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June 5, 2018

Episode 060: How to Achieve the Ideal December in your Handmade Business

I know how awesome it is to have a handmade business holiday season that is as stress-free as possible but also highly, highly profitable because you were prepared. I'm going to help you accomplish that ideal December through my unSLUMP guide. | The Merriweather Council Blog

handmade business holiday seasons tips

AHH it’s my favorite time of year! The time of year when we get to start strategizing for the holiday season!

In this episode, we are going to chat about your ideal December as a handmade business owner. What does that look like and how do you get there?

As you know, December is full of gift-giving holidays. December can be a hugely profitable time for product sellers. It can be hugely profitable for you as well, if you know how to prepare for it and how to take advantage of it.

the ideal situation

Basically, in December your ideal situation is that you’re making several sales a day. You’re hitting your goals and you are making the sales you want to make. You are working out orders with customers quickly, closing deals quickly, and once you get those orders you’re able to turn them around fast and with ease. You have your work space very nicely organized. Things are streamlined in your process online and offline. You have your social media accounts working for you with content going out daily. You are still able to interact with people as you see fit. You are able to send emails to your customers through your email list without a lot of struggle.

Everything is working rather nicely. Things are streamlined and things are going off without a hitch. Customers are communicating important details about their orders with you without you having to follow-up with them a hundred times. Things are just looking really, really good. Things are feeling really good. Your process is down. Your space is as organized as it could possibly be. Your turnaround times are solid. You’re getting orders out in time. Things are arriving as they should be, on schedule.

I believe that that is what your ideal situation looks like as a maker in business in December.

You’re making the sales you want to make and you’re hitting your sales goals. You’re able to produce those orders and work through that order queue without a lot of struggle. In addition to that, your outbound marketing is trucking along. You know what you’re saying. You have all of your accounts pushing out relevant and seasonal content daily without a lot of struggle day to day, right?

frazzled, stressed, and unplanned

I believe that that is what your ideal situation looks like. That is what mine would look like; rather than being frazzled and stressed out and at the last minute having to call people in to help me. Unplanned this, unplanned that. Missing important dates to send emails to my list, forgetting to update something or whatever. Things happen. My ideal situation looks like those things that happen, happening a lot less. All the things I have control over, I have actual control over. Saying that you have control over something and then actually controlling it are two different things.

enjoy the holiday season

That ideal December is what I want for you, it is what I want for me, it is what I want for all of us this year. Holiday 2018 (whether it’s your first holiday season, your third, fourth, fifth holiday season, whatever the case may be): I want it to be hassle-free and stress-free as much as possible for you as a business owner. I also want you to be able to enjoy your own friends and family, your own life, and the things you personally love about the month of December.

For me, I love to go home to New York and be with my family, visit the Christmas tree in Rockafeller Center and see friends I otherwise don’t see very often. Those are things I love to do. In my ideal December, because I have gotten my business situation to that ideal place I described, I am more able to find the time. Not only time to do those things I love to do in my personal life, but actually enjoy them. To have the presence of mind to be in the moment, doing the things I love, without worrying so much about what’s happening with my orders or whatever in my business. I’ve planned for this and because of that I can do both. I can have my ideal business December and my ideal personal December if I plan for it, which is exactly what I want to help you do.

If you are reading this post today you are very likely a handmade business owner. You likely want that ideal December I described, both personally and professionally. I am going to help you get there.

holidays and shopping

I talk about this every year: If you can use June, July, August, and September to your advantage by prepping for October, November, and December, you can have the ideal personal and professional December, okay?

It’s so, so important that you hear this message now, in June. Black Friday is the day that your average American person begins thinking about buying gifts for holiday for their friends and family. Of course, there are some very well-prepared people who start thinking about this much earlier. But, for most people, the impetus to begin holiday preparation and shopping for the vast majority of people on their list is at least Black Friday. That’s the soonest, okay?

