- When you first start to think about designing your brand,
you immediately begin thinking about
the logo you want to create. the colours you want to use,
all of that fun stuff
that makes creating a brand sound exciting.
There is definitely an order you want to use
when branding your handmade business
because each step builds on the one before it.
If you skip a step, or do the steps out of order,
your brain won't quite reflect the customer
you want to attract and that is really quite crucial
if you want your handmade business to succeed.
So in today's video, we're going to talk about each step
and explain why it's such an important part
of the branding process.
Plus, I'll be showing you some really professional
branding examples that our Tizzit HQ members,
members who have no branding experience whatsoever,
have designed completely on their own
by following this simple process.
Ready? Let's dive in.
(drum music)
Bonjour, my name is Deb and I'm the founder of Tizzit.co,
a membership community for makers and handmade shop owners,
just like your fabulous self.
You can learn more about our community, Tizzit HQ,
via link below this video.
But for now, let's jump straight into today's conversation,
8 Steps to Branding Your Handmade Business.
Before you start thinking about brand ideas
for your handmade business,
there are two important things you need to do first,
defining your ideal customer
and getting what I call "brand clarity."
When you define your ideal customer,
you are defining very specific characteristics
about your best potential customers in two areas.
The first is demographics, which is factual data
such as how old are they?
How much money are they making? Where do they live?
What do they do for a living? Are they married?
Do they have kids? All that stuff.
The next is psychographics,
which is information about their attitudes
and their aspirations.
So what do they do for fun? Where do they travel to?
Where do they shop? What do they do in their free time?
What movies or shows or bands influence them?
What do they wear? What are their values?
And it's a common mistake to stop at the demographic levels
when trying to define your ideal customer profile.
But if you stop there, you will not know enough
about your ideal customer to make good decisions
about your brand, your logo, and all of that.
You have to dig deeper into the psychographics,
and I actually have a rule to make it easy
that's called the "focus on one person rule."
I won't go into it in this video or it'll be too long,
but I will leave a link down below to my article
that walks you step-by-step through how to define
your ideal customer profile.
Once you have done that,
you next want to work on brand clarity.
In a nutshell, brand clarity is about
understanding your brand and what your brand stands for
before you actually design it.
It requires you to dig a little deeper
and make sure that you have considered four key ingredients,
mission and vision, market knowledge,
uniqueness, and consistency.
I have two articles that will be very helpful
for you to review when you're working on brand clarity.
The first one talks about what makes a good brand
and gives you a good overview of what factors
help a brand succeed.
And the second helps you gain a solid understanding
of why branding is important
and all the amazing things it can do for your business.
I'm gonna post those links for both of those
right below this video for you.
Now, once you worked on your ideal customer
and brand clarity, you are now ready for the fun part,
designing your brand.
And to craft a good brand,
you have to go deeper than things like fonts, colours,
and appealing visuals.
There are actually four key ingredients to good brand
that you need to work on.
The first is choosing your name.
Deciding on a name for your new business is very exciting,
but can also be very hard.
You want your name to be so many things, right?
Like catchy, memorable, likeable, and different.
But if you're not creative,
and actually even if you are creative,
it's easy to get stuck and struggle on this one.
So I came up with something that I call
"The 3x5x7 Method to Naming Your Craft Business"
that makes coming up with good name ideas much, much easier.
I'm not going to dive into the process in today's video,
but I have a video that breaks it down for you.
And again, I'll put the link below.
Once you have a name, start to create your mood board.
Your mood board is your inspiration board
where you will collect photos
that "feel" like what you want your customers to experience
and feel when they interact with your brand.
So essentially you're going to go and grab images
on the internet that inspire the same emotions and feelings
that you want your brand to inspire when people look at it.
You wanna collect lifestyle photos only.
No graphics or other brand logos.
So for example, photos could be pictures of people,
places, landscapes, home decor, travel,
anything that creates the ambience
that you want your brand to embody.
There are software programmes out there such as Canva.com
that make creating a mood board really quite easy and fun.
So don't be intimidated. Anyone can do it.
Now, let's take a look
at some of our Tizzit HQ members' mood boards.
First up, is Allison Moffitt of Inner Nature Journey.
Allison is getting ready to sell physical self-care boxes
and products with an online hub/education component
allowing our customers to explore different science-based
self-care practises.
Allison's mood board imparts a feeling of simplicity,
calm, and nature.
When I look at each picture,
I can literally feel my body start to relax already.
Next, let's take a look at a mood board from Mel.
Mel is the owner and creator of MIMI Handmade,
and she makes fun and stylish baskets
for home organisation and decor.
Mel's mood board does a beautiful job at creating a mood
and emotions in anyone looking at it.
Don't you immediately get a feeling of like fun
and happiness just looking at the pictures?
Our third example comes from Marie,
creator and owner of Studio Wanderlust Co.
Marie creates colourful travel and national park posters
and prints to have a retro and vintage feel.
Her mood board is full of exciting travel pictures
mixed with eclectic home decor pictures.
It definitely makes me wanna take a trip and go adventuring.
