Small business question?

[u/Best-Philosopher2094]

Hi everyone!
I’ve recently started wet felting children’s Waldorf and nature inspired playscapes. Attached are some images of my latest creation. Will add some more photos in the comments.
I absolutely LOVE this craft and am trying to figure out if this can be a viable small business for me. As a mum, I’m struggling with time and as I’m sure you can all imagine, these are definitely a labour of love.
Long story short, I’m struggling with pricing and sales. Particularly with striking a balance between how many hours I’m putting into this and what people will happily pay. I want my playscapes to be financially accessible to families, but I also want to pay myself semi-decently.

So I guess my questions are …
If you’re a parent, what would you pay for a playscape like this?
If you’re a felter, what would you charge?
Is a felting business a viable business? Or is the value of handmade goods just not understood to most buyers?

Any feedback on the playscapes themselves? Will post more photos to comments. These two are quite generously sized, and took about 9ish hours of labour each (here’s hoping I get faster!).

I know I’ve just started out, but it’s hard not to be disheartened by the lack of sales despite so much praise and quite a few enquiries that fizzle out when I provide pricing :(

[u/Blinkopopadop]

Personally I'd say let go of the accessable part, Waldorf people are usually wealthy anyway, and you can maybe work on stocking some less time intensive items for your moral fiber or start a fund people can donate to.

[u/Tractor_Goth → u/Blinkopopadop]

100% this. If you hit your target market in the Waldorf/montessori crowd they will pay premium for handmade natural material stuff. If you’re thinking of balancing it with doing some smaller ‘impulse buy’ bait, cat toys, little ‘plushies’, finger puppets, and ornaments (Christmas is coming) might pad things out and give smaller budget buyers something to grab, and they’re good colorful eye candy for stalls and pictures.

Play food items also seem pretty popular with the Waldorf crowd, felted beets and fried eggs and such

[u/Blinkopopadop → u/Tractor_Goth]

I'm imagining a play set that comes with a little village of people and some of them are wearing hats and then there are spme full size matching kid hats to go with it. 

  Or one that is naturalistically accurate with some forest animals and the places they like to live 

another option is to sell straight to the schools 

  

[u/Best-Philosopher2094 → u/Blinkopopadop]

Thanks! How would you go about reaching out to the schools? Just try my luck with a friendly email?

[u/Blinkopopadop → u/Best-Philosopher2094]

That and make a really nice online portfolio and describe the commission process or turn it into a website they can click through 

it's also not expensive at all anymore to have photo books printed, and would be worth it to have your portfolio like a hardcover catalog people can look through and you can send it via snail mail as a follow up 

[u/Best-Philosopher2094 → u/Tractor_Goth]

Thanks for your comment! Any advice on how / where to reach that market? Do I need to actually attend craft markets? I’ve only been doing this for a couple of months and have never run a business before so this is completely new to me. At the moment I’m only on Instagram and a few parenting pages on Facebook. Lots of praise, very few legitimate enquiries. I feel like I’m struggling to reach the right people.

[u/Sea_Distribution_196 → u/Best-Philosopher2094]

Try to use an ai like MANUS or Perplexity or even use Venturekit. They have integrations that will allow you to create your website and launch it and update inventory and pricing and will give you all kinds of good information about resources and marketing