Well, this little bit of information just couldn’t wait until Thursday, I was anxious that I couldn’t even wait until Tuesday so I am sending out this smoke signal early, because I don’t know if this class will sell out!  Jon Contino is legendary amongst hand lettering aficionados and to be able to take a $20 class from him?  Well, that is just crazy (good) talk. I just found out from my pal Michelle P. that Mr. Contino will be teaching the on-line class above via Skillshare. I have already enthused about how brilliant I believe Skillshare to be, but the addition of a lettering superstar has taken them over the top in my book. I am a bit bummed that the day class launches I will be hitting the road, but you can take the class and enjoy it immensely for me right?  I am so excited about this development I think I may implode.  I hope some of you do take the course, I can’t wait to see what you create in class!

It took me a bit to decide, I did get a little swayed by my New Orleans trip and put a bid in with my husband to add Nola into the mix, but he was having none of it. I had narrowed it down to the Bay area & Seattle then my former boss thew in a curve ball and offered me my old job back for the salary he originally gave me before he cut it in half because of the decline in the economy. For a split second Los Angeles was back on the table making my decision making even more complicated, but then I counter offered and my former boss told me to basically kick rocks barefoot, which obviously stunted any further negotiations. Obviously, it was a little relapse in better judgement on my part but my husband did allow me to indulge myself.

So back to the Bay area & Seattle. I really, really wanted the Bay area, I miss California desperately but with our new budget/savings not being what it was prior to our move out East I knew that we wouldn’t be able to get everything we wanted/needed in a place (mainly a washer + dryer, total deal breaker for me) in the Bay area.  Being so secluded in the country it was also very important to me to be able to be in a area that I could walk to places and that I could get around my new city without a car. In Los Angeles and outside of the areas we could afford in the Bay area that wouldn’t have been an option. I had a nice little list running of things I could not live without and things that would make me miserable if I couldn’t have them (wood floors, a non-fiberglass bathtub). When we started to add all the pro’s versus the con’s Seattle really was the winner. It’s affordable, beautiful, walk-able, on the West Coast and the food is outstanding.  There’s great architecture, it’s cosmopolitan, people are nice, it’s super dog friendly and I couldn’t be happier!  I have spent a lot of time in Seattle but my husband has never been (gasp!) I know who does that moves nearly 3,000 miles to a place they have never been?  I am not as brave as he is, but he LOVED Portland so I think Seattle is going to be perfect for him. We only have a couple more weeks left here in the South and we are so excited for our new adventure!

vintage seattle map print

And the winner of last weeks bestowal of the custom logo stamp set is Brianna Morrison! I also need the vintage globe winners to please email me because I’m moving and they need to go to new homes (announced the winners here), I will choose alternate winners if I don’t hear from the current winners this evening.

Before I do the big reveal of the city we chose I should keep my promises and discuss having your own shop versus utilizing a platform like an Etsy.  There are a ton of Pro’s & Con’s that might be better for me to go over to better illustrate my thoughts.  My first pro for having your own shop is to be able to have a dedicated url, ie. besottedbrand.com rather than besottedbrand.etsy.com.  For traditional branding purposes it looks much better to have a dedicated url.  Now the cons (or the price you pay for that dedicated url).  I knew when I launched Besotted Brand that I wanted to have a dedicated url and design my site the way I envisioned it.  I didn’t have a huge budget for the site but I knew that I might have a better chance of getting a price that I could afford if I worked with someone that would be willing to code and allow me to design.  Be prepared if you go this route to get clipped emails back. I contacted a fairly popular web development company and emailed that I would be willing to design but needed coding, they wrote back and asked my budget I told them and they told me to go somewhere else. Ouch. I eventually found a great coder, super professional and when I told him my budget he told me what he could do it for and we met in the middle. Now for the cons of that dedicated url besides the initial investment, you need to think fast on your feet of how the heck are people going to find your shop in the sea of other shops out there on the interwebs?  Now that you are out thousands of dollars and have no budget for PR you need to figure out a plan for exposure.  I being the genius that I am did not have a formal marketing plan in place (I do not suggest this). I find promoting myself extraordinarily difficult. What I did have prior to launch was a mailing list, it was a list that I had up for a few years. I sent an email to that list letting them know that I had launched. It had a pretty even across the board response about 50% were thrilled and shopped shortly thereafter and the other 50% forgot they signed up for the list and reported me as spam thus I got banned from my email campaign carrier. Ouch. I don’t like getting too many emails from companies so I am not a huge fan of the email campaign. I do send one out about once a quarter and I try to make it worth the recipients while. There was no Pinterest or Instagram when I launched but those are great ways to get your brand noticed, as are places like Facebook. I read that’s how the wildly popular Mae Mae Paperie got her start by networking via Facebook and contacting fellow alumni about her newly launched company.

