Gosh, I would never have believed it, but to my total surprise, PEOPLE’S NAMES are the most popular of any object, jewelry or otherwise, that I make or have ever made. A close “second place” to people’s names is — can you believe it ?? — DOG & CAT NAMES. I am flabbergasted.
If you’re not at all surprised, you’re one of the very few who actually understands what’s going on here, and you might be in a position to market to the few like yourself who don’t want any part of the local sex, drugs, rock n’ roll scene that permeates planet Earth while humans are temporarily in control.
So how can writing people’s, or a dog’s, a cat’s, a horse’s, a pig’s or a parakeet’s name on metal foil help you locate other potential workers for The Work who, like yourself, don’t related to, or belong to, the local robot population???
It’s not hard to attract off-worlders and higher plane inhabitants to your FREEHAND PSYCHEDELIC LETTERING NAME TAG booth, where you make handcrafted freehand-drawn embossed metal nametags encased in stunning acrylic capsules that comes to the customer in a gift presentation, making it the perfect stocking-stuffer or corporate party favor and, for only ten bucks, it beats most other corporate gifts by a long shot.
There’s only one way you’re going to make a decent wage out of these things, and that’s if you yourself go through the process of ordering the parts wholesale, thus saving you a ton of money, time and effort.
Time is an important factor. The HAND-DRAWN NAME TAG is a “NOW” item, and at its best should be delivered to the customer’s hands within a minute or two of them telling you their name, but it’s also possible to sell them mail-order, which is to say, delivered by truck but marketed online or in person for delivery later on.
I’d make sure you tell your mail-order online customers that you ship the same day or next day from when the order was received, and stick by that to the letter. Get a rep for fast service and intelligent shipping.
On the Fair Front, you should have a sufficient number of embossing “frames” already prepared, as I’ve demonstrated in my metal embossing training videos, and you simply fill in the frame with whatever word or words the customer wants, up to 8 letters total, which I can help you figure out, if you need help figuring out how to fit 8 letters on a small piece of metal foil.
I have made dozens of training videos and I offer classes, workshop and weekend clinics for metal embossing professionals, starting right from scratch, for those who have never worked in metal before, or tried any art or craft before. No experience necessary.
Metal embossing is so forgiving that you don’t really have to be much of an artist to succeed, although if you ARE a good artist, your sales and prices will surely reflect that.
The secret of making the NAME TAGS is to make the lettering calligraphic and artistic, even exaggeratedly arty-farty and balloon-like, meaning that you’ll intentionally distort the letters and/or numbers to fit whatever remaining space happens to be available. Of course, you should be prepared to make several attempts if it’s a name or word you haven’t tried making before.
This TAKES PRACTICE, and you shouldn’t get upset with yourself if you’re not automatically an artistic genius from the very first second your brand-new stylus hits the metal foil. That’s not going to happen. You LEARN, and learning, real learning, takes time.
Images are VERY forgivable in the metal foil medium, so you can try just about anything and not fail too terribly. Most of what you do will be just fine with the customer and, if not, they’ll tell you, and if they don’t, you should make sure to ask, “Is this what you wanted?” and be prepared to hear “no, I had something quite different in mind,” or “it doesn’t look like my Georgie”, and do try it again until you get it right, for at least three tries before you give up entirely and try to interest the customer in something you CAN do.
You can manage to get an incredible amount of detail into a metal embossing, if you really want to, IF you manage to slow down to a crawl, which is the basic idea of the craft anyway, and take your time — don’t hurry to spew these things out by the hundreds per hour — it’s not worth it, believe me.
Even at only $10 per item, you’ll do enough business in a day at a street or park fair to make it well worthwhile. Now, with NAMES, you can blast them out the door as fast as you can make them, and that’s possible at the rate of one item every 45 seconds, so do the math.
If the fair draws anything like 5,000 or more per day, you’re in good shape. If you don’t even see 1,000 people in a weekend, you’ve got a problem, but even there, you should be able to turn enough to pay for your booth and expenses.
If the fair draws fewer than 20 people, you need to think about selling on eBay.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby