Work & Finance > Work At Home

Create and Sell Kids Craft Kits
By Mike Morgan

Here's a twist on the old "sell your crafts" theme. How about creating and marketing a craft kit for your craft?

Instead of selling a completed project, you sell an materials-included, ready-to-do craft project. It doesn't necessarily HAVE to be geared toward kids, but those seem to sell well.

For example, since our Cub Scout Den recently built some birdhouses from kits, let's say you like to build birdhouses. To build one, let's say you need to cut some 1/4" wood into a variety of shapes, glue some pieces
together, and nail some others together. You would cut the wood into the all of necessary shapes and sand them. Your kit would consist of the pre-cut wood, all the nails (plus extras), and instructions. All of this could go into a Zip-Loc baggie and be sold for a few dollars. Just about any small and relatively easy craft can be sold as a kit "baggie". Crafts using wooden thread spools seem to be popular lately -- those would be perfect candidates for kits.

Remember that the more difficult or involved the craft, the better you will have to write the assembly instructions. PRICING Set your price at about four times the cost of materials. However, if you are going to sell crafts for kids, try to keep the price below $10.

For kids crafts, create "bundle packs" of 6-8 of the same project at a little bit of a discount. This will make it very attractive to Scout leaders and parents shopping for birthday party activities.

MARKETING -  Write a press release -- or have one written, if you don't know how -- and make sure the local newspapers (free and paid) and radio stations (especially AM stations) get it. This is the kind of story they love, and a feature
story will get you a lot of exposure. Create flyers for your local community bulletin boards.

Call you local Scouting (Boy- and Girl-) council office and find out when they have their leaders' meeting, called a "Roundtable" in Boy Scouts. Arrange to speak for five minutes at one of these meetings. Bring a kit or two for
demonstration and plenty for sale, since you might make some immediate sales.

Talk to your local craft shop. Many are surprising open to the idea of selling local craft works -- but most crafters assume they won't be, and never ask!
If you do a craft that can be packaged as a kit, and aren't doing that, you are bypassing what could be a very lucrative avenue for revenue!