Читать книгу One Thousand Ways to Make a Living; or, An Encyclopædia of Plans to Make Money - Harold Morse Dunphy - Страница 119

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Having suffered her full share of the losses and disappointments that fall to the lot of so many victims of the fraudulent “home-work” schemes through which many become well-to-do at the expense of poor women who are seeking to make an honest living a California woman perfected a really meritorious as well as profitable plan that can be carried out by other women with as great profit as it brought to her.

Instead of dealing with that class of utility articles which can be purchased ready made for less than the ordinary woman can buy the materials, she decided to specialize in something that appealed to the vanity of women who could afford to gratify individual taste, and chose as her particular specialty those dainty ribboned sachet puffies for the handkerchief case, shirt-waist box or bureau drawer, also those made in heart shape with beauty pin attached, which girls wear inside their waists, presenting a beautiful appearance, yet easy and inexpensive to make, and affording a nice profit at 10 cents each. In fact, the entire cost of the material, including the beauty pin, is only one and one-half cents each and the making is but a minute’s work.

Few people really know how to use sachet powder. They generally use entirely too much, and the scent is too strong, or it is adulterated with something like orris root and the scent is uneven. But this lady did know, and she placed fluffy cotton, or wadding, inside the bag, and sprinkled it lightly with the sachet, which gave an even, delicate and lasting perfume. She made up the bags of silkalene of various colors, using baby ribbon of colors to match for “drawing” the puffie. The silkalene will cost 10 cents per yard and one yard will make twenty-eight of the bags. Less material is required for the corsage puffie, but the beauty pin evens up the cost. Any woman who can sew can make one hundred of the puffies a day, at a cost of $1.50, and she can readily sell them for $10, and even more, thus making a profit of $8.50 a day for very light, pleasant work.

Having made up several hundreds of the puffies, in various styles and colors—the larger ones are round or oblong and the corsage puffies heart-shaped—she decided upon the “trust” plan as the best means of selling them. She sent out a number of boys and girls to sell them at 10 cents each, paying them $2.00 for each one hundred sold, and even at this figure she made a profit of $6.50 on each one hundred puffies. And they sold, too, for almost every woman or girl who saw them bought at least one and in some cases as many as half a dozen, so the sales were easy and rapid.

Having made so great a success in her home town, this lady extended it to other towns, and after covering the territory thoroughly she offered to sell complete instructions, with patterns for making them, for $1.00. To those purchasing this information she supplied the materials, which she bought at wholesale, and made a good profit in that way, so that in a few months she was enjoying a steady income equal to that of many other merchants in her town, yet she had only a few dollars—and a good plan—to start with.