around £0.47 (US $0.67) per hour.
Labor can have another impact on your plans to make your living selling your handmade items. Using the same example above and the assumption that one item takes 15 hours a week to make, this means that in all probability I can only realistically make 2 or maybe 3 of this item in a week. My profit (once the cost of materials had been deducted) was £7 (US $10.03). So, if I manage to sell all three of these, I would earn £21 (US $30.09) out of which I would have to pay all my other business expenses for the week before I could consider withdrawing money to live on.
Some people who run this kind of home business are just selling off things that they would have made anyway in the hope that they can claw back some of the money they spent on making it to buy materials for their next project. However, it could be that you end up turning a much loved hobby into a job that forces you to spend a good deal of your day on things you don't like doing for very little money whilst destroying any sense of pleasure you once got from that hobby in the first place.
All is not lost for us crafty types though! It may be possible to boost your income by running classes in the craft of your choice, writing a book about it, or having a blog and being an affiliate for the companies who produce the components you use.
But, what if you're not the creative type or you don't want to sell the things that you've made yourself? What are your options then?
One option available to people who don't make things themselves is to sell things for other people. There are a number of different ways of doing this, and which one you choose probably partly depends on your personality.
The first way is to sell things on commission. This is great if you have technophobe friends who want to clear out their clutter, as you can list it for them on sites like eBay or Music Magpie and then charge the friend a percentage of the final sale value as your commission. If you get good at this, you can soon build up a clientele. However, I would advise that you only sell things you have in your possession or have easy access to so that you can easily answer questions from buyers, and ship it out yourself. Remember feedback is king on eBay, and you don't want an ill-informed friend
the transfer of the population from the countryside
to the cities made keeping even small numbers of livestock impractical. Women found work doing menial jobs, mostly in the wool and cotton mills where they were overworked, under paid, and definitely under appreciated by their male bosses, who were more than happy to get rich off the backs of their often badly treated workforce.
This age saw the birth of the Women's Rights movement and women eventually managed, at least in western countries, to get the right to vote,
to own property and to earn a living. However, there was one insurmountable obstacle that they had, at this point been unable to overcome. For women, it was the biggest monster of the Industrial Age for women and it still defeats thousands of
women today. I speak, of course, of the proverbial
'glass ceiling' that women have been hitting their corporate heads against for over a century.
In Britain, as in many other industrialized countries, there was a brief respite for women during the Second World War. Since most of the able bodied men who were of working age were off fighting in mainland Europe, there was an influx of women into the factories and railways that kept England going. Many women were, for the first time, doing 'non-traditional' tasks such as welding metal frames for airplanes, driving trains, and a few brave ladies even took to the skies flying the Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancaster Bombers and
other war planes from their factories to the Royal Air Force (RAF) airfields. They did these things even though they knew that the factories that they were working in were targets for Hitler's bombers and
One option available to people who don't make things themselves is to sell things for other people.
Work in progress. https://www.facebook.com/stitchedbead/?hc_ref=SEARCH&fref=nf. Photo: Heather Barlow
Women working on the railroad during World War II. Photo: Unknown credit. PD.
61 | Ceres Magazine | Fall 2016