6 Ways To Earn Money With Tufting

January 19, 2022

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How To Earn Money With Tufting?

Tufting your custom rug is a great hobby for entertainment and gives satisfaction to see the finished final product. Also, it is a great opportunity to create extra income from this side hustle. I will share the 6 best ways to earn money with your tufting skills and knowledge.

Starting tufting as a hobby has an initial cost, but it is possible to create an income source with tufting. There are different possibilities to earn money with your work in tufting. Here are the different possibilities to earn an income:

Selling Custom Rugs
Custom Design Rugs For Commission
Teach Others How To Tuft
Start A Youtube Channel
Join Affiliate Programs For Tool Recommendation
Create A Starter Kit For Beginners

Here are the 6 best ways to earn money from tufting. Continue reading to learn details for each method and how to start.

Table Of Contents

How To Earn Money With Tufting?

Sell Custom Rugs

This is probably the option that everyone thinks of first and the most popular one. It is entertaining to make your custom rug, but it is even better to create for others. For me, showing your work to other people and having their opinion about your artwork is the most satisfactory step in the whole tufting process. In addition to this, finding people who are willing to pay to have your work is an amazing feeling.

Before considering selling your rugs, it is important that you know how much it costs to create one. Without a proper calculation of the cost, it is impossible to set your profit rates. You can check here how to calculate the cost of a tufted rug based on the area.

There are a few options I see that people are using. For all of the options, you can find hundreds of online tutorials about how to set up your store step-by-step. For all of these options, you should check the legal regulation according to the laws of your residence country, for most countries, you do not have to do anything before your first sale but after that, it can change depending on the taxation laws.

Selling Online

Probably the most common one, with all the new platforms and tools it is so easy to set up your online store just in a couple of hours even if you are a complete beginner. Some of the most popular platforms are:

Shopify -> It is one of the most comprehensive platforms for online stores. You can find all the tools you will need to manage your orders and shipping. If you have a limited budget, it can be a bit expensive compared to other platforms.
Wix -> It is not as common as Shopify because of the lack of extra features provided by the plugins in Shopify but it is a good alternative to consider. The cost to use Wix is relatively cheaper compared to the previous option. You can use it for totally free to try it out, you only need to pay when you actually want to publish your website publicly.
Squarespace -> Similar to the Wix but it is not fully focused on eCommerce purposes.
WordPress -> WordPress is one of the most popular tools for creating any type of website, more than 35% of the websites online are created using this option. With additional plugins, you can create your fully customizable online store. It is probably the cheapest option to start, with hosting services like BlueHost you can start at 2.95$ per month.
Etsy -> Instead of setting up your own website as a store, you can use Etsy to create an account in the Etsy Marketplace. You can access a larger number of people with the existing users of Etsy but as a downside, you will have less control over your store.

Local Art Marketplace

You can check your local marketplaces to exhibit your work and meet with potential clients or search for stores where custom rugs can fit their product range. It would be possible to make some agreement with the store owner and place some of your work in the store and share the profit with the owner in fair portions. In this way, you can benefit from the existing customers of the store, and the store owner can increase the product range with some extra income. You will have access to a very limited number of customers compared to online sales but in this option, you do not have to deal and pay for the shipping process. Especially if you would like to make sales internationally it can be costly to ship your products.

Sell Custom Design Rugs For Commission

Selling commissioned tufted rugs is pretty similar to the previous method. But instead of deciding the design of your rug initially and putting your final work into the marketplace, you create a custom design according to the request of the client and tuft the rug accordingly. It has both advantages and disadvantages compared to the first option. Since it is going to be a custom-designed rug specifically for the client you can increase your profit rate but it is more active work. If you are selling your own designs, it is possible to make all the work in the beginning and start advertising it but in the case of commissioned sales, it is not possible to start the tufting process without having a request from the potential client.

Your contact page on the website is one of the most important places to be reachable by customers. It is better to provide the necessary information from the beginning so people would know what except.

Platforms like Etsy is one of the most popular choices for commissioned rugs.

Teach: Tufting Workshop

If you have been interested in tufting for a while and you think now you are able to share your skills and experience with other interested people, teaching how to tuft can be a great way to earn income for you. You can start with one of your interested friends to gain some experience before starting properly if you are not sure how to start.

It would be possible to teach both in-person and online. Teaching and helping through online meetings can be more challenging than in-person meetings but still, it can work pretty well. You can create a detailed curriculum containing all the steps, techniques, and tips and create an online course on the platforms like Udemy or Skillshare. After you finish all the materials for the course, you can just publish it and almost forget about it, it will run smoothly without any problem and create a great passive income.

Another approach to this can be teaching one-by-one virtually, the platforms like Upwork or Fiverr can be useful tools to do so. Interested students can contact and hire you through these platforms after you create a profile on them.

Alternatively, if you have enough resources, materials, and an available location it is also possible to start a workshop studio in your city so people can actually register and join tufting sessions. This would be the most beneficial way to learn and experience tufting for the students but probably cost more than the online version. If you are planning to continue this path, it is better to consider the initial investment cost for the workshop.

YouTube: Document Your Tufting Process

Rather than ”teaching” how to tuft with an online course or workshop studio, you can choose just to show your process, and how you work when you are starting on a new tufting project with a Youtube Channel. It is so satisfying to watch even just a timelapse of the tufting process and how it suddenly becomes a beautiful rug piece.

It is definitely more an intimate way to help others with your personal tips, and tricks than an online course. It will be accessible to millions of people through YouTube and it can really help you to create a community for yourself. The people in this community will always be potential clients if you ever decide to sell your rugs. In addition to helping with the advertising part, you can earn a decent income from Google AdSense.

In order to start a YouTube journey, you do not need anything but a phone with a camera. To increase the quality of products you can always invest more time and resources but in the beginning, you do not need to worry about it. It is better to start directly and test it before wasting a lot of time on the small details.

Join Affiliate Programs For Tool Recommendations

There are a lot of necessary tools involved in the tufting process and it is always good to share your experience and opinions with others in the community. Most of the tools can only be purchased through online platforms like Amazon, Tuft The World, Tufting Shop, or AliExpress and all of these companies have affiliate programs that you can easily enroll in and start earning commissions by your referrals.

The commission rates can vary depending on the platform and the type of product that your referrals purchase but you can expect something between 5-30% of the total amount.

If you have followers through either a YouTube channel or social media it is a great way for you to create an extra source of income.

Sell ”Starter Kit” For Beginners

In the beginning, it is not quite easy to figure out all of the necessary materials to start tufting, a beginner can easily get overwhelmed in this step and quit this idea. It has a learning curve to understand and experience all the different types of materials. For each material, there are a lot of options to choose from for different styles of rugs.

In order to solve this problem and create an alternative for the newcomers, you can create a Starter Kit that includes all the essential tools to tuft their first piece of rug, such as;

Frame Materials
Tufting Gun
Primary Tufting Cloth
Secondary Tufting Cloth
Yarn
Backing Glue

This would allow the beginners to test and experience easily if the tufting is interesting for them rather than finding all of the different suppliers for different materials, ordering separately, and waiting for all of them to arrive in your place.

These were the 6 possible ways to earn income from tufting that I think are worth trying out. Of course, there can be other methods to try, but in my opinion, overall, tufting has a great opportunity to create a side hustle. You can find more ideas about starting a tufting business and earning your first penny quickly in Earn Money With Tufting QUICKLY!

*_{Disclosure: I only recommend products I would use myself and all opinions expressed here are our own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.}