Selling Rosaries?

[GeorgiiMichael]

Do any of you rosary makers sell your rosaries on Etsy? How about somewhere else? Just in your parishes? How busy are you able to stay selling them?

I'm about to have a lot of free time seeing as my temporary job is almost over (don't feel sorry for me, I'm counting down the days until I get out) and so I'm trying to decide how to have some sort of cash flow. It's unlikely that I'll be able to make $15 an hour making rosaries (unless I can just get a ton of orders), but I'd still like to do something productive and at least somewhat lucrative with my free time.

Any other input/ideas? Thanks!

[CatherineM]

I give as many away as I sell, and the ones I sell usually go for the cost of materials. So I've never made a mortgage payment.

[Nihil Obstat]

The raw material cost is pretty steep on rosaries unless (at least so I imagine) you are buying in bulk quantities.

[Nola Seminarian]

I'm trying to sell some at the current moment to help with a trip I'm taking to a monastery but nobody is biting

[Nola Seminarian]

Then again, I can only make twine ones so that might be why

[CatherineM]

My most popular ones right now are lanyards for ID cards. Women here have started wearing nice bead models instead of the strap things. I just make the lanyard a rosary. Kind of hidden in plain sight.

[Basilisa Marie]

I think an Etsy site is a good idea, but you might have to find a way to advertise it to get more traffic. Would a Catholic bookstore be interested in selling your hand-made rosaries for a commission? Or have a little slot of your business cards for customers by the register? The ones you make are really high quality, and people generally like the idea of a rosary being hand-made. Or at least I do.

Edited September 14, 2012 by Basilisa Marie

[arfink]

Personally, I would avoid Etsy because of the KILLER fees. Instead I would use these folks:

www.bigcartel.com

They are who I am getting my webstore hosted through. That way you won't have to pay any extra fees besides Paypal, especially if you only want to sell a handful of rosary types. 5 product types may be listed and an unlimited number of each product type sold for no fee whatsoever, and the store is exclusive to you. No commission fees.

As an example:
You want to sell rosaries in a variety of colors. This would be 1 product type (knotted rosary, say) and you could set up options for colors under the one product type, and then you tell it how many you have to sell. You can sell as many as you want with no fees. Then say you want another type, say, beaded rosaries, you would make a 2nd product type, and so on. You get 5 of these product listings for free.

Pretty sweet setup if you ask me.

[GeorgiiMichael]

arfink, do they allow for custom orders? Say I had a bunch of different colored beads, crucifixes, centers, etc, but they would all go into making the same style rosary, would they be able to handle that as the same product listing?

[arfink]

[quote name='GeorgiiMichael' timestamp='1347672014' post='2482484']
arfink, do they allow for custom orders? Say I had a bunch of different colored beads, crucifixes, centers, etc, but they would all go into making the same style rosary, would they be able to handle that as the same product listing?
[/quote]

I think so, but I'm not sure how to make that happen. Given their website is free you might poke around and see what you can do with it. Customers can leave you comments on their order to specify how they want it made, so if you were charging the same for all the different pieces then it would work out OK I think.

[GeorgiiMichael]

Hmm, thanks. I think I'll give it a shot tomorrow when I have a bit more time (and energy) to do some poking around. I'll be sure to post a link when I get it up and running. I've got some pretty uniquely styled rosaries that my friends have really loved so I think I might be able to do okay.