Craft Toolkit is an online toolkit supporting makers to identify, understand and action the creative and professional development of their craft businesses into a business plan. It has five modules, each with exercises:

1. The Bigger Picture
1A. Goal Setting
1B. Relationships Map

2. Planning the Details
2A. Product & Service Development
2B. Creative Inspiration
2C. Development Checklist

3. Selling and Marketing
3A. Create Your Customers
3B. Tell Your Story
3C. Ways of Selling

4. Managing Money
4A. Costing and Pricing
4B. Cashflow

5. Sustainability
5A. Purpose Setting
5B. Creating A Sustainable Product
5C. Sustainability Map

The Toolkit is free to use. Simply register for your user account – you will need your name, a valid email address and a password. The Toolkit can be accessed on a smartphone, tablet or laptop / desktop computer.

When logged in, from your dashboard you can access the modules, exercises and your developing Business Plan and much more.

Each exercise is introduced via a scene setting film of Scottish and Thai makers exploring relevant topics in their businesses. Then, interactive steps prompt you to input information about your business (e.g. who you work with, activities in your business calendar, finances) both as it is and as you would like it to be. Your work in the modules is saved as you go, with a summary of key outcomes available in your Business Plan.

As you progress through the Craft Toolkit, you can create a To-Do List in your Business Plan, to take further online or offline.

At the conclusion of each module, further questions prompt you to address or perhaps go further with any challenges or opportunities identified as you’ve been giving thought and attention to your business.

To support you with this, a Resources section (intended for users based in the UK) is available in your Business Plan.

Craft Toolkit enables you to explore one or multiple interrelated business issues, including:

• Identifying what is valuable and important in a business
• Understanding the value of creativity and importance of creative inspiration
• Setting goals and planning ahead to achieve them
• Reviewing, refreshing or developing new product(s) / collection(s)
• Calculating costs and prices for products and services
• Managing money – cashflow, income and expenditure
• Taking stock of who is involved in the business, their skills and roles
• Telling a story
• Identifying and profiling customers
• Identifying new markets or audiences for products and services
• Considering how to sustain and grow a business

With the Craft Toolkit AAS provides professional makers – whether starting out, mid-career or established – plus those with an ambition to establish a making practice with a foundation of professional development support to maintain, review, grow and ultimately sustain and lead their craft businesses.

Aligned with our Making Sustainable Livelihoods strategy – specifically sustainable practice, capacity building, training and education, digital delivery and building community – Craft Toolkit contributes to building strong and resilient craft sectors, something that is fundamental to AAS’s work in Scotland and internationally. 

Craft Toolkit is licenced under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike).

Boost Your Business Course

Weekly on Tuesdays 24 February – 24 March 2026 (online) & 14 April 2026 (hybrid)
Free for AAS Members, £50 for non-Members

Applied Arts Scotland’s (AAS) ‘Boost Your Business’ 6-week course is a focused opportunity for makers living and working in Scotland to systematically think about how to take their business to the next level.

Course Facilitator Helen Voce introduces Boost Your Business:

Centred around AAS’s Craft Toolkit, the course is for makers based in Scotland who want to:

• make a start on a business plan for their new business
• explore a new strand to their existing business
• pivot their current business.

The course is for you if you are:

• a recent graduate preparing to get your practice off the ground
• embarking on a second career in craft and want to earn an income from your making
• an established / mid-career practitioner wanting to explore a specific creative, professional or business challenge
• an experienced professional considering a change in your business and / or personal circumstances
• looking for a supported process to help you to reflect and re-energise
• seeking help to clarify your business goals so you can plan ahead
• gain confidence in planning, goal setting and decision making
• deciding how best to consolidate, expand or diversity your business
• exploring how to balance creative and business activities and ambitions
• considering how to be more sustainable in your practice choices

In addition, the course is for those exploring those big, difficult values-based questions such as ‘Why do I do what I do?’, ‘Who do I do it for?’, or considering the purpose of their business relative to ethical, societal or environmental factors.

Perhaps you have one key creative, professional or business challenge or a number of different parts of your practice that you are trying to align. Whatever your specific needs are, Boost Your Business will help you with guided session using the CraftToolkit’s five modules and 13 exercises. You’ll explore and create a simple plan tohelp you consider your values and goals, and use this as the foundation to establish, diversify, consolidate or expand your business. And becoming familiar with a range of new planning tools will give you the confidence, understanding and processes to support you in the months and years ahead.

