When you set up a company you hold every post in it at once. That is quite natural. Let me try to list those roles from my own point of view:
* Designer and pattern maker: all the models are my own creation, the patterns constructed, put into production 🙂
* Maker, that is the one who sews, knits, embroiders and whatever else. Be it fabric, thermantine, leather or wool. I manage with all of it. Even with designing my own logo, business cards, advertisements and other such things.
* Salesperson, including the administrator of my own website, keeper of the Etsy shop, "specialist" in Facebook and other social media. I am not sitting here in the middle of the night for my own amusement, scribbling texts together. It is so that there is lively activity on the website and so that a Google search for the keywords that matter to me throws up my page first. Thank you to those of you who can be bothered to read this. 🙂
* Supplier and transporter. Always quick to find cheaper materials and to fetch them all myself. A couple of times I have used a courier service. But it is not the most practical option. When I ordered granules for beanbags by courier, for instance, I paid nearly a third of the product's own price for transport. But what can you do when your own car is simply too small. With materials it is like this: large manufacturers can buy at wholesale prices, that is fabrics by the roll. A tiny craftsperson has to pay the full whack for everything, always by the metre. Or in grams and pieces. Look, I recently bought wadding by the roll. Now half the room is taken up by a roll of wadding. The child has no room left to play button games on the studio floor.
* Packer, including designer of the packaging and product labels, the one who runs back and forth to the post office and so on.
* Bookkeeper, including budget setter and finance director. Invoices, quotations, stock records (yes, there are those too) and so on.
* Photographer and photo editor, that is product photographs. I am a long way from being a specialist in that field. But the more you learn, the more foolish you feel 🙂
And at some point you realise that you have to start buying in services somewhere. Either the time for production gets too scarce, or a penny accumulates that you would like to spend on making your life easier. It is a little early to talk about a spare penny while I still cannot pay myself a wage and there is nothing left to take out as dividends either.
But being happy in your work and what you do is already HAPPINESS in itself.
On using a photographer's services.
This time, once the latest collection of quilts was finished, I decided to use the services of a professional photographer. These were such special pieces for me that I could hardly bear to hand them over to the client at all. So I thought up a way to delay it. I asked for extra time to record properly the piece of patchwork consisting of four quilts and four cushion covers.
I picked out a few of the nearest photographers and got in touch. Among them Terje Altonen of the SeeSee Photo Studio. Because my young family have been going to her with the children for several years and those photographs are simply wonderful. You look and look and go on looking. 🙂
In fact the initial choosing took quite a long time, far longer than I reckoned. I studied the product photography galleries on the websites of the town's photographers, but found nothing at anyone's that resembled my work. Everyone's product photographs were limited to tiny odds and ends and, as a rule, a web shop style white background. I wanted to find something new and inspiring. Or perhaps simply evidence that pictures like this are taken at all. Or what style I might order the pictures in. And to see a rough price. Nothing at all.
So I asked a couple of photographers for quotations, explaining my wishes a little. I reckoned I would need some 20 to 25 photographs in all. The offers were fairly comparable and matched roughly the price list of a 1 to 1.5 hour photo session. I took the risk of paying out that money, even though for me it is the price of more than a week's work. But that is a subject of its own, that is, the price sensitivity of people at home when it comes to craft. Every Estonian can do everything themselves, after all 🙂
In the end I decided on the very photo studio that has taken such beautiful pictures of my young ones: SeeSee Photo Studio and Terje Altonen.
I was there at the shoot myself, folding the pieces open and closed, arranging labels and folds, helping to place the quilts and cushions and keeping track of the views I needed. The result is very beautiful, with a breath of nostalgia about it, exactly as I had hoped to see it in my mind's eye.
These photographs are something valuable for me, which I can go on using successfully to promote my work.
I have added a selection of the photographs sent to me to my portfolio page of large quilts. Take a look and applaud away. We will hear it, both I and the photographer 🙂
