In this video,
I want to help you figure out what to do and in what order to start and grow a
successful handmade shop. Let's dive in.
Hi, I'm Deb. I'm the founder of Tizzit.co,
a membership community for makers and handmade shop owners.
In this video I want to introduce you to the four stages of what I call The
Maker's Roadmap. This is a summary of the four stages,
I do have a full guide including a checklist for each stage so you know you're
ready to move onto the next one and you can download that just below.
I'll put the link below this video.
It also has extra resources to help you along the way.
So before we dive into the content of this video,
please make sure that you go and download this guide because I really think it's
going to be very valuable.
The first stage of The Maker's Roadmap is the Dream stage.
The Dream stage is about laying the groundwork for a successful shop.
It's about validating your business idea so you can move forward confidently.
It's about understanding your market and your customers.
It's about getting clarity on exactly what your brand will be all about.
To be honest with you most makers are going to skip this part:
please don't!
I know the temptation is strong to skip this because it's mostly planning,
right?
It's not practical and because it sounds and feels more productive to dive
straight into setting up your shop or taking pictures of your products or even
creating your products, but this stuff in the Dream stage,
this foundational stuff is INCREDIBLY important.
I don't know how to emphasize this enough. It is really, really important.
Any strategic decision that you're going to make later for your handmade
business is going to be based on the insights that you are going to gain during
this stage.
So refer to your checklist and make sure that you've got all of these
foundational items covered. Really, really important. Plus,
because no one else does it, or not many other people do it,
you will have a leg up your competitors because you will have a strong
foundation where they're going to be working on shaky grounds.
Stage two of The Maker's Roadmap is the Start stage.
In the Start stage we get out of planning mode and we dive into doing mode.
By the end of the stage you're going to have everything in place to start
receiving traffic and sales to your shop.
This is obviously a very practical stage, but there's a fair bit to do: legal,
finances, deciding on your product collections, product photography,
product descriptions, pricing, packaging,
setting up your website - or if you sell on Etsy, setting up your Etsy shop,
adding listings to it, your logo, your brand design, and then some.
So take your time,
but don't get stuck being a perfectionist.
There are going to be many opportunities to improve later on.
If there are two things though that you do need to spend time on in the Start
stage it's your pricing and your product photography. These are key,
critical elements.
It's not the time to dive into marketing strategies,
social media or any other shiny tactic you might stumble upon online.
Stay focused. Number three is the Grow stage.
It's finally time to do the things you probably wanted to do from the get go,
but that you weren't ready for.
It's time to focus on bringing qualified traffic to your site,
marketing your product and most importantly, getting some sales.
This stage is often considered the hardest because at the Start stage,
although there is a lot to do, you can see the results quite quickly.
You can set up your shop and then you're like, "Hey, my shop is open!".
In the Grow stage,
it feels like you have a billion things to do at once, right?
Social media, blogging, email marketing, PR, live events, giveaways,
SEO, paid ads, should I keep going?
It can get really overwhelming really quickly.
My number one tip here when you get into this marketing stage is to only work on
one or two marketing channels at a time and to work in 90 days or in three month
cycles,
reassessing every quarter whether to keep going with the strategies that you
currently have in place because you think they're not strong enough or decide if
you're ready to add more to your plate.
This is really what I call my stacking strategy.
So you want to start with a couple of channels,
you might decide to start with Pinterest and Instagram for example.
Do it for three months,
don't look at anything else and just really focus on those two things that you
picked and then after 90 days, after three months, look at it and think, "okay,
am I ready to add Facebook into the mix or should I keep going only with those
two platforms?".
And slowly but surely you're going to stack up your marketing channels to build
an efficient marketing strategy.
Don't try to do it all at once or you're going to spread yourself really thin
and that's not good for yourself because you're going to burn out and it's
definitely not good for business because you're not going to be able to dive
deep into each platform strategy and to actually get momentum from them.
There are a few key milestones you should reach before thinking about the next
stage which is Scale and they are listed in The Maker's Roadmap guide and
checklist which I mentioned and that you can download below.
But the idea is that you stay in the Grow stage and you work in 90 days cycles
until you make consistent and predictable sales and until you have one or two
traffic sources that bring predictable,
consistent traffic to your handmade shop each month.
Number four is Scale stage and by now you have a really solid foundation and you
are ready to scale up and to expand your shop.
A quick note here though is that scaling is going to change your business and it
is okay if that is not actually what you want.
Going big doesn't have to be your definition of success and there is a lot of
positive things to say about staying small.
But if you want to go big it is time to improve on what you've built before in
the previous three stages. It might be time for a brand or shop improvements.
You might want work with a professional designer or developer.
You might want to start adding more marketing channels,
more distribution channels - maybe you were only selling online and you might be
wanting to start diving into wholesaling.
Maybe you want to get away from Etsy or add another store to Etsy,
like your own website,
so you might want to add more ways to distribute your products.
You might want to start diversifying your product offerings as well.
And it might even be time to start hiring and building a team.
This is really summed up the version of The Maker's Roadmap,
which is really a full fledged system. I hope this helped clarify
what your priorities should be.
The one thing I hope you're taking away from this though is that as a business
owner,
it's your role to know what is important for your shop and for your business
right now.
People will try to sell you all sorts of strategies and courses and it can be
very convincing at times. But if you're not doing things in the right order,
and if you try to skip steps,
you are going to spin your wheels and it's simply not going to work.
Don't forget your free Maker's Roadmap guide that's just below.
It's got so much more information with an actual checklist and some more
resources to help you dive into each stage. And if you like this video,
please give it a like and subscribe to my channel.
I come up with a new video every Tuesday,
always to help you start and grow a successful handmade shop. Bye guys.