Week 3B: Developing a Brand
My brand is rather fractured because I have not really approached marketing in an organized fashion. In one sense, it is just overwhelming. The usual cure for that is to break it down into steps, but I don’t know what all the steps should be. In another sense, business has always seemed boring to me. I want to design and create, but participating in business activities seems stultifying. Writing a business plan seems like a huge obstacle.
It is also difficult to do marketing because I have a few sets of products. As an artist, I make jewelry, art glass, home décor items, and commissioned pieces. As an Interior Designer, I create residential spaces and stage homes. And somewhere in there, I also do pet sitting.
It all started in 2005 when I retired from the computer industry and when I discovered beautiful beads on eBay. I started buying these gorgeous beads because I had to have them, they were so stunning. After I amassed a substantial quantity of beads, I decided I ought to learn how to do something with them and started teaching myself how to make jewelry.
In preparation for my great eBay jewelry selling career, I created a primitive logo that I used on all the invoices, packing slips, and other branded documentation one would use with an eBay presence. I made it in a variety of sizes for different purposes.
However, I did not sell any jewelry on eBay or Etsy, which I tried next. There is so much jewelry from Asia made by children and at such cheap prices that I could not compete. To beat those prices, I would have had to charge less than my materials cost me. This was rather depressing, especially because at this time, Etsy was still supposed to be a site for handmade artisan work. They have since changed their approach which made the site even less likely to be a good market for me.
In 2008, I started taking classes at Palomar College. I took the three-class sequence of Jewelry and Metalsmithing along with Enameling and Stained Glass. I had enameled a little when I was a teenager and was delighted to become reacquainted the medium. In my Stained Glass classes, we also learned how to slump and fuse glass. I because addicted to glass art in all forms, of which enameling is only one, the application of glass to metal.
I also finally started selling some of my work, at the bi-annual Student Arts and Crafts Show that Palomar College puts on every semester. I did really well in the beginning when I had quite a variety of things to sell. But I didn’t replace the stained glass and other larger pieces when they sold, so after a few years, I only had jewelry and small décor objects like wine glass charms left to sell. Jewelry pieces are small and even though they were very reasonably priced, they were just too much temptation for larcenous students and other customers, and I ended up losing so much product to theft that it was no longer worth my while to participate in the sale. I went from making $800 per sale to losing money.
Meanwhile, Palomar College didn’t offer these great studio art classes in the summer so I took an online Interior Design (ID) class. I loved it; I was a natural. I realized that I had been doing it all my life, with my many dormitory rooms and apartments and condos, and with my siblings’ homes. It turns out I have a great sense of color and balance. My stained glass instructor called me the Master of Color as I prodigiously poured out stained glass pieces. I ended up taking the entire sequence of Interior Design classes and getting my A.S. in Interior Design.
I did an internship in Interior Design with a designer who specialized in kitchens and baths, and had a great time. The designer hired me on permanently when the internship was over and I worked there happily for three years. But when she simplified her procedures and let me go, I discovered that not very many design firms wanted to hire people part-time and I didn’t want to work full-time. That resulted in my being mostly unemployed for the last three years.
For starters, I do all these things because I love and enjoy them thoroughly. That’s not to say that I haven’t tried to monetize the activities. I started by getting some business cards designed around one of my favorite colors, purple.
I didn’t put a title on the card, figuring I could use it for business and personal purposes. They mostly got used for personal purposes like when I met an attractive man in a club or on the beach.
I studied kitchen design as part of my ID training and created a fictitious company called Kitchen Korners. Since we had to create drawings, I also designed a logo for this made-up company using my other favorite color, turquoise. I used a whimsical font, a variation of Comic Sans, I think.
Kitchen and bath design is my favorite in that it combines ID with technology, two of my passions.
As time went on,
I decided that I wanted a logo that included my initials, something I could
sign artwork with, something classy and unobtrusive. My initials spell out my first name so it
would also be clever. I had been looking
at some of the online freelancing sites like www.fiverr.com
and http://www.freelancer.com in 2017,
and decided to have someone from one of them design a logo for me to see what
they came up with. I told the gentleman I ended up hiring that my favorite
colors were aqua and purple and that it would be great if he could work them
into it. He came up with a logo that
could be used both to sign my artwork and as a traditional logo.
The logo has my initials kind of smashed into each other with the N using the final stroke in the A as its initial stroke. I like it but didn’t end up using it for anything for a while.
Sometime later I joined the Good’ol’Gals, a women’s networking group that had members setting up booths during the monthly luncheon meetings in a marketplace. Around the same time, more and more people were admiring the jewelry I was wearing, mostly chain maille bracelets and pendants I had made myself, or copper enamel pendants that I created. These two circumstances combined to inspire me to really get my act in gear on this jewelry and art business career.
