Selling your work – without Instagram or a gallery: Part 1

Jake Lunniss in the workshop

Words and photos: Jake Lunniss

I’m about to make the first cut on a commissioned desk in redgum and Huon pine. The client came through a gallery. They saw something I’d made, liked it, enquired, and the gallery put us in touch. I’ve done all the design and communication since then, and I’ll do all the work for the next few months. When the client makes their final payment, all of it will go to the gallery. For an introduction. I don’t begrudge it – that’s the model, and the gallery needs to eat too. But when you run the numbers on a technically demanding piece built by one person in a small workshop, the model doesn’t leave much for my children to eat. Something has to change.

So I’ve changed it.

I deleted my Instagram account. I walked away from the galleries. I’m building a direct audience from scratch – a newsletter, a supper club, and quarterly drops of small-batch objects sold exclusively to the people who’ve chosen to subscribe. This piece is the first instalment of a year-long record of how that goes, published here via AWR as it happens. No retrospective polish. Just the thing, in real time.

Before I explain the plan, I want to say something about Instagram specifically, because I suspect most if not all of you are on it and wondering if I’ve lost my mind.

Instagram had me convinced that the path to a sustainable practice runs through follower counts. Perhaps there’s a version of that which is true – I’ve seen makers build seemingly genuine businesses on the back of a well-curated feed. But there’s a cost that doesn’t show up in the analytics. Wendell Berry has a test he applies to tools: does this serve the work, or does the work begin to serve it? I put Instagram through that test and the light in the workshop came on. I wasn’t just building a piece, I was building content about building a piece. The joinery became the backdrop. The sawdust for the reel. At some point, without quite noticing, the work started happening for Instagram rather than the other way around. I do not want to be a content creator who also makes furniture. I want to be a furniture maker.

So I walked back into a world without Instagram.

Before Instagram, before the internet, before any of this, makers built practices on a handful of channels that still work because they’re grounded in something that hasn’t changed: I have never sold a single piece to someone who hasn’t first seen my work in person. The object in the room. The piece that sits in someone’s house, gets touched by their dinner guests, and leads the question that has always generated commissions: who made this? The open studio, the craft fair, the loan piece in a restaurant or a wine bar – all of it is a variation on the same idea: get people to put their hands on your work.

Jake Lunniss, table with parquetry top – "200 squares of redgum veneer, each grain direction rotated 5–10° from its neighbour, creates a surface in motion."

There’s a parallel channel that works differently – not the hands, but the eyes. A profile in a magazine, or an essay that carries a byline and a URL, reaches people who haven’t touched the furniture yet, but who might want to. The editorial endorsement does something an Instagram post can’t: it says someone else decided this was worth your attention. That transfer of trust is old and it still works.

Galleries were the traditional version of both: the object in the room, curated and endorsed. But galleries are closing. The economics have always been difficult for the gallery; the maths brutal for the maker. The essence of what they provided – getting people to palm your wood – remains completely valid. But the institution that used to deliver it is failing.

So how will I get my work in front of people if Instagram doesn’t sell anything but more Instagram, and galleries are closing?

The answer, it turns out, might be embarrassingly old-fashioned: an email newsletter.

I don’t need tens of thousands of followers. Without giving half of the gross away, I only need to make six dining tables a year to eat comfortably at my own. Six tables. If I assume a conversion rate of five percent from genuine conversation to commission – conservative for an audience that has already self-selected by subscribing – I need about 120 meaningful conversations a year. Ten a month. To generate ten enquiries a month from an engaged list, I need somewhere between 500 and 800 subscribers who actually read what I send them.

That’s it. That’s the whole maths.

Not fifty thousand followers. Not a viral reel. Eight hundred people who care, delivered from a system I own, on a platform I control, with no algorithm deciding whether today’s post gets seen.

But here’s the problem: how do you grow a newsletter list without social media? I’m hoping the way to a person’s inbox might be through their stomach.

I have a dining table. I made it. I also – and I mention this with appropriate modesty – cook better food than most restaurants. Fortnightly, starting in June, I’ll be hosting ten paying guests at that table for a four-course lunch. The food, cooked by me. The ingredients, grown by me. The table my guests sit at, the chairs they sit on, the boards the food arrives on, the coasters their crisp Chablis beads condensation onto – I made all of it.

Ten people, four hours, hands on the furniture the entire time. No gallery commission. No gate-keeping algorithm. Just the work, and the people who might want to own some of it.

Wish me luck.

I’ll be reporting back here through the year – what’s working, what isn’t, and what surprises me. The list is small. The model is unproven. I’m building the case study in public because I think the question matters: is there a way to sustain a serious craft practice in Australia without living at the mercy of an algorithm or giving your margin to an institution?

It works for potters. It works for photographers. I’m about to find out if it will work for woodworkers.

Jake Lunniss is a furniture maker based in Ocean Grove, Victoria, specialising in marquetry and parquetry. He writes a weekly newsletter at jakelunniss.com.