One of the residents of the village I live in has decided to start up a "Barrow" which is essentially a small village shop but without the overheads. As such, there was a desire to get a range of products onto the barrow with which to sell to the local population and passing trade. It is staffed entirely by volunteers and family of the owner, meaning there are almost no costs apart from stock.
There are a variety of different products which are available on it, like cakes, pies, crumbles, potatoes, leeks and other vegetables. In addition to this there is ice cream upon request. This is quite lucrative; I don't know exactly how much is made, but at a guess the margins are 25% or more. On the products that I sold there was a margin of 50% which I think is quite good.
There was a village fete in which there was a good turnover, it was a fundraiser for the school, but the owner took her barrow and made a decent return, taking around £120 for around 3 hours of selling. The majority of the turnover came from the sale of ice-cream, as it was I very nice day.
I talked to the owner, and I sold some high quality images to her of the local area. I got them for free through a promotional deal, but they were worth £0.30 per image. I sold them to her for £0.50, and then they were sold on for a £1 each. They were nice images which were "6x"4.5 printed in a mixture of high gloss, matte, high gloss with boarder, matte with boarder.
One of them looked like this:(without the Proof)
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| An example of one of my images |
In addition to the images I made a custom wire stand for them. This was so that the images could be displayed in the best way so that could be sold. At only a week in, the success of their sale is to be determined. Hopefully they sell well and make a profit for the Barrow owner. I did only make £15 from the sale of these images, but it was just a test run to see if it is viable.
I plan to make a collection of postcards, of which to sell as the owner was very keen to have post cards rather than just images, so I am going to look into making those instead as better margins that will sell for a lower price.
One of the ideas I have is that I think I might take a variety of images, maybe 4 different ones from four different seasons to give a nice collection of postcards, maybe do a bundle for £2.50, with a cost price of only £0.84 including delivery. I might also take pictures of local features like the collection of hand pumps that are dotted around the village and compose them into a special edition image.
I have also looked around the market in my local town. I was surprised at it's small size, and how cluttered and tight for space it was. However I think there might be potential. More on that next week.
Until next week,
Thanks for reading!
