Earn Money at Home Doing Alterations and Sewing

My mother didn't call herself a seamstress, but she did have good sewing skills; good enough that everyone in the family, sooner or later, called on her to hem a dress, darn their socks, sew on a few buttons, or re-make a jacket to fit someone other than its original owner.

In later years, she ran a small ad in the local newspaper of our small town and was swamped with projects to make, alter, or mend. Her biggest problem was taking on too much work, but she found it hard to turn people away.

If you know how to sew, you can get enough work to fill all the extra time you have to spare, right in your own home. Best of all, you get to set your own price, and your own time schedule for doing the work. If the downturn in the economy has affected your personal finances, this might be a really good time to start a little side business to bring in a little more money for the next few months.

From watching my mother deal with her customers, here are some suggestions I would make for anyone who wishes to start an alteration business in their home.

1. Treat your part-time, in-home, alteration business just like any other business.

In other words, keep records. If your alteration business is going to be very simple, you still need to find out from the city whether or not you will need a business license. You also need to keep some basic records. The records can be very simple. Just a notebook with five columns drawn on each page: one for the date, one for the customer's name, one for a description of the service they purchased, one for the price you charged for the service, and one for any expense you incurred in rendering the service. This record will be of great help when tax time rolls around.

Give your business a name. When someone calls, it is much better to have a professional sounding name like, Helen's Alterations, or The Sewing Solution, than to just say, "Hello, may I help you?"

2. Advertise your services.

You can run a newspaper ad, as my mother did, but there are free places to advertise in order to keep expenses down, especially when you first start your business. Super-markets often have places where customers can post jobs, help wanted notices, posters about lost pets, etc. Take advantage of all of these. If you are just going to do alterations, make that clear in your ad. If you are willing to construct complete articles of clothing, mention that. If you only wish to do mending, say so. Make sure your notice is large enough to attract attention and includes your phone number so your prospective clients can reach you.

Visit local fabric stores and let them know that you are available to do a variety of sewing tasks, or even to help others learn to sew if you think you would enjoy teaching sewing skills to others.

Go to the manager of the men's and women's clothing departments of local stores and give them a card with your name and contact information. If they already have an alteration person, let them know you are available for work that person may be too busy to take on.

Mention your home alteration business to your friends. Just the other day, one of my friends was complaining that every time her husband bought a pair of pants, they had to be shortened. This would have been a perfect opportunity for an alteration person to say, "Really? I do that kind of work in my home business."

3. Run your business in a professional manner.

Before you accept any project, let your customer know that payment is expected upon completion of the project. Discuss delivery options-will you call them when the item is ready and arrange to have them pick it up, or will you just give them a date and time after which it can be picked up? On rare occasions, you may agree to deliver the completed item, but only if you are not out extra expense for doing so.

Check out the competition in your area and price your services close to what they are charging. For standard services such as hemming a dress or pair of pants, sewing on buttons, mending rips, etc. a price list posted in your sewing room is nice. That way there won't be any haggling over the prices when you present your bill for completed services. Do give each customer a detailed bill explaining what service was provided and what the charge for each service was, along with a total at the bottom.

When I visit a business, I expect it to be run efficiently, even if it is being run from someone's home. I don't expect the owner of the business to spend 15 minutes moving children's toys out of the way so I can navigate through a messy room to find a chair to sit on and another 10 minutes shuffling through papers on his or her desk before we can get to the business I came for. If you are a professional alteration person, you need to have an area set aside just for your business. You can have a box or basket for each project you are currently working on and label it with the client's name and phone number. That way you won't run the danger of returning an altered bikini to a 300-pound, 90+ year old client. Try to process the projects in the order you accepted them and to finish them on or before the date they were promised.

4. Evaluate your business periodically.

Not all businesses succeed. Some do succeed, but turn out to be something we don't like as well as we thought we would. So, after 6 months or a year, take time to thoroughly evaluate your in-home alteration and sewing business. If you just don't like it, but have built up a good reputation and clientele for it, you may still be able to turn a profit by selling it to someone else who likes to sew

That's one of the great things about this business; because you haven't invested a lot of money in it, you can quit any time you want, as long as you finish the projects you have already committed yourself to.

I have a feeling, though, that once your sewing hobby starts putting some extra cash into your pocket, you will want to keep this business going for a long, long time to come.