Making Something Out of Nothing. What’s Next?

A friend of mine used to say that if there was and easy way, or a hard way, to do something… I will always choose the hard way.

Last fall I decided to try being a vendor at the Portland Saturday Market. Partly just to see if I could actually sell my products, but partly to get feedback about the whole wine rack idea, examples of my design ideas and craftsmanship. I told myself I would give it a year to see how the Market could work for me. If I didn’t try, I wouldn’t really know how it worked.

Above: A piece of fire wood I pulled from a stack. It’s some kind of fruit wood, maybe Apple, but could be from a Plum or Pear tree. Below: I cut some highly figured pieces of Black Walnut, this Apple log and contrasting pieces of Alder. then I cut a tongue and groove with my IPM Machine on a router table with up-cut solid carbide spiral bit.

The red and blue crayon marks are to tell me to route either a tongue or groove.

I tried to organize the pieces so that the grain pattern continues in order through contrasting light/dark pattern.

This experiment in joinery has one more row than the first top I made two months ago. People seeing this first wine rack top said, “Look Honey, we could play chess and drink wine!” I hadn’t even thought of that in terms of  it’s graphic representation. I was just trying to make a big top out of small scraps of wood. This time around I added another row to make it look more like a real chess/checker board. I would need two additional rows to actually play a game on it, but this time it looks more like a game board. Because the tops are rectangular, the “squares” wouldn’t turn out square.

It is very time-consuming and tedious to machine parts and glue this up. Adding two more rows so it was a real game board would just add more work.

I still might try it some day but I need to drop back and punt as they say. For me the game is to design things around “FREE” material. It would be too easy to design beautiful, complicated woodworking ideas and just go to the lumber yard and buy expensive, highly figured exotic materials. In the end, I still need to sell them. That is the trick.

One of my neighbors at the shop gave me a two huge planks of some kind of tropical hardwood. He got it from a friend that works at a big wholesale lumber importer. In an inventory they found three big planks covered in dust at the back of the warehouse. Not knowing where the lumber came from or what it was, the friend gave it to my neighbor, who after a while had no use for it. So, it came to me. It is very hard, heavy and dense beautiful material. I used it for legs and rather than cut up big pieces of material, I used off-cuts and rips of Alder wood from my furniture building neighbors to make the racks.

KTW #1610a

It was a beautiful warm summer Saturday and the Market was pretty packed. Just as I hoped, hundreds of people were sucked into my little experiment! I can’t say it enough… If I had a nickel for every person that rubbed the tops, I wouldn’t have to sell them!!! Literally hundreds of people stopped to look at these two pieces and tell me that my craftsmanship was like art work. Great, just what I don’t need to hear anymore.

KTW #1610b

Above: You can see my first “checker board” top in the back. In close to three months, I still haven’t been able to sell it. Despite being told repeatedly that my prices were “very reasonable” or “too cheap”. I chopped fifty bucks off the price of it this day and still didn’t sell it! I tagged the two new pieces at $175 and reduced the prices of everything else at least $25. Very few folks looked at my other pieces or the checker topped piece in back for $125. I handed out a huge stack of business cards, flyers and talked to more people than I can remember about building them custom racks. Not only did I not sell one thing all day, but I never got a single call or e-mail for custom work.

KTW 1610b detail of top

Above: Traditionally styled bread board ends made from Sapele, and the through tenons are Australian Lacewood.

So, I’m coming up on one year of doing the Portland Saturday Market. What have I learned? Expensive lessons:

#1  The only people who are making money at the PSM is the PSM.

#2  Most of the PSM vendors are barely scraping by and many of vendors I talk to are going to quit.

#3  The public comes to the Portland Saturday Market just for cheap entertainment and the social hang out, not to actually buy anything. The economy in Portland is destroyed. If anybody has a job or any money… they ain’t spending it!!

#4  The people who run the Market have a hard task in trying to deal with a City hall and other public agencies that don’t really care to help the Market out. The Vendors who should care about the future of the Market and Market policy, don’t care at all. Having attended the last two membership members meetings with maybe twenty of the same long time vendors in attendance, and the three or four hundred vendors that show up each week conspicuously absent… apathetic would be a good description.

#5  If participation in the market, got my name/brand out there and worked as an advertising tool, it might be worth paying the monthly membership fee, daily booth fees. But to work all week, then get up early Saturday, set up the booth stand there all day, then pack up and go home for a twelve-hour day after not selling one thing to cover the cost of gas and lunch… I must be insane!

#6  I can’t afford to do the Market any more. The half-assed good Market days I had were off set by three bad days. It doesn’t look like this is the right venue for my endeavour. The PSM organizers don’t really care about me or most of the vendors for that matter. They know that there is no shortage of broke, laid off, out of unemployment insurance fools, that will give the direct marketing thing a shot.

The decision whether I should try to continue doing the Market is made for me. It’s not working for me anyway I slice it. I’m sure that there are other things I can try or do… but what ever it is, it needs to be easier.

Onward…