all things girls can tell

best tip: what a difference a year makes

 

in wrapping up some of my figures and things for january (how is it february already?), out of curiosity, i took a glance back at my numbers from the same month a year ago. last january was officially the first month that girlscantell was my full time occupation (after three years of being my favorite side project).

much to my surprise, and despite having so many other giant projects begging my time all month, my online sales were more than double what they were last year. but that was the least of it - in january 2010, i also added several new stockists (check out the newly updated list here to find great local shops that carry girlscantell!), and i managed to restock almost half of the shops on the list that were in need of more wares after the holidays.

i'm not tooting my own horn, i promise, as much as i'm saying, whoa, what a difference a year makes. most people who know me learn pretty quickly that i'm not a patient person, but i've learned a huge lesson in these past months -that those wise old words "slow and steady wins the race" totally hold true. great businesses aren't built quickly, they develop through week after weeks of putting in the time. so many small business owners get frustrated when they don't see crazy successful results overnight. that's not only totally unrealistic, it's really not even what you want (unless being a flash in the pan is your end goal, i suppose). 

best tip: establishing genuine relationships

 

people often ask what the trick is to supporting yourself through a small creative business (or, we'll pretend that's what they're asking when they gawk "you can make a living doing that?" when i mention what i do for a living...).  while there is, of course, no magic tip or trick to make it easy. there are simple things you can do to make things go as smoothly as possible.

the first would be to establish genuine relationships. this probably applies not only to making a living through your handmade art or what-have-you, but also just to, you know, life in general (but i won't claim to be any expert on the matter of "life in general", so i'll stick to blogging what i know...)

• customers - because without them, cheesy as it might sound, you don't have a business. this might sound obvious, but i think people forget this sometimes. so be real. be relate-able. be honest. give them your best. it'll pay off.
• 'employees' - you might not have people on the payroll (dream as you will), but it probably takes more than you to make your business work. the people who make your venues run, who manage the boutiques or shops that carry your work, the bloggers who feature your products... it's really important to not only communicate well with these people, but being consistently easy to work with, helpful, useful and just plain friendly can be the most important thing you do for your business.
• the 'competition' - the truth is, you don't have 'competition' unless you decide those other sellers are your enemies instead of your friends. which is just silly. be consistently honest, open, original and level-headed and things will fall into place. share something you learned with another seller who asks your advice or when you fall in love with someone's work, let them know - no one gets tired of hearing that people like what they do. these are the seemingly casual relationships that not only make work more fun, they really add up to more than the sum of their pieces.

the wise and witty conan o'brien said it best when he mentioned that if you're kind and work hard,amazing things will happen. truer words couldn't be spoken of succeeding in handmade business.

super poppies!

 

surely you've seen some of your favorite artisans and craftistas begging your vote for the 2010 poppy awards in the past few weeks. poppytalk handmade has assembled several ballots full of outstanding talent, and girlscantell is proud to have been nominated for the "favourite textiles" category. yay!

so, you know the drill, loves - click here and vote for girlscantell. then be sure to pass the link on to your friends and family through facebook, twitter, email, etc. and tell them to vote for girlscantell! voting lasts until this friday, january 29, at midnight.

if girlscantell wins a poppy, i'll post a special victory sale (which means you all win, really!) so get to voting!

hero blog: daily drop cap

ored of typographically dull blog posts? look no further. the perfect cure for the fonts that ail you, daily drop cap is a blog that posts a superfun new capital letter goodie each (work)day. what is a drop cap, exactly? well, it's when you take the first letter of a paragraph and you enlarge it (and usually make it quite ornate) so that it drops down two or more lines (as seen on the left at the beginning of this paragraph). drop caps are often used to begin works of fiction, or, if you're feeling fancy, you can use a drop cap to begin a special blog post.

superfun, right? totally. the blog is a side project for jessica hische, and she's posted each weekday since september 2009. according to her website, the project will go through approximately 12 cycles of the alphabet (yay!). enjoy!

microblogs and more!

 

typepad is doing some pretty awesome things this week.

first, they're releasing a new feature that's completely free and really great, called microblogs. why do you care about microblogs? because all year, typepad has been completely upping the awesome - there's a huge network of typepad bloggers, and useful features here to network to new bloggers and expand your audience. readers and commenters can fully participate in your community in new ways: through favoriting, following, commenting, reblogging and, ultimately, blogging with a free typepad micro blog.it's really easy to have real conversations and interactions with these tools.

it's all been introduced by the typepad folks or made shinier since this past april when i had the good fortune of meeting with the superfab community team - they were completely excited then. as features have been consistently rolling out, it's easy for me to see why now. so with the introduction of microblogs, everything is now more accessible and open for all to use (at no cost).

but another really interesting thing typepad is doing this week is, instead of just of sending out a traditional old press release to all the usual suspects, they asked many of their bloggers to announce the news right here on our typepad blogs. it's a really nice statement of how important and widely read typepad blogs really are. a totally fun way for a company to put their money where their mouth (keyboard? what's the analogy i'm looking for here?) is. bravo to typepad for thinking about a really normal procedure in a whole new way.