Then of course, Thanksgiving is the most traveled for holiday in America. It’s non-religious, it’s just an American holiday, ALL Americans could be celebrating it so lots of people travel for it. A lot of people are still out and about traveling and celebrating with their family and friends the Saturday following Thanksgiving. That whole weekend, while it is traditionally a very high-volume shopping weekend, people might still be traveling so they’re not at their home computer or in their office. They’re not in their regular schedule, so they might not be doing their online shopping quite as heavily until that Monday or Tuesday. That is why we have that little thing called Cyber Monday. Of course, people shop from their phones. It doesn’t matter where they are geographically but I’m just saying this is the stuff you want to consider. The average person’s not really thinking about it till at least Black Friday. Then they might not even really be thinking about it till the following Monday or Tuesday or even later.

Your very important holiday timeline

Let’s put it this way: the average American buyer does not truly get into purchasing gifts for the vast majority of people on their list until at least Black Friday. This year it is November 23rd.

Add to that then, the average shop owner is probably going to turn off their ordering potential somewhere between the 10th and the 14th of December. You need a couple days at least, right, to make stuff. Then you have to leave a few days to actually have it going through the mail and arriving probably before the holiday, right? Let’s say you want to have all your orders in the mail by the 19th of December. That gives them four-ish, five-ish days to arrive to domestic locations. Let’s say the 18th is the last day we’re shipping.

You need four days or five days to actually turn around the orders you received, which is your processing time. This brings us up to the 11th or the 12th of December, depending on if you include weekends in your processing time. I’m sure at that point of time of the year you do. Let’s say the 12th is the last day that you’ll take orders so that you can turn them around and put them in the mail by the 18th so they can get to their domestic locations by Christmas. That means you’ve got 12 days in December and 7 days in November. That’s a total of 19 days, 19 actual days, not business days. 19 days between when the average American buyer begins thinking about purchasing for Christmas and when you, as a hand-made business owner, likely need to turn off ordering in your shop. This will allow you to turn those orders around, to process them, and then put them in the mail and let the UPS do there job. 19 days. You know how quickly those 19 days are going to go when you’re in them? So quickly.

19 days on auto-pilot

Once those 19 days roll around you’ll want to be on auto-pilot. Make, ship, make, ship. Those are the only things you should be doing in real-time at that particular juncture of the year. Everything else can be done ahead of time. The only things you should be doing during those 19 days are filling orders and putting them in the mail. That is it. If you’re drafting emails on December 9th, you’re doing it wrong, okay?

I’m going to help you figure out exactly what to do, when exactly to do it, and get it done ahead of time so that you can be professionally and personally joyful in December. I am so excited to do that.

That is all going to happen through my unSLUMP guide, my seven-step process for getting you to the holidays through the summer.

The benefits of utilizing the unSLUMP

1. Get fully prepped for your best and most profitable holiday season yet. No stone un-turned. Learn from my wins and losses over the past 7 years.

2. Have positive focus in the summer because it can be really, really stressful. There can be a lot of negative feelings and emotions for sellers in the summertime, because things do tend to slow down a lot. I know, intimately, how difficult it is, and how stressful it is to feel like your business is just shriveling up in the summertime.

On the flip side, I also know how daunting it is when things do start to pick up again and you’re not prepared for it. I know how annoying it is to be like, “I had so much time three months ago that I could have used better to prepare for this now, so that I could do more now, when it matters, when there is a profitable opportunity.” I know how bad that feels, to be sitting in a space where there are opportunities that you can’t take advantage of because you just don’t have the capacity, because you didn’t prepare for it.

Eventually I figured it out.

have a stress-free holiday season with my unslump guide

I know how awesome it is to have a holiday season that is as stress-free as possible but also highly, highly profitable because you were prepared. From all ends of the spectrum, I get this, and I want to help you have that ideal December that we spoke about. That’s going to happen. The way that I’m going to help you accomplish it is through my unSLUMP guide, which is going to help you prep and prepare for your most profitable holiday season that’s possible for you. It’s going to help you avoid a lot of those downfalls that come up for sellers in the summer.

