A picture framing business is one of the few where you can show your creativity. If you adore artistic designs and styles and are looking to open a business, a picture framing business can be a go-to in-trend option.

Here are the steps to start selling picture frames.

Calculate the Budget
If you set up an offline business, the budget may be slightly higher than that for an offline business. You would have to invest in a site in a high-traffic area to get noticed easily. It would help if you also considered costs of infrastructure, machinery, inventory, workforce, delivery men, timely maintenance, and more. You can also go for a dropshipping solution to avoid extra inventory management expenses, shipping charges, order return costs, etc.

A more popular and cost-effective way today is selling picture frames online. Invest in a good-quality web-to-print software solution to build an engaging web-to-print store. Choose a next-gen online product design software to integrate into your store to let customers customize picture frames.

Complete Registration and Obtain Licenses and Permits
Register your business with local authorities and establish a legal business entity like a corporation, an LLC, or a DBA, etc. for your business to avoid legal issues in the future. Also, acquire all the licenses and permits applicable to your business. There are some licenses like seller’s permit, employer identification number, business tax certificate, etc. that you may need in common for your offline or online retail business.

Analyze Competitors
Analyze your competitors to get an insight into their offline or online promotional strategies, offerings, pricing strategies, range and timings of discounts, and other essential aspects. This intensive research can help gain knowledge about picture framing trends that you can adopt to stay competitive.

Once your business takes off, you can expand your business to selling art and framed photographs by hiring artists on a commission basis and collaborating with manufacturers of hang artwork to sell your work on a consignment basis. This implies that you can add new vertices to your business and increase its overall profitability.

Determine Your Target Market & Expand It
To succeed fast, have a clear idea of your target audience. As a rule of thumb, targeting the local audience looking for beautiful custom picture frames can work. If you succeed in impressing them with your offerings, they will spread good word-of-mouth across. Eventually, your local customer base will expand easily and rapidly.

Next, focus on increasing repeat customers. The reason is that the efforts in appealing to new customers are usually far more than in retaining the old customers. So, work out the best strategies (discounts, loyalty programs, etc.) to keep them engaged and retained.

In the final step, you can broaden your target market even further by collaborating with a few local interior designers with a significant clientele on the hunt for framed artwork. Besides, you can also pitch for your framing services to local art galleries and museums that need to get their artwork framed or reframed.

Promote Your Business
Always focus on promoting your business to get more audience and sales.

For an offline store, you can:

• Use promotional pamphlets and newspaper ads - Collaborate with retail stores in your vicinity to display your products in return for some percentage of total sales they make from sales of your samples.
• Inscribe your company logo on your pieces for people to notice your brand.
• Launch an online storefront to strengthen your online presence and display a map to show the customers the directions to your store.

For an online business, you can:

• Adopt the latest web-to-print storefront technology for your online store.
• Integrate a cutting-edge online product design software to let customers design the picture frames themselves.
• Use various digital marketing strategies and tools judiciously to enhance your outreach online.

Conclusion

If you are a lover of art, a picture framing business can be a good business option. All you need is to follow the above-discussed steps, and your picture framing business will become a huge success.

Summary: Read on the post to know the steps you can follow to start a picture frame retail business and use web-to-print storefront technology to strengthen your online presence.