Building Confidence Whilst Growing a Business
This post covers the topics below, delve in and enjoy this post as you navigate through starting and growing your business.
If you prefer to listen to the audio of the post you can go over to the podcast.
. Confidence in business and starting small
. Understanding your product and market position
. Agents and cashflow management
. Environmental sustainability and local sourcing
. Managing money and celebrating wins
So you’ve been trying to launch and grow your business but you’re lacking the confidence to get started. Here’s how I started out with big ambitions, but little knowledge of the greetings industry, starting small and growing slowly locally. Learning to walk before I could run, and not crumbling with an overnight success. Steady knowledge became my superpower, so stick around to find out how I learnt about my industry and looking back, discover what really made the difference to growth and longevity.
Hello and welcome back. I am Fay Martin founder of Fay’s Studio. In my blog, I delve into how I started my greeting card business in the depths of recession in 2009 to today where I am today selling thousands of cards all over the world. Follow my journey one step at a time through the blood, sweat and tears of being an entrepreneur whilst dealing with the challenges of living with 2 chronic auto-immune diseases. Join in the ups and downs of a being solopreneur, and get lots of tips and tricks on how to evolve and pivot your business in an ever-changing and challenging retail landscape.
You might be here to get some info on my brand whether you’re a retailer, a designer, a start-up or you have a chronic illness and need to find something relatable, I hope you’ll find it all here and share what you learn with your business colleagues.
I want to start by talking about confidence in business, and how quickly you can learn persistence and resilience when it comes to growing a product based business. When I was starting out in design I knew I needed a commercial product to create a business for myself. I didn’t know at that time in 2009 that 1.7 billion was spent on greeting cards in the UK alone every year. The Greeting Card Association also reported that we were a decade ahead in terms of design in the UK and that’s why so many buyers would come from overseas to source cards. I knew then that greeting cards would be my life-long passion.
When I launched my business the first thing I learnt was how to grow locally, and local support and local opinion is so important when you’re starting out. I would go into shops selling similar products and ask to speak to the buyer. They would kindly give their time to allow me to show my products and they’d give their valuable feedback about what would work and what wasn’t right for them, so my advice with your product is to get out there and start locally. First of all I was able to build strong relationships with my local stores, putting a face to the brand. In addition to that when I sold my cards in a local store which specialised in local artisans and makers, there I was able to test the market by offering my cards Sale or Return, and for many years I sold here and sold hundreds of pounds worth every month, I was also able to get a good insight into what customers were buying and what was getting left behind, so starting out, this was the best way to get feedback from the customer. This town also had their own currency called the ‘Stroud Pound’ so in turn the local economy was self-supporting. I also entered a local business awards, and won the small business enterprise award at the glitzy do. It was a great way to start building confidence in my brand surrounded by other viable businesses, and gave me a little media attention as well. The local newspaper came to my home to photograph me at work, which in those days was in the spare bedroom which was only big enough to hold a bed a desk and a few wardrobes for my small collection of stock.
Also growing locally meant I was able to get my first ‘no’s’ and this is also so important in understanding your product and the customer you might appeal to. Not every store was interested and you can learn just as much from no’s as you can yes’s, so when I got a no thanks, it wasn’t a reflection upon the product, it was actually just a reflection of what was right for the shop, and their typical customer. So don’t lose your confidence when starting out, as you are learning from rejection. Remember you don’t have to appeal to everyone. If you are trying to appeal to everyone you are appealing to no one.
Growing a business is as much about understanding your product and where you fit into the market as it is about increasing sales. It wasn’t until after 2 years of running my business that I first started illustrating birds and wildlife, which lead on to become the core of what I do today, this is my comfort zone, I find it easy to sell because I love to do it, and it is reflected in the quality of my products. Quite often buyers at trade shows would ask if my stand showed the work of many artists, which it didn’t of course, they were all my own products, but my background in illustration meant that I was able to adapt to many different styles, but this was starting to work against me not for me in the long term, but it took a while for me to figure out which products to lean into and which to archive.