If you really want to be honest about this, the cost of putting off your holiday preparation till September or October is that you’ll miss out on a lot of opportunities that come up in the summer relevant to Christmas. You put yourself at risk as a business owner for doom and gloom in the summer. That is probably the most costly thing that could happen to us as a business owner. You are the sole proprietor, most likely, of your business and your business relies on you. If you are not in a positive state, then your business can’t be either. With the unSLUMP, we’re going to have positive focus through the summer and we’re going to get to the holiday season as prepared as possible. It’s going to be magical and amazing. I really hope you’ll gift yourself that opportunity.

the unslump details

I have so many students who love this program. I honestly feel like it’s some of my best work so I’m so excited to share it with you. The updated 2018 version of the unSLUMP is available now for you to download, print out and get working on.

You’re going to use this work and guidebook to get through the summer and through the holidays with ease, less tension, and organization. We’re just going to work through the seven steps of my process, which include promotion, merchandising, logistics, updates and upgrades and many other things. Of course, unSLUMP is an acronym. Get all the details on the full program here.

This, I promise you, is going to make a huge difference to your holiday season if you can start ahead of time.

If you start now, you cannot go wrong. I’m so excited to help you get there, and I’m so excited to see what happens this year, holiday 2018. I feel it’s going to be a good one. It’s going to be a profitable one for all of us. Let’s get started!

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May 31, 2018

Episode 059: What You Need to Know About Your Etsy Sales-to-Review Ratio

discouraged about your etsy sales-to-review ratio?

Do you ever feel stressed out about the ratio of your Etsy sales to reviews? If you are a hot-blooded human, you probably have.

Of course, as sellers, we always want to see numbers of nearly any kind increase. This includes feedback! We love to see new, positive feedback from customers. It’s a validation of what we are doing, and the way we are doing it. It just plain feels good to hear from people that the work we have done has made them happy. It’s super easy to think that lack of a positive review means someone is unhappy, but that’s not necessarily the case. Today’s episode talks about all of this and more.

It is normal and common to feel a little self conscious about the number of reviews you have on your Etsy shop especially if you have a lot of sales and few reviews or if you are a newer seller wanting to build up more credibility.

in today’s episode

In this episode I’m sharing why this is normal but ultimately not worth stressing about. Also going to be really honest about a problem I think Etsy creates for sellers that has caused a lot of additional stress. Plus I’m telling you about an experience I had with an Etsy admin and their comment to me about the ratio of sales to reviews in my shop. Of course I’ve also shed some light on what actually matters when it comes to reviews, and my own process and thoughts on soliciting reviews (juicy right?!) Hopefully this episode helps you Etsy sellers feel more at ease about your sales to reviews ratio!

Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode!

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May 30, 2018

What Small Businesses Can Learn from Taylor Swift’s Marketing

Really glad to be able to share these extended show notes with you today, dear reader! If you missed our podcast episode about Taylor Swift’s amazing marketing example, catch up here! Big thank you to Kimber Casteel of Kim Art Designs for recording that episode with me and for writing this amazing “EP” for us! ha!

Kimber Casteel’s Deeper Dive into Taylor Swift’s Marketing

Whether you love her, or love to hate her, it is undeniable that Taylor Swift is on everyone’s radar. Taylor Swift has become a powerful and polarizing artist in recent years. After taking a long hiatus from the public eye to write her new album, Taylor Swift released Reputation on November 10th, 2017, a musical juxtaposition of her previous album, 1989. Reputation is an album through which Swift rewrites her story for herself, her fans, and really all of the people who may have misunderstood her.

Whether you are a fan of Taylor Swift’s music or not – there is truly no denying that she is a marketing genius. Sure, she has teams of people that work for her, but she innately possesses her own business savvy, knows what her fans want, and genius-ly brands herself to the pop-perfect tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in net worth. Even though Taylor is running her music business on a grand scale, so many of her business practices and marketing tactics can be applied to small business and handmade sellers! It was truly super fascinating for me to look through the lens of a business owner and really appreciate her each and every move for what they are – genius business decisions.

