Your product business isn't selling: the four reasons why

I was listening to Emma Grede interviewing Emma Chamberlain this week, and she said something in passing about how she started that I could not let go of: "We started as a D2C business as sort of a proof of concept to see if the customer was there, you know, lower commitment as a test. It went really well."

I stopped and went back over it twice.

It sounds so obvious, but it got to me because I ran a product business for three years and never once described it that way, not even in my head. It was never a test. It was a shop I built and hoped people would find.

What I did instead

When I started my product business I already had years of experience in product development so the thing I thought I had to prove was that I was the creative. That the illustrations were good. There’s a story the industry tells you — that product businesses reward the makers, and if the making is strong enough the commercial side eventually catches up.

So, I focused on the creative. Something like two hundred hours of making against six hours of telling anyone the business existed. I designed, I sourced, I photographed, I built the site, I packed the orders. All of it myself, all of it to a standard I am still proud of.

Fifteen sales. That’s the whole trading history.

Here’s what took me two years to see. I was testing whether I could make the product, and I already knew the answer to that. I’d been doing it professionally since my twenties. A test you already know the result of isn’t a test. It’s a demonstration. The question of whether anyone wanted it never got asked, so it never got answered.

The shop was fine. But it was on a street with no footfall.

If it isn’t selling, only a few things can be wrong

This is the part that matters for anyone still in it, because I know a lot of people are. You’ve got a product business you believe in, you’re not making the money, and you haven’t stopped because you can still see the version of it that works.

Right. There are only four things that can be wrong, and they go in order.

One, nobody knows it exists. Two, they know, and they don’t want it. Three, they want it and not at that price. Four, they buy it and there’s no margin left when you’re done.

The order matters because you can’t figure out the later ones until the earlier one is fixed, because you have no data. Number two is invisible until you’ve solved number one. Number three is unmeasurable until you’ve solved number two.

The first two are almost impossible to tell apart from where you’re standing. No sales looks the same whether nobody has seen the product or everybody has seen it and walked away.

Which is why most people miss it, including me. The instinct when nothing sells is to change the product — new range, better photography, new packaging, rebuild the site. Or to change the price, usually downwards. Both of those are fixes for problems two and three. If your actual problem is one, you’ve spent the remaining money and energy solving something that wasn’t broken, and you’ll come out the other side with a nicer version of the same silence.

I redesigned my site twice. I was working on my third collection before I stopped and asked myself “what are you doing?”. My problem was that eighteen people were subscribed to the list. All of them people I knew. One of them my mum.

How you test it when you have no money

This is the real constraint and it’s worth being honest about it. If you’re not making sales you don’t have much capital to work with, so anything that starts with “run some ads” is out.

What you need is borrowed footfall. Somebody else’s audience, rented for a day.

The cheapest test you can run in this entire industry is a market stall. £50 for a table at a decent local market, a Saturday of your time, and maybe two hundred people walking past. You’re not there to make money. You’re there for the information and to analyse three specific things.

1. They walk past without looking. Either it’s the wrong crowd, or the product isn’t catching people’s attention from three feet away, which is a real and fixable problem that no amount of beautiful close-up photography on your website will tell you about.

2. They pick it up and put it down. This is the useful one. Desire exists. Something in the last few seconds isn’t closing — the price, the material in the hand, the fact that it’s for them rather than a gift, or the thing it’s competing against on the next table.

3. They pick it up, ask you a question, and buy it. Then you have a product that works and a traffic problem, which is the good problem, because traffic is solvable and desire mostly isn’t.

You get all of that in one afternoon. It took me three years not to find it out.

The same logic applies to any borrowed audience. A shop taking six pieces on consignment. A mention in somebody else’s newsletter. A maker fair, a collaboration, a market organiser’s Instagram. None of it is a sales channel at that stage. It’s a test, and you’re reading the results.

What I would do differently

I asked myself plenty of times if I wanted to keep going but I realised that I didn’t. It stopped bringing me joy and I realised the creativity I was looking for in my career was not making art but running a creative product business.

But let’s say I decided I wanted to keep going. A better product wasn’t going to fix it.

To start addressing the problem I had with my business, I needed to stop making new things and start working on audience and distribution.

If I wanted my business to keep going my test would have been: six markets or fairs. Reaching out to ten shops with samples. One collaboration with somebody whose audience already looked like the one I wanted. Then read the results.

And that is not about growing the business. It’s about figuring out if I would get sales by getting my products in front of more people.

The thing I got wrong about it

For a long time, I saw the end of my business as a verdict on the work. Nobody bought it, so it can’t have been good enough.

I’ve been back through the numbers since and the product was good. The operations were sound. What I had was a business nobody had been told about. The most perfect lemonade stand, set up in the gated back garden instead of out on the pavement.

You can’t fail a test you never ran.

Why the test doesn’t get run

Somewhere in that same interview, Emma Chamberlain talks about having no fear. That’s the part I keep thinking over, because fear is the whole reason I never looked.

When the business has your name on it, or your handwriting, or your craft, the business not working and you not being good enough feel like the same sentence. So, you protect the part you’re most frightened about. For me that was the art. I had years of product experience behind me, and I still didn’t apply a single piece of it to my own business, because the question I was scared of wasn’t “is there demand for this” — but “am I actually good at making art.”

So I made more work. Better work. Work I could be proud of. And I quietly kept it away from the people who might not want it.

That’s the thing about not telling anyone. It feels like being busy, or waiting until the range is ready. It’s insurance. Nobody can turn down a product they’ve never been shown.

Which is why figuring out what is wrong is the hard part, not the fix. The fix in my case was a Saturday and £50. The hard part is being willing to find out.

Start with the right question

So, if you’re in it now, don’t take my answer. Mine was number one, and it isn’t going to be everyone’s.

If you have an audience, eyes on the product and it still isn’t selling, that’s a different problem to mine and a market stall will tell you so within an hour. If it sells and there’s nothing left at the end of the month, that’s not a demand problem at all — that’s a costing problem, and it wants a spreadsheet, not a market.

The four questions are worth going through slowly and honestly, in order, before you spend another pound. Nobody knows it exists. They know and don’t want it. They want it, not at that price. They buy it and there’s no margin left.

Work out which one is actually yours. Then go and get the evidence, even if you have a fair idea of what it’s going to say.