Four ways to move on from an unsuccessful launch.

Your art isn’t bad if it doesn’t sell out five minutes after you launch it.

The other day, I clicked on the (admittedly click-baity) headline, “Ella Emhoff’s Knit Collection Immediately Sold Out.” If you don’t know who Ella Emhoff is, she’s the step-daughter of Vice President Kamala Harris, and a knitwear designer at Parsons School of Design. What was fascinating to me, after reading the article, was that this sold out release consisted of only five one of a kind pieces. Yes, you read that right, five.

Yet, major fashion magazines were covering this as if it had been some major release. Now, no judgement to Ella for this. Knitwear takes time to make, she’s got a lot on her plate, and it’s awesome that the collection sold (out).

But this article also got me thinking about how obsessed we’ve become with the idea of collections selling out, and how much pressure that puts on us as artists and makers launching our own collections and new work.

When you see other artists and makers online whose collections (whether those are five pieces or fifty) sell out almost instantly, it can make you feel bad if your latest release doesn’t sell that quickly. (Or at all.)

And with more and more artists and makers selling online than ever before, the online launch has become pretty ubiquitous. For the most part, this is a good thing. I love a good online launch! I teach launch strategy in a lot of my own classes, and we talk about it a lot inside Artists & Profit Makers. I love launching because it brings energy into your business and (when done right) drives new subscribers to your email list.

But launching also puts a lot of pressure on us as artists and makers, much of it self-imposed, to try and make the launch a “success.” And unfortunately, it seems more and more these days, we start to define success as selling out your work as quickly as possible.

However, that doesn’t happen for all of us. For one reason or another, many of us have (or will in the future) faced scenarios where some or all of our work doesn’t sell immediately after launch.

This doesn’t mean that your work is any less valuable or worthy than if it sold out right away. But it can lead to feelings of frustration and self-doubt, especially if you start comparing your launch to others you’ve seen online.

Which is a shame, because regardless of the results, a launch should leave us feeling good, not let down. But more often than not, I see artists and makers feeling disappointed after they so launch.

So how do we handle that let down after the launch, particularly one where the work didn’t sell as fast as we would have liked?

First, by resetting our expectations. It’s ok if not everything you make sells five minutes after you launched it. That doesn’t make your work any less valuable.

So many factors come into play when it comes to selling out a launch. The size of your audience. The people in your audience. The amount of marketing you did prior to your launch. Timing. The size of your audience. (Yes, I know I already said that, but we actually underestimate the number of people we need on our email list or how many people need to follow us on social media in order to hit our sales goals.)

When it comes down to it, a sold out launch is actually really rare, yet we’ve been primed to see it as super common. By resetting our expectations, we can see value in our work even if it doesn’t sell right away.

Second, by recognizing that just launching the work itself is a big win.

There are so many artists and makers who are too scared or too paralyzed by perfectionism to put their work online in the first. It takes courage to not only share your work online, but to put a price tag on it – to say “this is for sale, go buy it.” Every time you do that, every time you bring new work to the world, you should celebrate that.

Ultimately, that’s what a launch is (or should be). A celebration. A party for you and the work you just birthed into the world.

Yes, part of the goal of a launch is to sell. But when you only focus on the sales numbers, you miss a big opportunity to congratulate yourself and celebrate the important act of putting your work out into the world.

Third, by reminding ourselves that while we think of an intense, immediately sold out launch as a sign of success, it can actually be a frustrating experience for our customers.

As a collector myself, I’ve had the experience of trying to rush through an order just to get something, anything, from a launch that I knew would sell out in minutes. Far from that being the thrill of the hunt, it’s actually a nerve-wracking and potentially frustrating experience.

Of course, I know it can’t always be helped. As artists and makers, we have limited capacity, and if you have a big audience, there may not be anything you can do about this scenario. (Except maybe, ahem, raise your prices.)

But it also presents an opportunity for artists and makers who aren’t selling out that quickly to remember that this actually creates a more pleasant buying experience for our customers. Not everyone wants to be forced into making a purchasing decision within 30 seconds.

And while we think customers will judge us if they see work that hasn’t sold out in an instant, in reality, most customers will think “ahhh, time to actually think about what I want” or even “oh yay, that piece I want is still there!”

And finally, we can get past those feelings of disappointment when a launch doesn’t go the way we want by remembering that the job of sharing and marketing our work doesn’t stop after the initial launch.

We’re so trained (not just as artists and makers, but as humans who exist in the attention economy) to always focus on the new that it can be easy to feel like once the work has launched, the marketing is done. It’s easy (and, I’ll admit it, often more fun) to move onto the next shiny body of work than to continue to hold space for the work you just finished.

But it’s essential to continue to promote and share that work, for a few reasons. Most customers need to see things more than once before they buy, and so just sharing something at the initial launch (even if you did a good job teasing beforehand) may not be enough to get someone to make that purchase.

And chances are good that even if you did a good job teasing the launch beforehand, most people didn’t see the work as much as you think they did. We live with our work every day – designing, making, photographing, getting in on our website, etc. – and so to us, it feels tired and played out. But our audience sees our work a fraction of the amount we see it. Which is why you can post something that you think is old, and someone will inevitably comment “I love that, is it new?”

Yes, of course, it’s totally easier when a piece sells out just after launch. It’s less work on our end. But the reality is that running a business and marketing your art is work, and sometimes it takes time for a piece to find it’s forever home.

And that’s really the most important reframe for work that doesn’t sell immediately after launch – it’s not any less valuable and customers aren’t going to think less of it – it’s simply work that hasn’t found it’s forever home yet. It’s still work that’s waiting for the ideal person to find it and fall in love with it.

That’s why it’s essential to keep talking about unsold work after the launch, whether that’s a day, a month, or a year later. Because the work doesn’t end after the initial launch, and that’s ok.