The Weekly Glow Up: August 30, 2023

Welcome back to the Weekly Glow Up, where I share tips and resources that you should know about as a creative who wants to make money from their art.

Here’s what I’ve got this week:

1. ⚙️ How to Not End Up With Boxes of Mugs in Your Closet for 3 Years

To this day, I have hand lettered mugs sitting in my closet collecting dust. They look like this:

Pretty sure they've been available for sale on my Etsy shop for over 3 years 😅

They're there because I based some of my business decisions off of my own bias — the designs I liked or the ideas I thought were exciting, without doing my due diligence to see if my audience would agree.

As an artist, you want to pursue the creative ideas you're excited about.

But you have to balance that with your business owner side and ensure it makes sense to sell that exciting idea, BEFORE you invest a lot of time & money into it.

If I were starting over with the product side of my lettering biz, I would try:

🙋🏼‍♀️ Asking my audience for feedback on potential designs/products 🤝 Gathering preorders before investing too much in a new product 🔍 Seeing what else is selling well in my niche 📦 Ordering a small sample size and see how the product does

What due diligence are you doing today before you launch a new product?

2. 📙 ICYMI: 3 Must-Have Tools for Creative Business Owners

In case you missed it, I recently released a short guide on 3 must-have tools for creative business owners.

These are the tools that I recommend to every letterer and creative I work with, even if they’re just starting out with their biz.

They’ll help you start off on the right foot by organizing your time, learning what to prioritize, and creating seamless client communications without being stuck in meetings all day.

Check em out here.

3. 🍵 Client Tea: Use What’s Worked in the Past

I was on a call with a letterer who’d had a good amount of success in the past through word-of-mouth.

She lived in a smaller community than she does now, and sold a niche product that didn’t have much competition in her area.

Now, she lived in a different, much larger area and was looking to expand her sales online to a larger audience as well.

She wasn’t seeing the same amount of success — she was having trouble capturing interest and engaging new customers.

In these situations, I like to encourage people to look at what worked in the past, and think about how you could possibly apply it to your new scenario.

For this example:

What worked was word of mouth, engaging people in a small community.

What changed is where she lived — her actual community.

So one idea to recreate what was working is to build a network within her new, larger community.

Even if you’re in a big city, you can find pockets and niches where you can make connections and build awareness of your creative business.

Are there creative meetup groups in your city? A local craft fair scene? Indie art galleries or pop ups? Local organization groups like Rising Tide or Creative Mornings?

By tapping into these things, you can recreate the advantages of that small community that worked so well before.

It’s always an easier and faster path to success to leverage the things that already work instead of starting entirely from scratch.