Should I sell wholesale as a maker?

Only if your price can survive being cut roughly in half and your process can survive making the same thing over and over, and for a lot of makers the honest answer to one or both of those is no, or not yet. Wholesale is a proper route, plenty of makers build lovely steady businesses on it, but it is a different business from the one you have rather than a bigger version of it, and the difference lives almost entirely in the numbers.

I want to start with why the question comes up at all, because it almost never comes up cold. It comes up because a shop emailed. Somebody with a till and a shopfront looked at your work and asked for 30 of them, and that email lands like being picked, like the moment your little business becomes a real business. I completely understand why makers say yes on the spot and work the details out later, and the details are exactly where this goes wrong.

How does wholesale pricing actually work?

A shop typically buys at around half your retail price, sometimes a little more, sometimes less, and then sells at the same price you do. So the whole question of whether wholesale works for you comes down to one sum: at half the money, does the piece still cover its materials and pay you properly for the hours in it?

If your retail price only just works, half of it does not work at all, and no amount of goodwill from a lovely stockist changes the arithmetic. I've written before about pricing backwards from what the market will pay, and wholesale is where that method stops being a nice idea and starts being the thing that saves you, because a price with proper margin built in can afford to be halved. A price built on what felt fair at the craft fair usually can't.

Say your bag retails at £48. The shop pays you £24, materials cost £10, and that leaves £14 for however long the bag takes to make. If it takes 2 hours, you've just agreed to work for £7 an hour, 30 times over, and you did it feeling flattered.

Doesn't the volume make up for the lower price?

This is the belief that catches makers out, so it's worth being really clear about why it fails. Volume drops costs in a factory because the machines and the set-up get spread across more units. Your costs are mostly your hands, and hands do not get cheaper with volume, so the 30th bag takes about as long as the 1st did.

Materials get a bit cheaper when you buy in bulk, I'll give you that, and you get faster with repetition, a bit. But those are small savings shaved off the edges, and the labour sitting in the middle, which is the biggest cost you have, stays exactly where it was. If the sum doesn't work on 1 bag, it doesn't quietly start working on 30.

What will a shop actually expect from me?

More than most makers realise, though none of it is unfair once you see it from the shop's side. The first expectation is consistency. A shop is buying 30 identical items, and making every one exactly the same is a genuinely different craft from making each one slightly special, which is the craft most of us actually fell in love with.

Then there are lead times you can hold, because the shop has planned its season around your delivery date and a late order costs you the account. There's saying no when your capacity is full, which is much harder than it sounds when the order is flattering. And there are terms agreed in writing before anything gets made: prices, quantities, the delivery date, and when you get paid, because shops often pay 30 days after delivery, sometimes 60.

That last bit is the one that quietly sinks people. You buy all the materials up front, spend weeks making, deliver, and then wait a month or two for the money. If you don't have the cash to carry that gap, a big wholesale order can put a profitable business on the floor.

Two small things you won't know exist until a buyer asks, and I'd rather you heard them here first. A line sheet is a simple catalogue of what you offer at wholesale, one photo per item with its name and wholesale price. A minimum order is the smallest order you'll accept, set high enough that the admin is worth doing. Both fit on a page, and having them ready is most of what looking professional means to a shop.

I learned the systems side of this in my own craft supplies business. It was a side hustle for about a year and I never really took it seriously, and then I was made redundant and it suddenly had to be the whole thing, because there was nowhere else for the money to come from. I poured myself into it and made it work, and the lesson that stuck was that effort on its own doesn't hold. You have to build systems, or the whole thing runs away with itself. Wholesale is precisely where that bites, because it is repetition at volume with somebody else's deadline attached, and loving your craft does not get 30 identical items out of the door on time. A making schedule and a proper materials list... those do.

Is wholesale worth it for a handmade business?

For the right maker with the right margins, genuinely yes. Predictable repeat orders you can plan a month around, no marketing effort per sale, somebody else doing the selling while you make, and a shop full of customers meeting your work who would never have found you online. That's a calmer way to earn than refreshing your stats, and I know makers who run their whole business on it happily.

But there's one thing to notice before you sign anything, and it's the one nobody mentions. Wholesale hands your customer relationship to somebody else all over again. The people buying your work in that shop are the shop's customers, they can't hear about your next collection, and if the shop stops ordering next season, every one of them disappears with it. Which can be a perfectly sensible trade, you've swapped one middleman for another and at least this one buys 30 at a time. It's the same position Etsy sellers are in with repeat customers, just wearing a nicer apron. The question worth sitting with is what happens when a stockist stops ordering, and whether you'd have any way at all of reaching the people who loved your work enough to buy it.

And if you run the numbers and the answer is no, or not yet, I'd like you to hear that as a strategy rather than a failure of ambition. Keeping every sale at full retail price, with the customer's name attached to it, is a completely legitimate way to build a maker business, and deciding that on purpose puts you ahead of most people who said yes to the flattering email.

Whichever way you go, the thing that protects you is having customers you can reach yourself. I've put the starting point into a free email course called 7 Days to Shift Your Shop, one short email a day for a week, on moving from waiting to be found to launching to people who already care. Wholesale or not, that list is yours, and no stockist can take it with them when they go.

The shop's customers are the shop's customers, and the day they stop ordering, you find out how many of them ever knew your name