As I mentioned in the last post I was growing enough locally that in 2010 I exhibited at my first trade show in London, at PG Live. I had a small offering of fashion illustration cards to show and I had hand illustrated a backdrop to cover the shell scheme provided by the organisers. I was in the Springboard section of the show for newbies. Springboard wasn’t incredibly busy, but little did I know which buyers attended the show, and I learnt a lot at the show about different suppliers and specialists within the print industry. I also entered my products into the greetings industry awards that year, called ‘the Henries’ and the buyers from Paperchase were on the judging panel.
I must have caught their eye as it was the day before my Birthday on the 13th of August I received an email, which I thought at the time was a joke from ones of my friends, from Paperchase enquiring about my cards that they had seen at the Henries, they wanted to buy and to discuss the terms of their first order. Well this struck up a very long relationship with Paperchase and for quite some time their product category requests would steer my work. I was designing almost exclusively for Paperchase as they were the bread and butter of my growth and designing with them in gave me constant income and the confidence to develop my products. Paperchase really cheered for the small publishers and gave me an amazing platform for my products, I experimented a lot more I would say back then because Paperchase always requested designs for certain occasions and I always responded. My largest order from Paperchase was 11000 Father’s Day cards, and these cards were all hand-finished with tiny googly eyes, so I had to order over 30000 googly eyes to glue to the cards, it was a month in production and actually the only litho-run of cards I have ever done to this day.
I was also at this time working on freelance projects with people I had met networking, so I had lots of other design work going on. I would say that although many opportunities came along and people wanted me to work on illustrations for free, I would advise against it. You don’t have time to work for free and you have the skills to be paid, and if the opportunity for the client is really so important, they will budget for the designer. I don’t look back now on my time as an illustrator and remember one thing I did free of charge that made any difference to where I am today. I kept saying ok, I’ll do this for free and this for free and eventually you de-value your worth. I was doing work in books later on and sometimes looking back I was working over time on amends and this that and the other and eventually full page illustrations were breaking down to a few pounds per page and it just wasn’t worth the bother. And yes, I was constantly pivoting in my business, what’s working, what’s not, archive, develop, move forward and buyers always want the next new thing, so you don’t have time to waste on free work and favours for friends. If you’re not taking your business seriously, you can’t expect others to take it seriously. I charged freelance work at a suitable rate, licensing deals at a good rate, and I always made certain that any wholesale orders where carriage is paid, that it made sense and followed other publishers in the industry. For example, you can’t give the same carriage paid order to the ROI, or USA or Europe as you can to the mainland UK for example. You have to look into where you haemorrhage money and it’s often these little gaps that affect your cashflow.
That brings me onto agents. In 2010 I was already looking for agents, and whilst I could get agents back then, they were never around for very long, the truth is when you are growing slowly and you don’t have new product all of the time because you are busy managing all the other things in running the business, agents soon lose momentum because they are seeing their same customers time and time again and that buyer aways wants something new. There is such a long chain of demand from when you create the product, to the agent, to the buyer and then onto the customer and the turnover is constant, so if you’re not also concentrating on new products agents will come and go, and as I mentioned before I have one incredible agent who has worked with me for several years and she has always been so supportive of my products and foremost how my health battle has gone on, she has been generous and so helpful over the years to support my small business so finding an agent like that I expect is rare.
I also look back at things that were important to me in business even then in 2010, I was already sourcing biodegradable bags for my cards. I had them made specially with a ‘blank inside’ message foiled in gold on them. I was buying thousands of these bags at the time until I started to ship to Australia, and my distributor wanted cellophane bags because the heat in Australia was known to discolour and degrade the bags on the spinners outside of shops. This is an example of how cashflow within your business and the lack thereof meant that I had to make a choice to go back solely to cello-bags because the business couldn’t afford to buy both, which now sounds implausible, but at the time must have been a real strain on cashflow. I wasn’t buying in large quantities back then so envelopes and bags were so much more expensive per unit. This can really stunt your growth when just the raw materials have such a high cost and you have tiny profit margins. After the trade show in May I was already planning my next trade show as well, so I always had to have thousands to spend within my marketing budget to account for growth too, and taking the plunge into trade shows, the benefit must outweigh the risk. Post-show, I would always work out the ROI (return on investment) and following up on leads made at the show is also vital to continue to benefit from your investment.
