Blog Categories

How to price handmade products for real profit — recipe costing, margin vs. markup, wholesale pricing, and per-craft guides covering candles, soap, pottery, jewelry, sewing, woodshop, and more.

Practical inventory management for makers — SKU naming, reorder points, multi-location stock, shelf life and shrinkage, stocktakes, and when to graduate from a spreadsheet.

What the law actually requires — cottage food rules by state (CA, FL, NY, PA, TX), sales tax nexus, hot sauce acidification, pet treat labeling, herbal-product shelf life, and more.

How to run production cleanly — batch and lot tracking, recipe costing, yield management, seasonal production runs, and operations playbooks for soap makers, bakers, roasters, ice cream producers, and tabletop publishers.

The money side of a maker business — cash flow for seasonal sellers, what COGS actually means, equipment depreciation, shrinking margins, and when the IRS starts treating your hobby like a business.

Where and how to sell — farmers market profitability, juried show break-even math, wholesale account audits, smartphone product photography, and the real cost anatomy of every shipped package.

Beyond solo — when to hire your first helper, what changes when you go from 10 to 100 orders a month, and the industry context (statistics, history, trends) that shapes the modern maker economy.

Selling files instead of physical goods — version tracking for Notion and template sellers, the real cost math behind print-on-demand, and how to "inventory" digital products that have nothing on the shelf.