Page 91 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

five mats. That cleaned me out of mats and out of tires, too. I got another
order for one hundred and thirty feet of mat from a chain of grocery stores the
next day, and had to scour around town to find old tires.”

James Hadley paid five cents each for the old tires, and got an average of
three square feet of matting from each tire. He sold the mats at seventy cents
a square foot. His total cost including production cost and overhead was
twenty-five cents a square foot, giving him a net profit of forty-five cents.
With the mat-making equipment he was able to turn out three hundred square
feet of matting daily. Operating thus for the first ten months gave Hadley a
profit of more than a thousand dollars.

There is an unlimited field for mats made from old tires in most cities.
Laundries, taverns, roadhouses, saloons, cemeteries, churches, office
buildings, machine tool manufacturers, electric power houses, dry cleaning
plants, stores, restaurants, printing plants, factories of all kinds, and every
home, are prospects for sales. The mat-making machine is small and operates
on house electric current from an ordinary light bulb. It may be set up in your
basement, or some unused room. The mats turned out are unusually durable,
being woven together with heavy spring steel wire.

CommunityMarketingofHandicrafts

O

NE of the difficulties sometimes experienced by those who make things to
sell is that they are more or less at the mercy of buyers when it comes to
marketing their products. If there are several people in your community who
make similar things, it may be possible to organize a community marketing
agency, with one person acting as an agent for the products of all members.
This, of course, has been done successfully in agricultural communities, and
the idea is beginning to find favor among those who make things that are
usually sold through such outlets as gift stores, department stores or
wholesalers.

A typical organization of this kind is the Willow Cottage Weavers, of