so, if you don't already have one, do yourself a quick favor and sign up for a free typepad microblog account at typepad.com. and if you have questions about typepad's usability or things, feel free to contact me. i've been blogging with typepad for about 3 years, and it's one of the best decisions i've made for my business. 

ps. they also introduced a gorgeous new, streamlined design for typepad blogs, chroma, but i wanted to play with it a bit before chatting about it, of course. you can read all the good stuff, officially, here.

hopping away

sometimes it's easy to get distracted by all of the side effects - i accidentally get caught up in why views are down or there haven't been as many followers or why is this selling and that just sits there. and that's when i try to stand up, pay less attention and get back to work.

it's so easy to let all the little "measures of success" totally cripple you. or at least me. i forget one of my favorite things to remember: work makes work. the best thing i can do is to make myself hop away from the computer, stop obsessing over analytics and go make fabulous new things. because if you're not putting anything new out there, there won't be anything for people to find. the only thing that will continuously sustain any audience is good, solid, consistent content.

and so on that note, i'm setting aside my laptop for just a bit to work on burning new screens, taking new photos and making some more amazing things for you all to discover. soon. i promise. xo!

doing boring better

last week, i was eating cereal one morning, mindlessly flipping through local supermarket circulars and came across the flyer above for the new grocery section in my local target, my little heart went all aflutter.

why? well, frankly, it's fun. it makes actually really terrible food (that's a whole other blog post, really) look aesthetically appealing and thoughtful. they could have easily used that template that every other supermarket seems to use (ie, the one below) and called it a day. but they took the opportunity to make an impression.

what boring, mundane things do you have to generate for your business that you haven't seen as an opportunity to make your own yet?

treating it as such.

one of the most important things i've done this year for my business is treating like a business. and it really seems like the more seriously i take showing up and getting things done, and done well, the more rewards there have been. it's lead me to a couple realizations:

if you believe you're running a real business, other people will, too.

you can only be as successful as you'll believe that you can be.

now, you should know by now that i'm not some fancy-talking, blowing-sunshine-up-your panties, daily affirmation type person (which reminds me, i want to pick up a copy of barbara ehrenreich's newest book - bright sided: how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined america. it sounds super interesting) who thinks all you have to do to accomplish things is will them so. however, i have become exceedingly convinced that if you don't think you can succeed, that will indeed hold you back. if you can't imagine making a living doing what you love, how will it ever happen? the very truth of it is that if you don't honestly believe you're going to be successful, no one else will, either.

(i suppose this is called confidence.)

and that, bloggity friends, is most of the reason why sometimes i like to dress up like i work in the fanciest of offices (dare i say a la mad men?) even just to work in the studio by myself, editing photos, answering emails and packing up orders. it makes me feel like i'm at a real job (which in turns makes what i do actually a real job. yes?)

superawesome craft show idea

doing craft shows alone sucks, so when kelly and i realized our stuff worked really well together at shows, we were pretty psyched. a couple weeks ago when kelly and i were doing a mock set up for crafty bastards in my studio a few weeks ago, we were trying to figure out what we could do for a banner for each of our little brands. kelly had the brilliant idea of using online fabric printing company spoonflower.com (which i had always thought just did smaller scale, more repetitive patterned fabric) to print our banners.

so the banners you see hanging in our crafty bastards booth (above) are the spoonflower results. they were super affordable and, even though they look really different, they were a great way to provide a little consistency within our little booth space.  and i figured i'd share this tip with you! since making a great banner, logistically, can get a little tricky. enjoy!

separation for sanity's sake - two great interviews

while it may seem easy to people who don't have the pleasure of running their own creative business to say "how hard can it be to just stop working for xyz number of hours a week?". honestly, setting things down and taking a little time off can be incredibly difficult.

in their recent interview on poppytalk (a fantastically curated marketplace which i'm super flattered to be part of for the next month!) lucy of berkley illustration really hit the nail on the head in articulating what makes it tough tomaintain enough separation or balance to preserve sanity. you probably know berkley illustration - purveyors of unbelievably quaint portraits of animals in fine garments. i've been impressed that they work together as a husband and wife duo (without strangling one another - to me that seems quite the feat), and, of course, i'm always on the lookout for advice on balancing work and, well, not-work. it's a great interview - go check it out!

on the one-person-amazingness front, i absolutely love the illustrations of kate bingaman-burt (you may recognize the amazing work she's done in her obsessive consumption project, which was a hero blog here not long ago!) here's an interview she did recently with readymade magazine about how effing awesome her job is. 

why have i linked these two interviews here today? i guess as a little reminder that no matter how awesome what you do is, work is just work, and there's so much more to life than work. even if you're 200% in love with what you do, keeping work vs. not work straight is completely important.