Art Markets: The Pros, The Cons, The Profits and The Costs
The Side Hustles section on Massive Orange Book will usually feature interviews with other side hustlers, telling their personal stories of trials and tribulations, successes and accomplishments, cock ups and “Well, at least this will make a good story one day..”s.
However, this one’s going to be slightly different. This one is about mine and Phoeb’s personal side hustle experience that happened a few weeks ago. (FYI – Phoeb is my best friend and Sustainability Contributor here at Massive Orange Book, AND fellow part-time artist-on-the-side. I will gradually be going into more detail about Phoeb over time and will also be featuring her projects that she is currently working on, so keep an eye out for that!)
You see my internet friends, a few weekends ago, Phoeb and I woke up at the crack of dawn (well, 5:45am) and bundled ourselves into my tiny 2004 Hyandai Getz with scratches and dents on every visible surface, and made our way up to Kirribilli Markets, one of Sydney’s oldest and most popular markets, to host a stall at our first ever art market.
@flareypares and @pollysnell_art: well and truly making waves in the Sydney arts and crafts scene. Fuck yeah.
A bit of background on us and our art
To give this a bit of context, Phoeb and I started our art Instagram accounts in March 2019, when COVID stormed into our lives like a big black cloud of doom, leaving us living in the heavy lockdown in Melbourne, 11,000 miles away from our family and friends back in the UK. It’s not all doom and gloom though. We had each other, and it was the weirdest and cosiest time of my life, so I’m not complaining. Actual real life footage of me throughout the first few months of lockdown in 2020:
We both moved over to Australia within 3 months of each other two years ago. I left the UK on Boxing Day, and probably well and truly ruined Christmas like the selfish Gen Z I am. Our plan was to both live, work and travel as much as possible, something that was obviously pulled to a sudden halt when Covid kicked off, but we made it work, and I managed to take two months off work at the end of 2020 when restrictions were easing up over here in Australia, to travel the East Coast for a road trip together. (spring break WOOOO)
We have both always been “arty” I guess you could say, and painted in our spare time for fun, and we both needed to use this weird extra time at home to distract ourselves and become absorbed in a new dedicated hobby. And honestly, it was the best.
We’d sit there, ambient mood lighting set to perfection, with our snuggly blankets protecting us from Melbourne’s bizarrely sudden and turbulent winter weather changes, and paint to our heart’s content. Chatting shit, smoking spliffs and watching Tiger King. It was a simpler time.
We both set up our individual Instagram accounts (@pollysnell_art and @flareypares) to share our artwork and give us something to build alongside our new hobby. It served as the perfect distraction and project to put our energy into, with all the added time at home and no way of planning our next travels.
Just me with my blonde highlights posing with my framed paintings proud as punch:
This behaviour I later found out, was not at all uncommon. I came across so many articles online about people using their added energy on side projects, art side hustles and the development of hobbies they didn’t have time for before when they were “busy”. E.g. This article on Glamour UK, ‘What’s your Lockdown Side Hustle? Meet the millennials who started new businesses during the pandemic‘. I LOVE THIS ENERGY. People taking a bad situation and using is as a time to discover what they truly want to do, and build in their spare time. Combined with building up the confidence to share it with the world, and find a community of likeminded people online. It’s fkin sick.
At the time, back in Melbourne, I sold a few prints online and also sold 100 prints in bulk to a guy launching an online gift box subscription called “GiftnSend”, so as far as side hustles go, it wasn’t exactly a huge side income generator, but it was fun to do, and I enjoyed switching off and teaching myself new techniques. I subscribed to Skillshare (get 14 days of Skillshare for free by using my affiliate link!), and did online courses to learn new painting techniques, and how to do digital illustration on Procreate, and watched endless Youtube videos of other artists showing off their incredible sketchbooks.
Transparency is key
I’m very invested in making Massive Orange Book a transparent platform, with all our content we publish. By this, I mean going into detail about money, finances and how people physically make things happen, in the hope that it will spark an idea for someone trying something new and become a genuinely helpful source for info on le world wide web.
So, I’m going to explain exactly how much we spent, (or at least how much I spent, because we used different suppliers and made our own products etc) how much I made on the day, the pros and cons in general, and what we’re going to do next.
For anyone thinking of doing an art market, I hope you find this piece helpful. Every market is of course totally different, and everyone’s experience will be different, but putting yourself out there is such a good feeling, even if it all goes to shit on the day.
Our general experience…
Kirribilli Markets in Sydney are great. We did ours on the 9th May, so it was Mother’s Day in Australia, so there were lots of happy mums dotted around the place, and it gave it a nice vibe.
Here’s my side of the table, with all my female nude prints on display! I put framed ones at the back and then had my business cards and prints on these cute racks from Ikea.
According to some of the other stall holders who we chatted with throughout the day (or rather Phoeb did, she’s the social butterfly of the two of us), it was a slower day for Kirribilli, with them noting they’d sold less than usual. This gave us a vote of confidence that if we sold F*** all, it wasn’t even our fault. Ha.
Oh yeah FYI – always remember cellotape… this was Phoeb’s joy when she finally found some to borrow from another stallholder.
We were sat opposite a grumpy looking woman called Di. I know this because her stall was called ‘To Di For’, not because she came over and introduced herself. She was selling jars of jam, chutney and various pickled ingredients. She was sort of like a female version of the Berny meme, comfortably positioned in her camping chair for the entire day, absently working on her crossword puzzle. Barely even looking up when someone fingered her jars (– I say!)
