vi141009 Determining market size
Twelve niche markets can’t lose
A dozen reasons that the Seattle Printmakers Center will be self-sustaining
When you listen to the fundraising campaigns of the local NPR
affiliate, KUOW, I frequently hear the phrase, “self sustaining,” and I smile
inwardly because it’s an oxymoron. If the station were self-sustaining as they
say, then why are they urging listener to send money?
In the fourth year of my project making Halfwood Presses, I
wrote a book titled, “Halfwood Press, the story.” In it I wanted to document
what happened to bring about this design and I wanted to tell the story in
terms of the first thirty people who bought the presses. I wanted to tell my
story, too and I tried to make it complete in the style of an interview.
About midway through the story, I wove in an account of my
attempt to estimate the size of the market for the presses. I was thinking that
maybe the press could be a real business; I could make a salary! Or, in the
best of all worlds, grow the business until I could sell it and retire to my
Big Project. How I determined the size of the market was according to the
demographics represented by those thirty owners of the presses—what gender,
what age spectrum, educational background, income level, etc.
My conclusion was, in 2008, that 400,000 people would buy the
Halfwood Press line if they knew about it. If I were a real company, with a
sales staff, a marketing machine, and all the back-office support it takes a
small business to grow and sustain itself and the people who worked there, then
those 400,000 potential customers would, indeed, know about and want one of the
Halfwood Presses. Even more than presses, in fact, I have ideas for
accessorizing the press—even to the point of products designed for niche
markets within the arts and education industry.
This analysis and my book never took me anywhere. Although I
attended startup meetings, workshops, and MeetUps where I hoped to find a
co-founder with a business mind, the number, 400,000 customers in the United
States alone, had no impact (and, ever hopeful, I continue to go to these
meetings). As a designer and innovator in my field, I hold my own, but as a
promoter of business development and growth, I can’t seem to cut it.
Yet, I am still taking the approach I took in 2008 as I now work
on determining the market size for the Halfwood Press line and apply the method
to Seattle Printmakers Center. In statistical analysis, as this work is known, a
person takes a perspective, somewhat like an artist decides on a point of view.
You can apply this to almost any kind of art—story telling, photography, screen
writing, etc. My point of view is that of an educator. Education has the
driver’s seat when it comes to art in my world. Like a carpenter sees every
tool as a potential hammer, every business—to a teacher—takes on an aspect like
an educational experience.
Therefore, I took my experience as a college teacher as my
point of view in arriving at the 400,000 number for potential press purchasers.
In other words, in the 19 years I taught, I asked, “To how many students did I
teach printmaking? How many colleges were there across the country during those
19 years, with teachers like me and students like the ones at the University of
Washington?”
The thirty people who bought the Halfwood Presses had, generally
speaking, some education in printmaking, and they liked
printmaking—particularly intaglio printmaking—well enough to shell out hundreds
or thousands of dollars to purchase and, in other countries, pay the taxes and
shipping costs half way around the world. It worked for thirty people.
Another generation of students had continued to go to college
after I left campus in 1985, so at the time I did my market analysis in 2008,
therefore the number of students who took printmaking and liked it about
doubled over what it had been in my limited experience. That’s how I concluded
my exercise and came up with 400,000.
It has been six years since my 2008 arithmetic. I wonder what
it is today, in 2014?
It makes me think, but I prefer not to do the arithmetic
again. It was sufficient for me, in 2008, to be encouraged and go on for
another six year despite that I got nowhere with business acquaintances, trying
to get the attention of a co-founder who has a business mind and who is as
passionate about education and technology in the arts as I am.
Rather, I will bundle the market analysis of the Halfwood
Press line with the niche markets that go along with printmaking. For example, there
will be the business of publishing in and about prints, printmaking and
printmakers—similar to the two European legacy magazines on paper and the one
in the US, the Journal of the Print World. The publishing niche will be another
one of the dozen income streams that will sustain the Seattle Printmakers
Center.
(Can you speculate on what enterprise will be the biggest advertising
customer in the publications—both in paper and a digital, online magazine—that
come out of the Seattle Printmakers Center publishing component?)
Therefore, I submit that with a development team made up of
people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers—and from the perspective of
education—the Seattle Printmakers Center will truly be self-sustaining as it is
fed by a dozen income streams from the components comprising the Center. We, at
the center, will not have annual fundraising drives and claim that we are
self-sustaining. Our customers will sustain us for producing good products and
services.
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