Selling Miniatures

As I told before, I had no experience. Mainly, I had no experience in pricing. The clay is cheap. I could make more than 100 miniatures expending only 1 dollar with the clay. The ink also was not expensive. If I buy a small can of each color, I could paint during months. The solvents as Tinner and the brushes were the most expensive, but still not so bad. I would spend so few, that my dad was used to say that I turned earth (the natural clay) in cash!

Also, the value of the miniature had to come from the time I need to make each piece and my skills. But not only this... There are other things that we have to account as: if the miniature is the one of a kind, if I am a known artist or not and, mainly, how much the people is willing to pay.

But 30 years ago I didn't know about it. My husband sold a lot of miniatures to the stores, but we didn't know really how much we could ask for each miniature. Only when we saw the prices of my miniatures in the stores windows, we had the idea of how much we could sell them. I was amazed because the prices were like 5 times higher than we had asked. We knew that the prices would be higher at the stores, but not so much.

So, I realized that I could earn about 5 times more if I had sold the miniatures directly to the clients. That is why we did stop of selling to the stores and started looking for clients only. We get a sales person: a college student, friend of us, that sold a lot of miniatures in the Federal University of the Rio de Janeiro. My mom also sold a lot for us, and she didn't ask anything to do this job for us. Friends of my mom sold for us too, asking nothing to do it. We sold to neighbors, relatives and friends.

We also started participating of fairs, shows and events. Every Sunday, my husband was going to a turistic and historical town in the mountains close to Rio de Janeiro called Petrópolis (that means the "Town of Pedro" because the king Don Pedro II and his family were used to have vacations there a century ago). It is a charming town and go there to sell is like to have a kind of short vacation too. The sales in this place was like to earn a week paycheck. We could live the week with that money we earnt on the Sundays.

The only problem about fairs is the weather. If the weather was bad, we didn't get much. But, fortunately, the weather in Rio de Janeiro state is like to have summer during the entire year. Life was good.

PS.: Dear readers (if there is someone awake yet), next post I will tell you why I thought we were like the North American indians...