But it’s a process that’s essential for marketing and selling.
One of my firm beliefs is that it’s so much easier to market and sell your work as an artist and maker if you truly love your work.
I’m not talking about process here. I know many artists and makers love their process. They love what they do. It’s why they want to build a business making their art or craft.
No, when I talk about being in love with your own work, I’m talking about being in love with the actual finished product, with the experience of your work, the way your customer will eventually relate to it.
In my class Sell Without Shame, I give a series of exercises to help artists and makers fall in love with their work. The goal is to spend some time up close and personal with your work, so that you fall in love with it in the way a passionate collector might.
And doing these exercises is often extremely eye opening when it comes to the process of marketing and selling your work. They let you see your work in a new light. They help you fall in love with your work.
But recently, I’ve come to a very important conclusion. Falling in love with your work is not a one and done thing. It’s not an exercise you can do once, check off your list, and then move on.
Instead, falling in love with your work is a continual process.
This is especially true for work that doesn’t sell out right away.
As artists and makers, we’re often so full of ideas that as soon as we release our work into the world, we’re ready to move on to the next thing. But that doesn’t always work for our customers.
Our customers (or, more accurately, potential customers) need to see things multiple times. They might need encouragement before they make a purchase. At the very least, they need reminders that that thing they saw and loved is still available to purchase.
All of this means that we, as artists and makers, need to be sharing, selling, and talking about our work way more than most of us actually are. And like I said at the beginning, it’s easier to share and sell your work when you’re in love with it yourself.
Fortunately, you can actually use the process of falling in love with your work as part of your marketing strategy.
Whenever I’m not feeling excited about my work, I pull a piece out of my stash and do a photoshoot with it. The process of spending time with my work, of looking at it in through camera lens, wearing it, all of these things remind me of the pleasure that a customer might get from experiencing my work.
That’s actually what inspired this blog post. Photographing a necklace for another blog post reminded me how much I still love my older Contra Collection. And I want to be clear about something here. When I photograph my work, I don’t just take one or two pictures and move on. I often shoot hundreds of images. Now, I might only ever end up using a few. But that time spent shooting is time spent falling in love with my work all over again.
Which makes the process a double win. Not only did I create new content that I can use on my blog, in my social media, and in my emails, but the act of creating the content reminded me why I love that work, which makes me more likely to want to talk about it in al those places.
And this certainly doesn’t just apply to jewelry. Spending time styling and rearranging paintings in your home or studio, taking your ceramics on a picnic in the park, creating photos or videos where you explore the details or movement in your work – all of these things can help you fall more in love with your work (while also providing the opportunity for some great marketing content).
Now, there’s something important I want to note here. This process of falling in love with your work doesn’t work if you spend your time noticing the “flaws” in your work or stressing over getting the “perfect” picture or video. A big part of falling in love with your work is approaching it from a place of love – the kind of love where the faults fall away and you obsess about the good things. The kind of love that leads you to take blurry Polaroids (remember those days) that are more treasured than any studio portrait would be.
Obviously, I’m not advocating that you start posting crappy, blurry photos in your marketing. (Though if the emotion is there, you might be surprised what you can get away with.) Instead, what I’m saying is that in order to fall in love with your work, you have to overlook the faults. Because your customer isn’t looking for them. (And chances are, they’re only visible to you.) Falling in love with your work means focusing on the good things, and finding ways to highlight those.
And just like marketing, falling in love with your work isn’t a one and done thing. It’s a process that happens over and over again, from the moment the work is made until the moment it leaves your studio and heads to its forever home. Because the more you love your work, the easier it is to share it, and the more you share it, the more likely it is to find that forever home.