In 2016, I had started calling my business Jan Neff-Sinclair’s Custom Creations as much of what I made was done to a client’s specifications. The term creation was also vague enough to cover jewelry, art glass, and décor objects. I made up some 4 x 6 art cards, a play on business line cards that show what a business’s products are.
I even included a small panel listing the classes that I taught. At that point in time, I’d taught a preliminary stained glass class at the San Diego Quail Gardens and done stained glass demos at Palomar College. I also taught enameling to fellow students at Palomar College and even had a handout for beginners to use when I wasn’t in class or was otherwise occupied.
Palomar scheduled Jewelry and Metalsmithing I, II, and III all in the same large studio room with the Enameling class. That was four classes in the same room with only one instructor. At times, he had an instructional aide but not always. He spent so much time with the Jewelry and Metalsmithing I class that it really helped him out to have myself and my friend Noah teach the beginning Enameling students who hadn’t done it before.
I made up a price
list along the same design guidelines because when a show popped up that I
could participate in, I didn’t always have enough time to put a price tag on
every single individual piece for sale.
I eventually came to the conclusion that my business name was too long and no one would remember it. It was too much to type in if someone wanted to look for me on the Internet. It might be accurate but that wasn’t the point. So I came up with Jan’s Jems as a new business name. It is short, alliterative, a cute misspelling, and ambiguous enough to include everything I did. After all, just about anything can be called a gem if it is special.
In 2017, I had also noticed that other people had business cards with the same design as mine; they had no doubt gotten their cards from VistaPrint, too. So I designed a really fancy card that was even stacked or layered, so it would stand out from the dozens of other business cards people collected. I even went so far as to commit to a title for myself.
It was a gorgeous card that I really liked but it was too expensive to give to just anyone. I finally realized that I was hoarding the cards, which certainly was no help to getting my business off the ground. Something had to change.
In 2019, I decided it was time to get serious about this business stuff. I was no longer working at the Interior Design firm and I missed the income. I decided that I needed a web presence. I had not yet decided if that would be as just an artist or if it would be as an artist and an Interior Designer. But to get out in front of it, I got the domain name and email address. Unfortunately, someone else had already nabbed JansJems as a domain name so I ended up with http://www.Jans-Jems.com which had a hyphen. I still cannot decide if the hyphen makes it too hard to recall or not.; sometimes I wonder if I should have gone for http://www.jans.jems.com but some people don’t realize that you can have more than the single period before the com and would never enter it correctly. The email address that went along with the domain I selected was Jan@Jans-Jems.com.
Of course, now
that I had a web site and email address, I needed a new business card. I couldn’t justify the expense of the last style
of card that I’d used so I went for something different although still colorful
and classy. This card is purple-based
and has a silver embossed leaf pattern on it.
The problem with this card is that I have yet to stand up my web page or set up my email address. So every time I give someone this card, I have to cross out the lines with the web site and email address and write the Yahoo email address I usually use on the back. Not very professional.
And if you
believe what the Motley Fool
The Motley Fool article about building a brand lists elements of a brand. I have some of these elements:
- Logo
- Color palette
I sort of have the elements:
- Typography – Comic Sans,
Arial, other whimsical but readable fonts
- Personality
- Artwork – fun, exciting,
unique, bold, attractive, eye-catching, good value
- Interior Design – comfortable,
relaxing, custom, gorgeous, #NoBeigeZone, nothing overpriced
- Voice
- Artwork – ???
- Interior Design – everyone deserves good design
I don’t have these brand elements:
- Style guide (implies a lot of work that might be overkill)
- Iconography (I don’t even know what this means outside of a logo)
My research needs to begin with customer or client definition. In my case, there will be a lot of overlap between my artwork clients and ID clients. I see my customer segmentation approach to be a concentration of just a few segments.
I ought to research tools some as well. I’m pretty familiar with MailChimp as I use it to put out a bimonthly newsletter for the political club where I am Communications Chair. It can’t do everything I need though, I don’t think. Bitrix24 was recommended as good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for startups so I will research it. I think I need a blog, an online store, a portfolio, and an education section that can contain articles and videos. If I can make part of the education section into a subscription service, that would be even better. It would be great if the online store tied into Facebook stores, eBay, Amazon, Walmart, Instagram, Shopify or something similar, and the new PayPal marketplace. Whether this is a realistic expectation for a package that doesn’t cost $100 month remains to be seen.
I don’t have an angel backing me so startup funds are extremely limited. I will have to make do with less expensive offerings. However, with my Software Engineering background and a familiarity with basic web design, I might be able to kludge together everything I need on a platform that doesn’t have everything built-in. The journey continues . . . .
References
Izquierdo, R. (2020, June 30). How to Build Your
Business' Brand in 5 Steps. Retrieved September 24, 2021, from the
blueprint: A Motley Fool Service:
https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/how-to-build-a-brand/
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