September 24, 2024
If you’ve been crafting for a while and you’ve decided that you want to make a business out of it, you’re in for a wild ride! Building a business from the ground up can be one of the most exciting and life changing things you decide to do, but you need to make sure you’re taking the right steps to become successful.
Building a strong brand for your craft business is one of the first things that you should focus on. Your brand is so important: people will nearly always pay more to get a piece from a high quality, reliable brand than somebody whose image is not as strong (even if their product is of a similar quality). What we’re really doing when we choose to work with a business is choosing them for their ethos, what they are associated with, and the way they communicate with you. The most successful brands out there understand
Let’s talk about what you’ll need to do in order to build a strong brand for your craft business:
Before you can build a strong brand for your craft business, you must know exactly who you are.
What motivates you? Why do you do what you do? Knowing this will help you to define your brand. No one will have the same mix of inspiration, ideas, and values as you, so making sure you know what they are and then creating a strong brand based around them will help you to stand out.
Why you make is the most important part of your brand, not what you make. What you make can change over time - even your brand name and logo!By understanding your why, you’ll make sure that your brand identity stays the same no matter what. This is how you build a strong brand over time and keep your audience and customers engaged, rather than confused. If you haven’t yet completed coming up with ideas for small scale businesses, of course you should do that first. However, you need to be sure that what you’re doing is something you love, as you will need to work this into your brand. Don’t just do something because you think it’ll make you money. A brand built around your true authentic self and likes will always build a bigger fanbase
Changing your name down the line can cause all kinds of issues, so it’s better to think about it carefully and get it right this time around. You’d need to change your domain name, business cards, and all kinds of other things relating to your online presence - your audience will get pretty confused, too.
Think about what you want to say using your brand name and see what words you can use to represent that. Some people like to incorporate their own name somehow, others prefer not to. This is a personal choice.
Once you have a few ideas, write them down see which of them read and look better. Let a few marinate in your head for a while to see which stick. Don’t make any snap decisions or you might end up wishing that you’d waited a little longer. You’ll also need to check across all social media platforms and websites to be sure that the name is truly yours, and register it as soon as you can once you have made your mind up. You don’t want to have your heart set on a name for your craft business only to realize that the Instagram handle or domain is taken.
Creating a short and clear tagline that explains what you do will give people a quick way of understanding your business. It’s a helpful way of summing your business up and you can use it on your social media, business cards, and so on.
Give your brand an identity that resonates with your audience. You do this by coming up with a distinct voice you can use on social media, emails, product descriptions, packaging, and more. Take inspiration from how other brands use their brand voice/personality and how they communicate with their audience, and make sure everybody is on the same page about it.
Your identity must be consistent across all platforms at all times. Things like your logo, color palette, and business contact information, as well as how often you post and the sort of things you post all need to remain consistent.
Everything should eventually tie together to create a clear identity that you express across all channels and platforms!
[Photo by Laura Stanleyfrom Pexels]