Some time ago, Peach and Kathy, the creative wing of Cousins Day, decided to pool their talents and go into the craft business. They both cross stitch beautifully and had some really beautiful projects they wanted to work on that they thought would sell well at a craft fair and make them some money for Christmas. They started a business called Krafty Cuzzins.
Every time we went to Cousins Day, Kathy would drive to and from my mother's and Peach would sit in the back doing her cross stitch.
Then Jeri and I went to Europe.
I had a great time shopping for gifts in France and one of the things I brought back from Arles was a bread basket for my mother. I wrote about this before.
You can see it up there in the right hand corner. The thing lies flat for storage but when you tie up the four corners, you have this great little bread basket. Kathy leaped on that thing and decided she could figure out how to make it and that it would be a great craft project, since she was getting burned out on cross-stitch.
At our next Cousins Day, she had a prototype to show us. She was so excited about how they were coming out and how much she was enjoying making them.
She was particularly excited about it because every time she showed a basket to someone, they liked it so much they bought it and she was afraid she wouldn't have enough time to make the 50 baskets she wanted to make in time for the craft show.
We got all carried away talking about their use beyond just a bread basket. We thought of making up a gift basket for a baby shower present, filling it with powder, rolled diapers, pacifier, rattle and anything else that you would give a prospective mother. Or a sewing basket, a place to keep all your sewing supplies. A nice basket to store your Christmas cards in. We talked about marketing it for the RV-er, since it folds flat so there is no storage problem, and it's both reversible and washable. The uses seemed endless.
I remember that when I talked about the baskets here on my journal back in September I had at least two people write and ask me for information about how they could order a basket.
And so today was the day of the craft fair. Peach and Kathy, and Peach's daughter, had managed to make fifty baskets for the fair. They also had made some very nice framed cross stitch pieces, some coasters, some pepper jelly, some bread-n-butter pickles, and a little book-type thing that you can keep earrings in when you're traveling. And the fifty baskets.
I found them easily enough in the crowd.
As small craft fairs go, it seemed to be a well attended one, though I am no expert in these things. There were lots and lots of tables set up. Peach and Kathy were next to a lady selling blankets, which seemed to be just big pieces of cloth with pieces of fringe cut into it. But she seemed to be selling some because some of the patterns on the cloth were very cute.
The fair started at 9 a.m. and I got there between 9:30 and 10. Peach and Kathy hadn't sold a thing. In fact, hardly anybody had even LOOKED at the display. By the time I left they had dropped the price of the baskets and one woman had bought one. I had bought three of the other things on display, and so by noon, when I left, they had made a grand total of four sales. They were very discouraged....and they had a huge box of bread baskets left over. I don't know if there was a big influx of customers between noon and 2, when it ended, but what they had sold by the time I left would not cover the cost of having a table at the craft fair (to say nothing of the investment in materials and labor making the things!)
It's a shame because they are really high quality baskets, and while I sat there several people seemed to like them. I know for a fact you can buy them at Williams-Sonoma, and they cost more than what Peach and Kathy are selling them for.
So the next step is that I'm going to design a web page for them, including a video on how to put them together and showing possible uses for the basket. We'll get that up, as well as establish a site on Etsy to see if maybe they can get some customers there too.
This all sounded like such a perfect project in September and it's disappointing that it is looking like such a dud in November.
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