And, a business is born.
It doesn’t seem like many people talk about how difficult it is to start a business. Of course it’s a lot of work. But just how much is a mystery until you start one of your own. I’ll be chronicling this journey, hopefully, not only to help someone else, but to ensure I’ve kept copious notes on my process should I need to backtrack and make changes.
“Baby” needs a name. Once I’d decided I was going to make a go of it, I had no idea where to begin. So, like many people, I bought “Dummies Guide to Starting A Business: The Essential Primer for Launching, Operating, and Scaling Your Way to Profitability” by Andrew Rehbein. One of the first steps was figuring out a name. This was probably the hardest and longest piece of the process so far. It took WEEKS for me to come up with Scrap of Clay Art Studio. It seemed so OBVIOUS when it finally came to me, but I hemmed and hawed forever playing with words before it finally sunk in. Once I’d figured that out, I was panicked to find out if the name was already taken. I kept thinking, “Oh my gosh, if the name is already taken, I’m back to square one and its already taken me so long to get where I am now!” Copious searches came up with nothing. So, I snagged the domain name and made the trip downtown to register my business as a sole-proprietor.
Mirror, mirror on the wall… Having finally settled on a name, I needed to come up with a logo. Thankfully, with my design background, I already had the software and know-how to do this part. I played around with fonts and went with what you see above. Playful, easy to read, distinguishable at smaller sizes, and could be used easily in both color and black and white. I saw a course on Facebook that offered a free week-long marketing webinar, so i signed up. The course talked about marketing specifically for art businesses. It was inspiring. Afterwards, I signed up for the program that would help me market my business and received tons of tools and advice. I felt a bit more impowered after that.
What’s the plan, Stan? It was time to write a business plan. While I knew I wasn’t going to need funding, having a business plan would help keep me on track. It took about a week to write the plan, however, the financial part still isn’t finished. I’ve never been great at numbers and figuring out that part ended up causing me to lose steam. So, that piece is on hold. However, I was able to flush out everything else, from mission to operations to sales. Should I ever need funding, I’ll have to finish the financial piece, but I at least have a working model.
Entering the “dark web”. Anybody who says creating a website is easy, has never created a website from scratch for an e-commerce company. Not only do you need to take product photos, but product photography is nothing like portraiture or landscape. So, I signed up for an online class and learned everything I could about lighting, etc. I bought a lightbox, set up my old Canon and got to work. While I have decent photos to work with, this will be a continuing process as long as I continue coming up with new products. Then you have to comb through all of the photos, color correct, crop, and save them so they’re usable. Once those were complete, I had to write product copy. Thankfully, Squarespace has an AI verbiage generator you can use to “spice up” what you’ve written. All of this took me a couple weeks to complete.
Next blog, I’ll go into the marketing side, additional webinars I’ve been taking, and the final launch.