Schedule

10:00 – 16:00, weekly on Tuesdays 24 February – 24 March 2026 (online)
In the first five sessions, we are building in a 2-hour break from 12:00 – 14:00 to give participants time to look after business and / or personal stuff, have lunch and take time to gather information or reflect. We rarely award ourselves time to just sit and think, so we want to encourage participants to do that even if it’s just for a short time.

Time TBC, Tuesday 14 April 2026 (hybrid)
The sixth and final session is an opportunity for participants to collectively reflect on their journeys, developments, draft business plans and next steps. The hybrid (venue, location and timing TBC) session is an opportunity for participants to gather to reflect on how they have identified ways to boost their businesses and to support each other to take their next steps / actions. AAS will make a financial contribution to in-person attendees’ return public transport costs for this session (details TBC).

Cost

• Free for AAS Members
  using the code shared in Members Bulletins
  
• £50 for non-Members
  who can benefit from one year free AAS Membership (Professional or Associate)

Facilitators

The course will be facilitated by Carol Sinclair and Helen Voce, experienced independently and collaboratively experienced in supporting makers with the creative, professional and business development of their craft practices. Carol and Helen co-led on the development of the Craft Toolkit with the support of the British Council (see Background).

Participant Information

Participants must be a maker / craftsperson / designer maker / artisan living and working in Scotland, and:

• have registered for a free, individual Craft Toolkit user account (you need a name, a valid email address and a password)
• have access to a laptop, desktop computer, tablet or smartphone connected to the internet
• be committed to attending the six half day sessions (online and hybrid) detailed in the schedule
• be willing to allocate additional time for preparation (e.g. gathering information about existing customers or new markets you wish to reach) and reflection (e.g. research further pricing of competitors / allies or contact prospective retailers) to optimise their business development
• be willing to share their learning, reflections, outcomes, experience with fellow participants in support of individuals’ and collective progress
• be respectful of participants’ confidentiality at all times
• have completed and submitted an anonymous Equality & Diversity Monitoring Form
• be willing to evaluate their participation in and progress on the course for the purposes of AAS developing the course in the future and our reporting to Creative Scotland as a Multi-Year Funded Organisation

During the course, the Craft Toolkit will capture and support your steady and considered progress as you go:

• Exploring a module per week for five weeks, a summary of key module outcomes will be accessible in your individual user account.
• You can create a to-do list with detailed reminders and tasks to explore matters beyond the course schedule.
• An extensive list of further resources per exercise supports you to explore identified business issues from other perspectives and with additional tools and knowledge.

Registration

• 50 places are available on the course
• 50% of places will be initially reserved for AAS Members
• Places are available to those who fulfil the criteria above
• Places are offered on a first come first served basis
• The online registration form must be completed in full
• Non-Members course registration will be confirmed once AAS has received their payment in full
• Registration has closed

AAS reserve the right to refuse participants registration on the course. 

Background

Craft Toolkit developed from our long term international partnership work as part of the British Council’s Crafting Futures Programme. In 2018, following delivery of multiple activities in Thailand, the British Council Thailand contracted us to develop a digital craft toolkit to help Thai artists, designers, entrepreneurs or anyone else interested in crafts to expand their craft businesses through online learning opportunities.

As well as covering a variety of business topics such as setting goals, overall planning, developing products, sales, marketing and budget management, the toolkit needed to be available in Thai and English, free to access and accessible on multiple devices.

In the first phase of development (March 2018 – July 2019) we determined the toolkit would be a website / mobile web app, designed the user interface / layout / style, developed content into interactive exercises and games and understood and plotted the user journey. In the second phase of development, we conducted four introductory workshops and user testing in Bangkok (August 2019).

Fundamental to AAS’s creation of the Toolkit was the cross-cultural exchange of expertise, experience, knowledge and skills between makers living and working in the UK and Thailand. This is a collaborative approach AAS adopts in our role to provide support ‘by makers, for makers’. At the beginning of each exercise, we chose to set the scene and make the content relatable through short films of insights from 10 Scottish and 10 Thai makers, designers and craftspeople. They shared stories of their creative and business set up, development of their business and how they grow and sustain it via images, film and audio recordings which Simon Mills edited.

Craft Toolkit is available in 12 languages, enabling it to be used in more territories primarily through the work of the British Council and the legacy of the Crafting Futures Programme. We continue to support international partners to train trainers to activate the Craft Toolkit as appropriate to craft business and matters locally. We welcome the opportunity to look back at the tool through the eyes of others and to experience how they apply it and develop additional tools and resources.