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Posts: 2Hi everyone,
I am looking for some advice on how to sell bears in the UK.
I want to sell my handmade Bears in craft shops. How do I go about this. Is there anything I need to do or can I just find somewhere and start selling?
My bears are collector bears for adults, do I need to simply label them as such.
Thank you, any advice is appreciated 
Hi Emilyjane
Welcome to teddy talk it is a wonderful place full of helpful people and great advice! It is a little quiet on here at the moment but I expect that most are very busy finishing commissions and listing bears to sell for Christmas. I am new to making bears myself (in fact it is a year this week that I started :)) and have only been selling since May this year. So my advice is what I have learnt recently and may be lacking in parts that others can help with. I wonder why you are so set on selling in craft shops? If you sell in a retail shop you will have to sell (to the shop owner) at a price low enough for the shop owner to make a profit margin on which is normally around 50%. This makes my bears I think too expensive but I know a lot do so there must be a way of working this that I would like to know too Anybody??
Regardless how you sell you will need to purchase product and possibly public liability insurance to cover you and your customers and you already are aware of labelling for the over 14 age group.
Other ways to sell are at specialist bear shows where you pay for a table that cost from £40 to over £100 for the day there is a list of all the shows in the Uk in a copy of
Hugglets booklet that has just come out for 2014. You can also open your own online shop on craft sites Folksy or Etsy (they walk you through the whole process) that is very easy to do and costs very little (a few pence) to list a bear for sale but once a bear is sold you do have to pay % of the sale and also % to pay pal. Bear pile is a great on line shop that costs a monthly fee of about £10 but you can list as many bears as you like and doesn't charge any sale commission. You can link a face book page to any of these sites and of course you can also sell on your own website/blog page. There is a lot of work in selling bears yourself but it is nice to have direct contact with the collectors.
Anyway good luck and lets have a look at your work!
Michelle