If you’re not a “Swiftie”, as her fans are amorously called, I am here to fill you in on all of the need to know details about Ms. Swift, as related to her business. While her personal life does play a huge part of her media coverage – I think it’s time we focus less on who women are dating and more on their business accomplishments and hard work!

Let’s get started from the beginning.

Building Her Brand

Taylor Swift is a branding genius. She knows her fan base VERY well and is consistent with her delivery of nuggets of detail, hidden messages, and lyrically genius ear worms. Taylor Swift is one very smart woman – everything she does is aimed at furthering her brand. SHE is her brand. Her fan base consists mainly of young females, ranging in age from pre-teen to adults, like myself, who have been following her musical journey for years. (After all, we were both born in the same year!).

It is nearly impossible to NOT pay attention to what she is doing. She utilizes the most powerful tool of this generation – social media – to ensure she is getting the information she needs to her fans where she knows they will see it. This is not unlike the many makers and small businesses that also have leveraged platforms, such as Instagram and Pinterest, to gain fans, popularity, and business.

Prior to the release of Reputation, fans were quickly alerted to Taylor’s next move when she blacked out her social media. What does this mean exactly? After months of being VERY quiet on all social media accounts, Taylor Swift deleted many years worth of social media content from all of her accounts (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and even her website was blacked out) in late August of 2017. Fans had speculated that a new album should be dropping soon, as this was the most time Taylor had ever left between releasing albums (3 years!). News outlets picked this up like wildfire – that is exactly what she wanted. I personally made sure that all my best friends knew that something was going on with TSwift!

As she built up the anticipation of what was to come next, she was patient and kept us waiting for just the perfect amount of time, and then released short teaser clips of what would clearly be the new theme for her next album, tour, merch… and well, everything. Cue a slithering snake. People went crazy when she posted a teaser promoting new music and a new album. In true TSwift form, there were hidden messages in everything down to the lengths of the clips she posted. Even her album release date (11.10.2017) adds up to 13, her favorite number, which her die hard fans ate up. She is known for subtle details like these, and it is most definitely part of her brand and connects her to her fans even more.

Most notably, Taylor managed to KEEP everyone talking, without even saying much herself. Her Instagram account has nearly had comments turned off on every post since she wiped her social media – her way of basically saying, I don’t need an algorithm and I surely don’t need a comment pod to get – and keep – everyone’s attention. We see you, Tay!

Taylor Swift’s Marketing at Target

I must notably mention that Taylor also had an exclusive partnership with Target where they created a magazine for fans of Taylor that included exclusive photos, photos of handwritten lyrics, and a CD inside. There were TWO cover variations of the magazine, but the inside contents were the same. What did her die-hard fans do? They bought both covers. She knew they would. This also meant doubling her album presales as well. Did I mention this was Target’s largest ever presale for a product? Ok well now you know 😊 Genius.

Her total preorders of her album totaled over 400 thousand copies, which was DOUBLE the amount of preorders for her previous album, 1989. Once officially released, her album sold more copies on Day 1 than any other album released in 2017 sold in its first week. Within 4 days of release, she passed the 1 million album sales mark. Reputation is her 4th studio album to sell 1 million copies in its first week. Clearly she knows what she is doing!

Social Media Marketing

After announcing new music, Taylor quickly began her claim over the internet by creating a partnership with Ticketmaster for her very own “portal” for her fans, dubbed “Taylor Swift Tix” – a genius way of funneling her fans to a platform and have them do the heavy lifting to increase HER social media stats, downloads, streams, and online sales. This is so smart. What Taylor did made it extremely EASY for her fans to tweet and Instagram about her music, sign up for updates, spend their money on her merch, and buy her CD many different ways. Genius.

