Our first "logo" for our first run.
As a crafter we often hear from family and friends that we should sell our creations, so often that's what we decide to do. We do a little research on local craft shows and decide to sign up and set up. We pay the fee, hunt down a table, sometimes buy a cheap tablecloth, and set up. You lay all your creations out on the table, store your boxes and bins under it and hope for the best. Sounds fairly simple huh?
You spend the whole day at this craft show and while you're there you're looking around and realizing that your setup isn't going to cut it if you want to continue with this avenue. At the end of the day one of two things happen a.) you've made a couple of sales and you're pretty excited or b.) you didn't have the best of luck and you're questioning your sanity. You go home and hit Pinterest for ideas to up your game with your display and booth and you find soooo many ideas that are just too cool.
You start purchasing a little of this and a little of that along with a 6-foot table or two and miss-matched floor-length tablecloths. Maybe you built a pegboard display for hanging items and edged it with zebra striped tape, and you found this really cool vintage tiered display and a couple of clear acrylic stands. You print out a sign to tape up somewhere in your booth and you do a practice set-up. Wow, this is so much better than that first set-up. Your tables are covered with longer tablecloths that hide your boxes and bins and your products are displayed at varying heights to help attract attention. So it's off to the next craft show to give it another shot. You do a little better this time around but it's still not what you're expecting or hoping for (you thought those gemstone earrings were going to sell like hotcakes and you made 50 pairs of them and didn't sell a single pair). While gemstone earrings are all the rage, and they should have sold at least some, nobody even looked at yours. You go home wondering why. You start to doubt yourself and your talent. Maybe people were just trying to be nice when they said you should sell your creations.
Now is when you have to decide if you're going to stick it out or throw in the towel. If you decide to stick it out then it's time to jump on the internet and research, research, research and when you're done, research some more. Or you can save yourself a lot of time and check out Flourish at Artisan Indie they have done all this work for you.
Your first mistake was not knowing your target market. My partner Dee Dee was constantly telling me if you try to sell to everyone you'll sell to no one. She was on the right track but neither of us had any clue how to fix this. I started researching and implementing different things trying to boost our sales. I started a Facebook page for our business and started posting pictures of our creations. Our pictures were not the greatest ( I started researching photography and learning), our page wasn't getting many likes or followers so I started researching and learning social media management, and we still weren't getting the results we desired. We knew our product was good and appealing, but we weren't catching the attention of the right people.
When she had to move an hour away she stepped back from the business and I made a go of it on my own. I opened an Etsy shop and listed my items and only made one sale the 2 years I had it open. I thought if I put it on Etsy it would be advertised, and I didn't have to do much. I was dead wrong. This is something I didn't really learn until recently.
In 2017 I had an opportunity to partner with my ex-mother-in-law to open a brick and mortar store for handmade only items. I learned a lot from the lady that we rented our space from and I continued to research and learn ( I spent more time doing this than creating at this point). We had a short run as circumstances occurred that had us deciding to close.
This was for our brick and mortar store.
In 2018 I moved closer to Dee Dee and we partnered up again. We found we were still struggling with sales. I had seen Flourish pop up quite a bit on Facebook and went to check it out. In October I decided to bite the bullet and join. I was overwhelmed at first because I just found the plethora of everything I needed to learn all in one place. I kid you not, I binged Flourish for about two weeks. I watched all the "camp" videos and read all the "camp" learning posts that had been running all summer. I started haphazardly implementing the target market and branding material. I finally reached out to one of the copy experts for some advice on writing descriptions she asked for my shop link and asked me about my target market because she couldn't pinpoint anything from looking at my shop. She asked some very pointed questions that made me realized that I still hadn't nailed it yet.
We are still very much a work in progress at this point. We are working on making some changes to our branding now that we finally understand our target audience. You see, you can't effectively brand your business, photograph your product, be effective at social media, or write meaningful copy until you nail the target market question.
Flourish is by far the best investment I have made for my business. We still have a long way to go but I am already seeing results from the few changes I have made.
This is our current logo that we will be making some changes to.
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