Page 81 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

hideous art moderne which cluttered up the country a few years back.
Beware of any designs that border on that short-lived “epidemic” in house
furnishings. In a number of magazines you will note a tendency toward the
“Victorian” in furnishings. However, this style of ornate furniture and
decoration will undoubtedly prove to be more or less of a fad. We live in a
modern, machine age and a modern style of design seems to be more fitting.
The old colonial type of furniture and decoration is in demand today, but
even the colonial is being produced by manufacturers in keeping with the
modern lack of ornamentation and simplified lines.

Suiting Your Product to Your Market

What is your community like? Is it a suburban section where people are
interested in garden furniture, rose trellises, fireplace equipment, bird houses,
dog kennels, door knockers, sun dials, hooked rugs, handmade quilts,
handmade furniture, pottery and other beautiful things for their homes and
gardens? Perhaps your community is an apartment district, where people
have little time to make good things to eat. Try selling your bread, or cake, or
doughnuts, or baked beans to these householders. Or your painted tin ash
trays, parchment lamp shades, cocktail tables may suit their fancy. If a great
number of children live in your community, whose parents have medium to
good incomes, then toys, nursery furniture, colored cutouts of animals, and
similar projects may be money-makers.

When your product is ready for the market, it can be sold through the gift
shops, the woman’s exchange, through advertisements in your neighborhood
newspaper, by word-of-mouth advertising, by opening a small shop in your
home or in an inexpensive location, or by taking space in a successful shop
selling something unlike your product. You may also be successful selling it
house to house. If it is possible at all, have your product on display in some
spot where people shop. Let people know what you are making—tell your
merchant, your neighbors, people you talk to on the street car or at a ball
game, the service station attendant, your doctor, the milkman—in fact, tell
the world. You can’t expect people to search you out—you must go to them
with your product.