Well, this is something I've been thinking about for the last 3 years, but now I'm seriously getting close to opening one.
I found what I want to do, something relatively low in cost, small and light to ship, and something that won't take a lot of time to make. I'm looking into opening a FB page, website and blog for it. I have no idea what the name will be yet, but I'm working on it.
I'll be making little clay baked angels that look like something like this:
I'm guessing each 4 inch angel will take about one 2 oz block of clay, which costs about $3. I'm guessing shipping materials and cost will be about $4. Right now, the only baby loss charity that has survived for more than one year is a charity that asks for each person to pay their own shipping. Since I have no money to give hundreds of angels away and I can't count on donations, I'll probably ask $6 for each order, which I think is a low and fair price, one that I won't make any money from and will just go towards the cost.
Each angel will be made from a baby mold and a wing mold, then further sculpted, dressed, and put together. Each one shouldn't take much more than one hour. The successful charity I'm modeling my own charity off of takes 50 orders a month and gets all those orders in within 4 hours of opening the forms. They have a team of 3-4 working on them. 50 hours over the span of a whole month shouldn't be too rough for just me doing it. I could test run my first month at 25.
In order to get this together, I need:
- $40 for the molds
- $30 for the flesh clay start up
- My own examples and pictures to show
- A website that lets me have a page for order forms as well as a message page
- A paypal for just the charity
- Tax information about running a charity
- A Facebook Page and marketing it
- A Wordpress blog for the charity
- A name for the charity
- An email for charity use - probably a gmail one?
- Get business cards made to mail with the angels
I'm not sure how long it'll take to get all of this finished. I'd like to launch it by Jesse's due date, which was September 17th. I feel like that is quite doable, so September is my goal. Until then, I'll be trying to gather the money, making samples, and setting up everything. That leaves me with about three months to get the work done and one month to spread the word to launch in the month of September. The money will definitely be the only hitch, I have no start up funds at the moment, but hopefully with selling some of the baby stuff, I'll get a few dollars together. Right now everything I made has gone towards funding Katie's ballet and her birthday as our budget is cut so thin right now that it can't come out of the bank. Trying to open a charity when we've fallen a bit into a charity case ourselves this year! I'm sure I'll be able to find a way for a worthy cause.
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