading Lotta Jansdotter talk in her interview about outsourcing her production, I’d much rather read about the criteria she used for choosing a bank for her business accounts, because that’s more where I’m at. Frankly, though, there probably isn’t enough hand-holding available in this world to provide the ample hand-holding that most crafty types would like to have during this business start-up process. Without Craft Inc. to give me even this amount of hand-holding, I would not even know that I was supposed to search for identical business names, or to have a separate business account. So simply being clueless about HOW to do any of that stuff is still a step in the right direction.