This is very similar to the trend of creating one landing page for all of your most important links and contact info, and funneling your fans from social media to this landing page. It behooves ALL of us to make it as easy as possible for people to shop for our products and get in touch with us! I personally get so frustrated when I am trying to buy something from an account I see online and their feed isn’t tagged with products, or the direct link in their profile does NOT take me to their site! Eventually I give up. You have to expect that if you aren’t making it extremely easy for people to give you their money – then they are probably giving up too.

So Taylor not only collected all of her fans’ data – wonderful to use for future marketing purposes – she also created this system in the Taylor Swift Tix Portal that made her fans WORK for a spot to be able to purchase a pre-sale concert ticket.

Taylor Swift Tix prompted fans to take “actions” that would give them “boosts” to further their spot on the virtual line for pre sale tickets. There were ways you could pay for larger boosts – mainly, buying the album and merch – but there were also tons of free boosts, too. Daily free boosts included streaming her VEVO lyric videos (up to X amount of times per day), tweeting about her new music, etc etc. What this did was skyrocket her VEVO view stats on YouTube and ensure that her hashtag and album were being mentioned DAILY on the internet. What more could you really ask for? This is perfect. Her fans were doing all of the hard work to gain something they considered valuable – exclusivity.

Without getting into too hardcore details on the ticket selling business, a huge difference in the ticket sales for this tour vs. her tour for 1989 was that this time Taylor wanted to make it as difficult as possible for bots to buy up her best tickets and then resell them at astronomical prices to true fans. At the core of the sentiment, I truly appreciate that. As someone who has paid nearly 3x as much as the face value of a ticket to go to a concert in the past, I really thought this was a step in the right direction.

Pricing

The true business and economical decision behind this was also very genius. Let me paint a picture for you. Her 1989 tour dates sold out in minutes. Yes, it was because the album was a hit, but there were also a TON of bots that bought up tickets and resold them at higher prices. It was wonderful for headlines – “Taylor Swift’s World Tour Sells out in Minutes!” – but really, in cases like these the artist and venue are losing a ton of money to bots. This is basically an artificial sense of success that doesn’t profit the business owner. Kind of reminds me of “exposure doesn’t pay my bills!” – ha!

So to combat this, this time around, you had to prove you were a real person and complete boosts in order to get a personalized pre sale ticket purchase time slot sent directly to you. Also, to keep the numbers relative, say for the 1989 tour Taylor is selling 60,000 tickets for a show. If 10,000 of those tickets were purchased by bots, surely 50,000 tickets sold is nothing to scoff at! That’s still a ton of ticket sales, and a ton of money! Her team calculated an average price for what her tickets sold for between bots and her normal ticket prices and used this scale to set the prices for her new Reputation tour. Cutting out third party resellers in presale, she released her tickets at a higher-than-average price. Upon hearing this, one might think, well wouldn’t she just rather sell out then have empty seats? This decision was made for a long term benefit.

You see, cutting out the third party sales allows Taylor to get a far more accurate representation of her ticket sales to date. More importantly, it also ensures that herself and her team are seeing the money. They can actually sell LESS tickets and earn the SAME amount of money as a sold out 1989 show because there is no one dipping into her ticket sales. This really reminded me of the notion of raising your prices to more accurately reflect the value of your work so that you can earn the SAME amount of money for doing LESS work. If you are selling a $5 product, to make $50 you have to sell 10 items. If you raise your price to $10 an item, then you only have to sell 5 items to make the same amount of money as before. Smart!

The long term benefit is that Taylor can (and will) continue to sell tickets to her show on her own terms. I remember a quote from her team that I read that said they are in this for the long term benefit and that their goal was the sell the last ticket on the day of the show. I really related to this because as a business owner, I want my success to also be long term. It doesn’t benefit you to make get-money-quick business decisions. Your focus should always be on building a foundation that will set you up for long term success!

