Running ahead of the pack

I've been running my Facebook page for just over a year now and consider myself to have moderate success in my sales and customer interaction. I know I don't have a fraction of the number of 'likers' that some of  my fellow Facebook crafters have following their pages, but I try not to use this as a measure of success. Slow and steady seems a much more preferable way to market my business at present, especially as my two youngest are still toddlers and this limits the amount of time I can spend sewing.

A few years ago I spent some time with a small business mentor, gaining an insight into turning art into a business. He thoroughly recommended spending the time building your reputation before starting to pump away at marketing and sales. As the old saying goes 'your reputation precedes you', although you must absolutely make sure that it does so in the right way! A bad reputation can be very difficult to shake off, and yet annoyingly, a good reputation is like glass and shatters easily.


I guess this has stayed with me and I try to put quality and craftsmanship ahead of quantity and trends.
I have very definite likes and dislikes in terms of style. I couldn't tell you how this is defined, but I know when I see something if it makes my grade or not. I try to stay true to this and wouldn't want to offer an item that I wasn't happy with as I see my art as an extension of me, my personality and my creativity. This can be hard of course, as I offer a bespoke service for customers to have their own design ideas incorporated into pieces. Quite often I am faced with creating a piece with colours that I just don't consider to 'work' or fabrics that I would prefer not to work with. This is for me, a challenge in some ways, but also a fantastical exercise in working with the creative ideas of others and coming together to produce a collaborative piece that is beautiful and means a great deal to the person who will receive it.


Taking the time to experiment with new ideas and perfecting them is all part of the job. It's most definitely worth it in terms of your reputation and artistically, many of my best ideas have occurred during second or third attempts.
Unfortunately, this has it's downside. Facebook has become so fast moving and there are so many craft business start ups that the joy of posting pictures of your creations starts to fade when you realise that after pricking the seed of an idea months before, working and re-working it has cost you valuable time and someone else has had a remarkably similar idea to you! This isn't copying - how could they have known what you were working on and vice versa? But it leads me to question the source of my inspiration; has my subconscious inspiration-radar picked up ideas from other internet sites, publications and social media sites that have eventually led me down the particular path of this idea? Evidently someone else has picked up some of the same elements along the way and we have both arrived at a similar point.
Maybe I should cast my inspirational net further afield. Maybe I should be quicker off the mark and make sure I get ahead of the 'pack'. Oh for a bit more uninterrupted time to work on my creations!!