It is also at this time when I made the transition from printing at my local printers to an actual greeting card printing specialist and the board and envelopes I then selected came from FSC certified sources. I want to bring this to your attention because the greetings industry hasn’t been greenwashing in any way at all. Harmful glitter was thrown out in the not so distant memory when supermarkets banned the use of flitter and we all followed the move to sustainable and biodegradable materials. But even in 2010 I am already improving and making moves to transform my products into something less harmful, with less of a footprint. In fact my first company logo was a pink pencil which was bent in a circle and made to look like the recycle logo. I knew then that I wanted my products to be environmentally friendly, it was important to me at the very beginning, but the squeeze on cost was a barrier to being so eco-friendly.
I wanted to gain confidence with my brand and products because I was able to sell them knowing all of the credentials. Buyers were becoming more interested to know about the materials used. Today, products are almost certainly expected to be environmentally friendly I don’t think it’s something we even need to think about now, which is amazing because everyone is doing their bit to focus on their environmental impact within our industry, and the trade magazines will feature any new development of a ‘greener’ product or story about companies who have a net-zero or carbon neutral accreditation. Customers can almost shop confidence and certainty now that the brand has done everything in its power to make it the least bit impactful as they could. In my small business I have very little waste at all because I constantly recycle and reduce where I possibly can, and of course my hand-finishings are all biodegradable, and I’ve moved away from plastic finishes.
14 years ago, when we were beginning to emerge from recession, the importance of being a British product was also rising. Everything was make do and mend, red white and blue, unions jacks were on everything and product trails at trade shows were leaning towards ‘buy British’, be a British brand, source locally, shop local, etc, it was a great time to be growing a business with these messages behind the brand. Made in England, made in the UK and so on and so forth. I was creating a lot of cards with cups of tea on them, and haberdashery and knitting etc, they were homely and charming and did really well at that time. Following trends of course can also build your brand and resonate with the buyer, but of course it’s always better to do your own spin on the trend and not just carbon-copy someone else’s style. Because of this my business and products were featured in the ‘Top Drawer’ show guide in 2010 which focussed on eco-friendly British made products. I look back at my notes from this show, and taking an order from a complete stranger felt really good, to complete an order form and to get a yes from someone who is invested in you and your product, that can only help further your confidence and grow your business. I also noted how buyers would stop in their tracks and that’s also a real boost to understanding what stands out, what is working and eye-catching. For me it often wasn’t the bold and bright ranges that shouted the loudest but the more considered, words and sentiments I would add to the design.
This was also a really lovely time because myself and my Mum who always helped me at shows, were renting a little studio in London with a kitchenette, as at the time being coeliac it was hard to find food to eat out, so we always had to cook at our rental place, plus it was nice to just relax at the end of a long and tiring day at a trade show and to go over what we’d learnt from the day and what new opportunities had come as a result of the show. Plus, a good show gives you the confidence to book your next one. Confidence can dwindle as much as it grows and being sensitive to market changes, and constantly pivoting and having a sense for how retail is working is imperative to keeping cashflow healthy, and spending in the right places. I haven’t exhibited at every show going because it’s not just money but time I didn’t have if I was going to keep on designing new products. Growing my business slowly helped me to learn from mistakes and it is trial and error that gives you confidence going forward. You can’t run before you can walk, and then even when you’re running there are hurdles to jump, but that’s where your resilience comes in.
So what did I learn from starting small. I learnt that I was always just fine being small, small was enough to still make a big difference, and small enough to care. When you own a small business, you can focus on what is really important to you and to really understand your product. My ethos is very much the same today as it was 15 years ago. Large enough to fulfil orders on demand in volume, but small enough to care about the customer and the details, and there comes a confidence in being exactly the scale you can manage.
So start small, live and breathe your industry until you know it inside out and then grow your business steadily. Take on help where you need it, manage sudden influxes, don’t crumble when things are overwhelming, drop what isn’t working, find your niche and celebrate your wins.
See you again soon for the next post, where I’m going to delve into my experience of launching my business with the backing of the Prince’s Trust. How I became an ambassador for the charity and got dinner at the Palace of Westminster.
Here are some helpful links:-
https://www.crohnsandcolitis.org.uk
http://www.coeliac.org.uk/home/