Taylor’s tour kicked off last week and she has been performing to crowds of 60 thousand people, so I would venture to say they aren’t having too much of a problem on the ticket sale front. Shows later in her tour, however, do have thousands of seats open (again, perspective… in a 60k seating venue, having 10k seats available is still an AMAZING turn out).

Some of the tactics they have utilized to continue selling seats to her shows in coming weeks is turning off Ticketmaster Verified Resale Tickets. How does this differ from other resellers? OK so Ticketmaster decided to combat the secondary ticket selling market (a multi-billion dollar industry, by the way) by creating their OWN reselling platform within Ticketmaster. So I could have potentially purchased tickets for a show next week and decided to resell them via Ticketmaster Verified Resale.

Side note – another genius tactic is that TM (Ticketmaster) created this platform on their own website. They realized that secondary ticket sales was a market they could venture into and took full advantage of it. The perk for them is that while they don’t make any extra money on the resold ticket – they DO earn that fee/service charge the person buying the resold ticket has to pay. These fees are then put back into SEO and online marketing to increase THEIR base ticket sales, according to TM reports. So. Smart.

Pre-Sales and Promotions

OK – back to the tactics to selling out remaining seats. Ticketmaster did a weekend promotion where they waived their fee and resale tickets have been disabled for shows that are coming up soon. They are testing out lowering the prices of seats that are left, which has spiked sales. How is this fair to people that bought during the presale? Well, to be frank, if you purchase anything from any seller at full price or during a presale, it is because you clearly had a strong desire for the product that they are selling. There was a part of you that made the decision that the dollar amount placed on a particular product was WORTH the enjoyment you would get out of it. Also, if you didn’t buy during presale you really were taking a risk. You didn’t know if ANY seats would be available or where they would even be, if there were some left at the end.

This is no different than when our customers sign up for our mailing list, group, etc with the promise of exclusive access to our product. Sure, we might throw in some perks for a presale, but most of the time the only perk offered is FIRST access. If you choose to not sign up and wait, then you run the risk of not being able to get the product at all. And as a lot of handmade sellers do, when we have leftover stock that doesn’t sell for some time, we often discount it to get it moving some time later. It could be weeks, or it could be months later. This is where the whole “not valid on previous purchases” clause comes into effect. Taylor Swift’s concert is no different.

Other little promotions frequently used to help “move” inventory is free shipping, flash sales, etc. I am not suggesting that these should be frequent occurrences. In fact, if you do these types of thing a lot you are actually conditioning your fans to wait for a sale. If you release something on May 1st, you could end up conditioning potential buyers to wait until June 1st, because they have noticed your pattern of discounting before releasing new products, for example. Try to switch it up and keep your fans on their toes! (Side note… when was the last time anyone bought anything full price from Old Navy or Express? Ha!).

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

Another tactic is just sheer FOMO (fear of missing out). FOMO is a powerful tool, y’all. Take it from me. I personally participated in the boosts but ultimately did NOT choose to purchase tickets during presale. As soon as her tour kicked off, I began seeing ALL of the clips and pictures of her concerts on Instagram. The FOMO was real. After a few more days of trolling the hashtag, #taylorswiftreputation, I caved and bought tickets!! FOMO IS REAL.

As of this month, Taylor is said to have sold $240 million in concert tickets and is projected to sell another $60 million in tickets by the time her tour is done. By withholding her new album when it was released from streaming services (such as Spotify), Taylor used FOMO to encourage people to BUY her album, which clearly worked in her favor, as the stats listed above show! You have to think to yourself, how can I play into FOMO? How can I create the sense of urgency to get my fans to buy my product? Leverage the innate feelings of FOMO everyone has. THE END!

I hope you enjoyed this pop culture biz talk and found some relatable tips here for you. There are lots of practices from big businesses that we should NOT replicate, but if you think a bit outside of the box, you can take tips from your favorite brands and businesses and apply them to your own!

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This post was written by Kimber Casteel of Kim Art Designs. Kimber is a talented embroidery artist and big time Swifty. Check her out online and on Instagram!