There's a maker you've been meaning to answer for a week now. She sent a warm note about her stoneware mugs, two slightly blurry photos, and the one question you can't answer yet: would you carry them? To say yes or no, you'd need her prices, how many she can make, whether she wants wholesale or consignment, and a way to reach her that isn't a DM already buried under three others. So the note just sits there, and you feel a little worse about it every time you see it.
Now multiply that by the others. An email from a jeweler two towns over. The woman who caught you at the register on Saturday and pressed a business card into your hand that's somewhere in the drawer by the tape. A tagged photo on Instagram you keep meaning to reply to. Every one of them is flattering, and every one of them is a small pile of missing information standing between you and a decision.
The fix isn't willpower or a tidier inbox. It's asking for everything you need in one pass, at the moment someone's excited to tell you, so a flattering mess turns into a short list you can work through with a coffee.
Why these messages pile up
A "would you carry my work?" message almost never arrives complete. You get a photo but no price, or a price but no sense of how many they can supply, or all of it except a phone number. Each gap means a reply, a wait, another reply. One decision stretches into a week of back-and-forth.
Before you can honestly say yes or no, you need the same handful of things every single time:
- Good photos of the actual work, two to four, ideally on a plain background
- Price points: what they sell it for themselves, and what they'd charge you
- Lead time: how long to restock once you reorder
- Quantities: how many they can supply now, and roughly per month
- Contact info: name, phone, email, and their Instagram handle
Collect those five things up front and most of the back-and-forth disappears. You're left looking at the work and deciding, which is the part that actually needs you.
One form that asks for everything in one pass
Set up a simple intake form (a web page with a few fields someone fills in on their phone) that asks for exactly the list above and nothing you won't use. Keep it short. A maker standing at a farmers market or finishing a late night in a mill-town studio will fill out six honest fields; they'll bail on twenty.
A few that earn their place:
- A photo upload that takes more than one image, since one angle never tells you enough
- Two price fields, their retail and their wholesale, so you're comparing apples to apples
- A short box for materials and a sentence of their story, which you'll want for your shelf tags anyway
- One checkbox: have they sold in a shop before? Not a dealbreaker, just useful to know
Resist the urge to add a field for every what-if. The form's job is to get you to a yes or no, not to run the whole relationship. You can sort out the fine print with the ones you choose.
Decide wholesale or consignment before you say yes
These two words trip up more first conversations than anything else, so settle your own answer before the form goes live. With wholesale, you buy the work outright at a lower price and keep whatever markup you set; you own the inventory and the risk, and the maker gets paid right away. With consignment, the maker keeps ownership and you pay them their cut only when a piece sells (often something like a 60/40 split in the maker's favor), which is gentler on your cash but means more bookkeeping on your end.
Neither one is the right answer for every shop. If you'd rather not carry the risk on an unproven line, consignment lets you give someone a trial shelf without betting your own money. If you hate tracking who's owed what each month, wholesale keeps it clean. Pick the one you actually want to run, and have the form ask for the matching price so nobody's surprised later.
The auto-reply that buys you honesty
Here's the quiet magic of a form: it can reply the instant someone hits submit, even when you're mid-sale with a line to the door. Write one short auto-reply that thanks them, tells them the truth about your pace, and sets a time they'll actually hear back.
Honest beats fast here. If you only look at new makers once a month, say so. Something like: "Thanks for sending your work over. We review new makers the first week of each month, so you'll hear from us by the 10th either way. If it's a fit, we'll reach out about terms." That last line matters. "Either way" means even a no gets a reply, which is the kindness most makers never get.
One thing a form can't do is judge the work for you. It gathers; you still have to sit down and look, and some months you'll pass on lovely stuff simply because the shelf is full. The auto-reply doesn't fake a yes. It just makes the wait feel respectful instead of like a void.
Put the form where makers already are
A form nobody can find does nothing. Two spots cover almost everyone.
By the register, keep a small card with a QR code (the square barcode a phone camera reads) and a line like "Make something? We'd love to see it." When someone pulls out a business card mid-transaction, you point at the card instead of losing theirs in the drawer. In your Instagram bio, put the same link, since that's where half these asks start anyway. A hand-lettered "makers, tap here" in your story highlights doesn't hurt either.
You can still take a card or a kind word in person. The difference is you now have somewhere to send them that captures the whole picture, instead of promising to "follow up" and meaning it less each day.
Worth doing this week
You don't need all of it running by Friday. Start here:
- Decide your own answer: wholesale, consignment, or both. Write it in one sentence.
- Build a short form with the five essentials: photos, retail and wholesale price, lead time, quantities, and contact info.
- Write a three-line auto-reply that states your review pace and promises a reply either way.
- Print one QR card for the register and drop the link in your Instagram bio.
- Reply to your current pile with that same link, and let the form catch what you've been missing.
If wiring up the form, the card, and the auto-reply sounds like one more thing on a long day, that's the sort of small, tidy setup we build for shops around here. Either way, the goal's the same: turn a draining inbox into a list you can say yes to.