How many products should I launch at once?

Fewer than you think, in more depth than feels comfortable. For most makers that means somewhere between 4 and 8 pieces that belong to one clear idea, and the honest ceiling is set by what you can make, photograph, list, pack and post while the rest of your life carries on, which is a smaller number than the one currently in your head.

Both fears inside this question are real, and they pull in opposite directions, which is why it never settles on its own. Launch too little and it might look thin, like nobody should bother turning up for it. Launch too much and you cannot make it all, let alone photograph it properly, and I've felt both pulls at once over a fabric collection, including one launch that sold out in about an hour and cost me a week of extra work, which I'll get to.

Is 6 products enough for a launch?

Yes, if the 6 belong together. A collection wants a reason to exist, one idea you can introduce in a single sentence, because 12 new things is not something anyone can get excited about, whereas one clear idea with 6 pieces in it is a thing a customer can picture and start wanting before she's seen a single photo.

The one-sentence test does most of the work here. If you cannot describe the launch in one sentence, it's probably 2 launches wearing one date, and splitting them gives you 2 moments of attention instead of one muddled one.

Fewer pieces also means each one gets real attention. Proper photographs in decent window light, a description that actually says something, its own little moment in the run-up. 15 pieces means the last few get photographed at 9pm under the kitchen bulb and listed in a hurry, and those are exactly the ones that sit.

Can I launch too many products at once?

Easily, and the buyer feels it before you do. Adding more pieces feels like insurance, because surely more options means more chances that something suits her, but past a certain point more choice makes the deciding harder rather than easier.

The buyer who cannot pick between 4 things she likes does not buy 4 things. She decides to have a think and come back later, and later has a way of not arriving. A smaller collection where the choosing is easy will quietly outsell a bigger one where every option argues with the others.

There's a cost on your side of the counter too. You cannot give 15 pieces a moment each in the run-up, so the collection ends up introduced as a job lot, and a job lot is exactly the thin, forgettable launch you were trying to avoid by making more.

How do I work out how many I can actually make?

Count the making hours first, because everyone counts those. Then add the hours almost nobody counts: photographing each piece, writing each listing, sourcing the boxes and tissue, packing every order that comes in, standing in the post office queue. Then add the hours your life has already spoken for, because the school run and the day job and the orders from last month do not step politely aside for launch week.

Say each piece takes 4 hours to make. 12 pieces is 48 hours, and on paper that looks doable across a few weeks. Add a proper photography session, 12 listings that each need writing, and the packing of everything that sells, and you're closer to 70 hours, sitting inside weeks that already contained everything your weeks normally contain.

The first sum is the easy one to do and the rest is the one that gets skipped, which is how anybody ends up committed to 15 pieces in a month that had room for 8.

And whatever number you land on, I'd hold a little back on purpose. That's a strategy, not a failure of nerve, because a piece that sells out can come back, and a restock is a second moment of attention you get for free. A piece nobody wanted is stock you walk past every day, quietly asking what happened.

Is selling out fast a good thing?

Everyone assumes so, and I used to. One of my first launches sold out in about an hour. I'd priced the collection about 10% under everyone else, in a proper fog of baby brain, which is its own mistake with its own post and part of why it went that fast, and for that first hour it felt like the dream.

Then the messages started. A queue of disappointed customers who had wanted it and couldn't buy it, and the part that still bothers me is that my customers were makers themselves. Their own customers were asking for those fabrics, so running out left them saying no in their own shops, which is a horrible thing to realise you've caused for the exact people who love your work most.

I spent the rest of that week answering messages about when it was coming back, extra work I had made entirely for myself, and none of it felt like winning. Sold out in an hour mostly means the people who wanted it most got nothing.

Which is where I finally noticed the question hiding underneath this one. Every version of how many products is really a question about how many people are waiting. 6 pieces is thin if nobody knew the launch was coming, and plenty if 40 people have watched the collection come together for a month and already picked their favourite.

But have you considered that you can know roughly how many are waiting before you decide how much to make? The run-up tells you, if you let it. Show the pieces as they come together and notice who replies and who asks for the date, and a Christmas collection with a proper 45 day runway does exactly this, the interest during the run-up becoming your order book before a single thing is finished.

Gathering those waiting people in the first place, and what to send them so a launch opens to a warm little crowd instead of silence, is more than one post can hold. That's what the Handmade Launch System is, the 6 weeks in front of the date rather than the day itself.

The launch that sold out in an hour had a waiting list all along. I just found out about it a week too late, one message at a time