Now let’s get into Etsy shall we?  With Etsy you could pretty much have your shop up and running in an afternoon, hooray! That’s a huge pro in my book. The other pro is having the potential to have millions of eyes on your brand each day without ever lifting a marketing finger! The flipside/con of that is those millions of potential consumers also have millions of competing brands in your same category to eyeball as well.  You are going to have to work extra, extra hard to make yourself stand out from the crowd.  Your photos will need to be first rate, as will your copy and once you get a sale you are going to have to jump through hoops to make sure that customer is thoroughly satisfied so you don’t receive any negative feedback which can adversely effect your shop status. Another thing I need to address are the fees.  When I answer emails about Etsy people are always irritated by the fees. That is indeed a pro for running your own site–no fees (but remember the bigger upfront cost). The way I look at it for a new business is 0% of 0 is zero. Meaning, if you don’t make a sale at all you have a big fat goose egg of nothing, but if you do and you have to pay a small fee it is worth it in my humble estimation. More eyes on your brand may mean more potential sales, you will have to decide what that is worth to you. Or do you have to decide?  I eventually opened an Etsy shop as well because potential clients were asking me if I had one. I  asked why and was told that they would feel safer buying from a place like Etsy. I ship a lot of international orders so I can see where having a big corporation like Etsy behind a shop would feel a bit more safe. I gladly pay my fees and consider it the price of running my business.  One last con for Etsy and it’s super unfortunate–there is a proliferation of copy cat shops and under cutting on pricing. My advice?  Ignore them. What? Don’t allow the negative to takeover what you created. If you priced your items accordingly + fairly than trying to meet the price of your lower priced copy cat is going to negatively impact your business model. Don’t get into sacrificing your quality because you are now trying to compete with a company that is copying you. Another sound piece of advice? Get some press, getting your brand in print will hopefully ensure that clients will want the original rather than a lower quality, lower priced counterfeit. In summary, they both have their pro’s & con’s, you will need to weigh both and find out what will work best for your current situation.

If you have anything you would like to add to this conversation please do so. And if you have any other questions I didn’t answer above let me know!

P.S. If you are wanting a huge does of ‘get yourself on the right track and follow your dreams’, this girl will be sure to administer it.

photo via the graphics fairy

Whenever I do the custom stamp giveaways I receive a full inbox the following week asking me when I will be doing the next one. Since I have no rhyme or reason how I do these things, my only answer is ‘soon’. Well, to all of you that have emailed or have hoped that I would do it again, I hope today is soon enough!  A lot of my clients have been purchasing their logo in two sizes one for their packaging and a smaller version for things like back of cards and tags. My client above (the very lovely Boutique Minimaliste) created the artwork for her stamps with her shop name on one and her shop motif on another.  For this bestowal I wanted to offer one lucky winner the same type of set, one 1″ x 1″ handle stamp (if you want to sub for a monogram instead, indeed do!) and one logo stamp up to 2″ x 2″.

I am not going to ask you to answer a question this Monday morn, but I am going to ask you to do a little work for it (if you are so inclined) leave a comment with something new you learned lately (it could be a new word, a new recipe, a new to you what have you…), and to Pin, FB and/or Tweet about (or whatever new fangled social media you are into these days, have you heard of Keep?) I will choose the winner next Monday. And to celebrate that we are moving cross country (again!)  in three weeks and since next Tuesday will be the last day for custom stamp orders for at least a month, I am offering 50% off all week on custom stamps & monogram stamps, so stock up!

Speaking of moving we did make a decision and I am quite excited about it, I will do the big reveal tomorrow! I can’t wait to share our choice with you.  Good luck friends!

P.S. The above photo is by Boutique Minimaliste, click here to see shots of how her stamp in action!

I was originally going to just share a cool free font find today, but realized I have compiled a nice little list of documentaries that the husband and I have had the pleasure of watching lately.  Living in the country we couldn’t get regular cable because we would have had to attach a gigantic satellite dish to the house, so we decided to forgo this luxury and just rely on Netflix instant download. I often find myself in a perpetual state of ‘there’s nothing to watch’ mode on Netflix., so if you seem to be there too here are some of my latest picks.  Let me know if you have seen any of these already or have any suggestions for  future ones, I am a bit of a documentary addict.  So here goes (in no particular order):

Kumare-I probably would have never watched this since new age-y/guru type subjects don’t hold an appeal for me, but I listened to two podcasts that interviewed the writer/director and I was pretty enthralled.  I loved his message, but some people are furious with him. I would love to know what you think!

Queen of Versailles-This is dubbed a riches to rags story, which indeed it is.

Candyman-This is the story of the inventor of the world famous Jelly Belly, it’s both inspiring and heart breaking.

Holy Rollers-Card counting Christians, this story is unbelievable.

The Story of Anvil-This is the ‘real’ Spinal Tap.

And now for that font, I used it in the graphic above, it has three weights (thin, medium, fat), it’s free for personal use but you can buy an extended license if you want to use it for commercial purposes. You can download it here. Enjoy the docs + the font.