5 Mistakes To Avoid When Selling Woodworking Projects

As woodworkers, most of us start out as hobbyists. We enjoy working with our hands to build something awesome. We put time, effort, and money into raw materials and tools in hopes that we can create our own masterpiece. However, once we reach a point of feeling confident in our skills and ability, we often try to find ways to make some extra money off our projects. This allows us to have the opportunity to fund future projects and invest in upgraded tools.

Even though selling our woodworking projects can be exciting and rewarding, there are a few potential problems we could face, and I plan to discuss those issues here. So, here are my 5 mistakes to avoid when selling your woodworking projects.

Underprice

Underpricing your work may come easy at first. Your natural instinct is to build projects at a very little cost, or even free, in efforts to gain lots of attention and pick up lots of business. After all, the concept makes sense, right? “If I sell cheap, I will attract a lot of customers”. Not necessarily. Your prices will dictate the type of customers you work with. Pricing things at the lowest cost possible will indeed allow you pick up a lot of customers, but not always the right type of customers. You run the potential of bottoming out your profits and dealing with some not-so-pleasant clients. Also, if your prices are low enough that every potential customer floods to your business, you will build up a huge backlog of work. While backlog and committed work is a great thing, it’s only exciting if the work pays you well. If you have 15 projects lined up but are only making $100 profit on each build, you will burn yourself out quicker than you’ll be able to finish the projects. The profits and prices of your work need to be at a level that both affordable and make sense to the customer, but also pay you well enough to cover your expenses and motivate you to do more work.

Overprice

This one is obvious. Overpricing can be just as bad as underpricing. I know, it’s hard to find the “sweet spot”. You don’t want to be priced too high, but also not too low. Pricing your items too high will drive away customers quickly. Your pricing strategy will ultimately depend on the quality and type of projects you build, as well as your brand. Branding yourself and your business can almost instantly add value to your products. If you build fine furniture, your brand is portrayed as a higher value than farmhouse-style tables, for example. Sometimes customers see value in the physical size of the products as well. Even though this is common for the average consumer, don’t let it fully dictate your prices. If it takes you 30 hours to make a table, it needs to be priced accordingly. However, don’t price it super high simply because the table is “really big”. Customers that are attracted to your business at high selling points are great customers to have, but can easily be warded away by your prices being too high. For example, if a high-paying customer is willing to do business with you even though your prices may seem high, he or she may decided against doing business with you if your prices are frankly “extreme”. Pricing your products too high will cause your customers to lose trust in you and your brand, and it can give off the perception that you are price-gouging.

Wrong Target Audience / Bad Marketing

Targeting the wrong audience can be a detrimental mistake in your product sales as a woodworker. Your marketing should be geared towards your ideal customer. Your ideal customer should be considered in areas of demographic, income status, geographic location, and much more. For example, targeting your advertising and marketing towards farmers with farmhouses may not be the best use of marketing resources if you are trying to sell modern, high-end, fine furniture. The opposition is true as well. Targeted marketing at modern city-center businesses probably doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to sell rustic or farmhouse style furniture. The gender, interests, and age of your target audience is also important. Consider doing some research or taking social media polls with your audience to be able to truly dial-in on who is your target market. You are then able to take the data from your research and generate a strategic marketing plan that is geared specifically towards trying to convert your niche audience to revenue-generating sales.

Poor Pictures

We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words. In fact, with the right pictures, a product description isn’t always even needed. If you are able to master the art of photography, you should have no problem generating many sales of your product. However, most of us aren’t master photographers. Some basic aspects of photography to consider are lighting, backgrounds or scenes, angles, and details. The lighting needs to portray your product in a way that is warm and inviting. Consider taking photos in a well-lit area that will allow your product to be seen with minimal dark spots or shadows. Product staging is a great way to showcase the product as well. Imagine that when a customer sees your product staged in a practical way for the photo, they are more capable of envisioning owning that product and using it in their own space in a similar way that you exampled in your photos. Consider taking multiple angles of your product. Maybe you decide to take some top-down shots, wide angle shots, close ups, shots from the corners or edges, and more. Honestly, when doing a product shoot, you can never really take too many photos. It is much better to have too many than not enough raw pictures. Once you edit the pictures, you can then decide which ones to keep and which ones to delete. When editing your pictures, ensure that you edit in a way that enhances the photo of your product, yet not over-edit or create an unrealistic representation of your product. We will talk more about product misrepresentation in the next section.

Inaccurate Representation Of Products

We have all heard of the concept of “clickbait”, and frankly, it isn’t fun. There’s nothing worse than clicking on a picture on the internet based on the caption or thumbnail, only to find out that the real article, video, or product is something completely different. This concept and defeat of misrepresentation is no different in the woodworking product sales game. Never misrepresent your product. Using fake dimensions, over-edited photos, color changes, and more can lead to a customer base that doesn’t trust your brand and will ultimately, decrease and hinder your future sales numbers. There is a fine line, however, as you want to present your product in a way that looks super appealing. After all, you are trying to sell your product, so your description and photos need to be presented in the form of a sales pitch. Always strive to present beautiful product pictures and elaborately-detailed product descriptions, just ensure that you aren’t taking it too far and being gimmicky with your presentation. The last thing you want is for a customer to purchase your item and be excited about receiving it, then open the box and find out that they purchased something completely different than what you described on your page.

While this list may not be exhaustive or all-inclusive, these are certainly some key items to consider when selling your woodworking projects, and are ways that can hurt your business growth rather than helping. If you can think of other things to add to this list, feel free to comment or simply contact me!