I shouldn’t be rude actually, because she supplied us with endless entertainment throughout the entire day, as we made ourselves quite literally cry by whispering to each other her stall was looking “jam packed” or that the latest customer should simply hurry up and “take their pickle”, while quietly playing Christina Perri’s Jar of Hearts while holding back the tears (of laughter).
The fact of the matter is, her stall was jam packed. I’ve never seen a woman sell so much chutney in my adult life. We quickly decided that we’re in the wrong side hustle business and immediately Googled what sort of food and/or health and safety licence we’d need to sell pesto, jam and chutney of our own. Sounds like it’s council permission and potentially some sort of hygiene rating – all TBC. There may well be a part 2 of this article series, featuring chutney. Stay tuned.
Here’s Phoeb’s side of the stall table, with one section for all her colourful tie-dye bucket hats (perfect for festivals!) using her brother Charlie’s sick snail design, and then the other side of the front table for Phoeb’s own digital art prints:
The Costs
There’s actually quite a lot to think about when you’re setting up a market for the first time. You need to book your spot, get a tablecloth, display racks, frames, a sign for prices, plus getting your product printed or hand-making each item from scratch – it’s a big (but quite fun) ball ache to tell you the truth.
The easiest way to explain the costs is with a neat little list, and being the organised queen that I am, I already have this saved in the notes on my phone, so here you go:
- Booking the market stall at Kirribilli = $200 / $100 each
- Cost to get extra prints made ready for the market = $100 (I use this adorable little printing shop next to my work, owned by an elderly British couple who pretend I’m their daughter lol)
- Prices sign from Kmart = $13
- A4 plastic wallets x100 = $23.35
- A4 backing boards x100 = $45
- Business cards = $46 (so worth it, put my IG handle on there and gained quite a few new followers during and after the market)
- Card reader = $59 (seemed like such a sick idea at the time but we couldn’t get them set up so ended up selling it at another market)
- Racks/stands for prints = $10
- TOTAL INVESTMENT = $396.35
I only got 100 A4 prints printed in the end, which I sold for $20 each, or two for $30. I also had some 8 x 8 square prints left over, so I brought them with us too. I was going to get some A3 prints made too and sell these for $60 each or two for $50, and I also thought about getting some cute dinky A5 prints and sell these for $10 each, to create more of a price range so there was something for everyone. I do genuinely think this would really help generate some more sales, because I could tell some people were interested but not interested enough to part with $15-20. A tenner could have swayed them I reckon.
This time, costs were adding up and I didn’t want to go too far in the red, so I held off on printing different size prints to save money. Over the next few months, if we continue to do markets (which we do plan to do), I’m going to offer a wider range of artworks at different costs.
We also had an idea to gamify our stalls somehow, for example “Pick a note from the hat, whatever discounted price the note says, you can buy a print for this price”, or guess the number of sweets in the jar for a free print, or something like that, to encourage people to stay around the stall, get to know us and get people chatting. With the idea that they’ll fall in love with our personalities and buy our art for that reason and that reason alone.
The Profits
FYI – here’s our price list from the market:
- A4 Art Prints = $20 each or 2 for $30
- Square 8×8 Art Prints = $15 each
We both charged the same to keep it simple, and Phoeb charged $40 for her bucket hats. This is also a lot cheaper than I usually sell my prints for, but we wanted to start low to see how we went with it. I also often sell my prints for more online because I do free worldwide shipping to keep things simple.
So how much did I sell on the day, I hear you scream? Frankly, it’s not quite enough to retire early to The Bahamas. Very nearly, but not quite. In total, I sold 8 prints, making me a total of $125 Aus dollars. So, about £70.
Plus, if you read the paragraph above, you’ll know we actually spent about $400 in total setting up our art market side hustle, so in answer to this subheading, there wasn’t actually any profits at all. So, you might wonder why I’m so bloody happy about the whole thing…
BECAUSE WE STARTED.
You’ll often hear people say, the hardest part about anything is just getting started. And it’s so true, once you’ve done it, you can never anxiously convince yourself you can’t do it ever again, because you have successfully done it before. It happened. There’s nothing you or I can do about it.
Now we’ve done one market, I feel so excited about the idea of doing more, and as regularly as possible. Obviously the first one was going to set us back a bit, because we needed to get all the prints ready and buy props to set up our stall, but from now on, the only cost we’ll have is booking fees, and some markets are as cheap as $30, and I’m pretty sure some of the naf car boot sale type markets are free, you just have to rock up at 6am and bagsy a spot!
TO SUM UP:
To sum up: if you’re thinking about doing an art market, get your shit and your kit together and JUST DO IT. We had such a laugh, and although this one didn’t make us millionaires, it’s the start of something for us, and has given us the confidence to do these regularly and for that I am so grateful.
Another point I’d like to make, and I don’t want to be a soppy bitch, but doing it with Phoeb was what made it fun. If you have a mate that also makes something, buddy up and plan a market together. It splits all costs in half and makes the day about 1,000,000,000 times more interesting. Endless opportunities to people watch and giggle about life’s great weirdos, including ourselves of course.
Thanks for reading, you are a fantastic human being.
P x
