happy monday morning to you friends! 🙂 i hope everyone had a wonderful weekend full of rest and relaxation. if they are anything like mine, this is the exact opposite of what my weekends are like. 😉 mine are crazy busy getting caught up on shop stuff, house cleaning, laundry and little projects here and there. but i love the weekends – no doubt!!
i have a great guest post from one of my sponsors this morning. cassie is one of those rare finds – she is super sweet and supportive and genuinely a wonderful gal all around! today she is sharing five simple things she has learned as an indie biz owner. if you are just starting out it will benefit to realize these simple ideas early on!
Hey Yall! I’m Cassie & I blog over at Live.Laugh.L0ve.
I am so honored to on Skye’s blog today. She is one of my best bloggy friends! Today I wanted to share with yall {yes I am from Texas} 5 things I have learned while having a handmade business, did I mention I had one. Well I do – I have a little handmade shop called ccy designs! 🙂
1. It takes time. Lots of time if you want it to be successful. Promoting, working on shop items, editing pictures of your products, writing descriptions, getting your shop out there. I’ve learned to be very patient with my shop – because it’s not going to grow over night, but I know if I put the time and effort into it, it will be worth it.
2. Understand that it’s YOUR shop. This is one that got me for the longest time. Don’t get me wrong. I obviously knew it was MY shop, but I was trying to go with a theme of things because that’s what I saw in other shops. They had a theme and I thought in order for it to be successful that my shop needed a theme. I couldn’t have been more wrong. My “theme” is now whatever I create that I fall in love with. Knowing that I don’t have to keep it to one certain theme has let my creativity breathe again!
3. Make items you love. You think this would be an obvious one but in the beginning everything I created wasn’t something I loved and it showed. I was creating things that I thought would sell. Big mistake. It finally hit me that I needed to be completely smitten with the items in my shop because it wasn’t going to show in the way I promoted them and in the work themselves.
4. Believe in yourself and in your shop. If you want others to believe in your shop, you have to believe in it. You have to know this is what you want to do and that you are doing what you love, otherwise how do you expect others to love what you make if they can’t see that you do?
5. Spread the word. This is a hard one for me. I’m very shy and asking someone to buy something I make, makes me want to curl into a ball and hide. But truth be told is your shop will get no where if you don’t spread the word about. It has to start with YOU. You have to be the one who lights the fire for your shop and then watch it spread and then keep it going. This is something I am going to be doing a lot more.
I hope these things helped! Thank you Skye for letting me be here today!
one of the things i love most about having a handmade business is that i am constantly learning. learning about running a business, how to create a new product, how to learn a new system, a little something about myself even. these five little tidbits are so very true for indie biz owners!
tell us – what is something you have learned as a biz owner since you have started?
Thank you for your sweet words Skye & thank you so much for having me today!