And finally, let's look at a mood board by Kristin,
owner and creator of KrisChrisCreations,
a shop that makes one-of-a-kind handmade bags.
Herr mood board is a combination of unique and fun patterns,
similar to those on the bags she creates
which are all one-of-kind.
It's feminine and fun, and modern and vibrant,
but it's also absolutely timeless.
So you can see that each of these mood boards
is completely different
and invokes a whole different set of emotions,
which is brilliant
because that is just what we want them to do.
So next step is picking your colour palette,
and I want to start with one very important piece of advice.
You don't want to randomly pick colours
that you think look good together.
Which some of you might be happy about
because you've been staring at colour wheels for days
and had your eyes glaze over
since they are infinite colours to choose from.
Believe it or not,
you already picked your colour palette at this point.
How? Your mood board.
You're going to choose colours that are in your mood board
for your colour palette
so that your colour palette reflects the mood
that you wanted to create with your mood board.
Let's take a look at our HQ member colour palettes.
First is Allison's Inner Journey palette.
You can see that her colour palette is extracted
from the pictures on her mood board.
And as you would expect,
the colours she's using invoke the same calm
and peaceful emotions as the pictures in her mood board.
Next, let's take a look at the colour palette
for Mel's MIMI Handmade.
When you look at Mel's colour palette.
it matches up with her pictures
and their fun and happy feeling perfectly.
Marie's Studio Wanderlust colour palette
is another good example of a cohesive colour palette.
She has extracted colours from her mood board
that invoke a feeling of travelling and new adventures.
And finally, let's look at KrisChrisCreations' palette.
Her palette has a beautiful combination of the colours
from her mood board
which also reflect the stunning combination
that the shopper will find on her bags.
Now let's move on to your logo.
My best advice for this is to keep it super simple.
Your logo does not need to say visually what you do.
If you sell yarn, you do not need a yarn ball in your logo.
If you knit, you don't need knitting gear in your logo.
Essentially, your logo doesn't need to be literal
and it needs to stand the test of time
so keep it really simple.
My best recommendation for a logo that looks the best,
is the most professional, will take you the least time
and the least amount of effort and money to create
is to have what I call a typographic logo.
Essentially, this means that your logo
is your business name written in some special font.
The trick here is that this font can't be a free font
that everyone has seen and knows about.
It should be a paid premium font.
So the investment there is going to be around $10
to have the legal right to use that font.
Of course for my example here,
I want to show you my logo, the Tizzit.co logo.
You can see that the letters are very unique.
And because it's a custom font,
it is more visually memorable to you.
It stands out more and it catches your attention.
But it's really just the word Tizzit
written in a special font that I purchased.
So that's your logo. Now onto your font and typography.
These are the fonts that you are actually going to use
for your headings and your body copy,
whether on the internet or even on your packaging,
and everywhere that you need to write stuff for brand
so these need to be pretty easy to read.
You also want them to visually compliment one another,
as in you don't want them to clash too much.
I won't cover all the rules of typography in this video,
but I just want to mention
that you don't need to go super fancy here,
especially not with your body font.
Because the body copy is there to be read,
it needs to be easy to read.
So this actually is where you would use free fonts
like Montserrat or Lato,
all these font that we used to seeing
and reading in books and online.
And stay away from the very pretty,
but hard to read cursive or decorative fonts.
So let's take a look at our Tizzit HQ members'
fonts all together.
What I want you to notice, and what's absolutely brilliant,
is how unique and different each set of font and logo is.
Each maker's logo is unique thanks to their custom font,
and their fonts evoke the feel of the business.
The next step is to put all of your choices together
in a brand style guide.
Your brand style guide has your logo,
a second version of your logo, your fonts,
and your colour with the colour codes
so you always use exactly the same colour.
You make this guide so that you can always use these items
consistently across all platforms, your sites, your shop,
your social media.
And if you work with someone like a graphic designer,
a social media assistant, or you hire someone
to do your packaging or whatever else,
you send your brand style guide to them
so that they have all the information they need
to keep your brand consistent and cohesive.
So now let's take a look at the brilliant
and professional style guides from our HQ members.
Each of these styles guides looks completely professional
and does a beautiful job conveying the emotions and feelings
they want their products to invoke in their shoppers.
They all followed the same process,
but the end results are vastly different
because so are their products, so are their visions,
and so are their brands.
Each of the handmade sellers in those examples
designed their brand just by following the branding course
we have available inside Tizzit HQ.
This course is everyone's favourite
because it's super fun, it's actionable,
there's no experience needed, and it's really rewarding.
So I would absolutely encourage you to check it out.
It's going to take you through each of those steps
that we've just gone through together
but with step-by-step tutorials
that make creating your own style guide easy and fun.
Plus, when you become a member,
you also get access to wonderful community of sellers
that you can show your branding ideas to
for loads of helpful comments and feedback.
And we really would love for you to join us.
Not mentioning that once your brand is ready,
we also have a full library of courses
to help you set up your store, grow it successfully
so you can start making a reliable income
from selling your handmade products.
So thanks for watching.
Check out the links to the extra resources and course
that I have for you down below.
And until next time, au revoir!