Stationery Pain Points — Tips To Help Your Card-Making Get Off The Ground!
“Why not find a niche you love the most in your work, such as birthday cards or wedding stationery?”
Stationery is a category that covers a lot of different event suppliers these days. With new and inventive ways of creating unique cards and craft items, there’s so much you can do with simple and affordable tools! From designing bespoke invitations to creating personalised décor and place settings, there are so many ways to make your customer’s event unique. Unfortunately, life gets in the way sometimes — so we’ve got some advice to help solve some of those problems that are limiting the flow of your creative juices!
We know that it’s difficult to start in an already bustling market. You have to fight to get your voice heard amongst the masses, so naturally, you start with friends and family, finding inspiration from your peers in the business and designing bespoke greetings cards. Bit by bit you improve your skills with card-making, maybe expanding your equipment and tools collection to help quicken the pace with the assembly line. You might even get creative with bunting for a family member’s birthday party and create even more than you imagined. However, the problem is still there — how to get exposure.
Creating cards for friends and family is a good start. It gets you exposed via word of mouth over the office water cooler, which goes further when your friends tell their friends and family and from there on it grows! Why not look into any craft fairs near you? You only need to factor in the cost of the table hire for the day, and you’ll be able to network with other stationery suppliers in your area. These opportunities will not only increase your customer base but allow you to integrate into a network of crafting people, discovering new fairs and learning from peers who’ve expanded their businesses even further! Why not find a niche you love the most in your work, such as birthday cards or wedding stationery? You can add Wedding Fairs to your internet search and see how many there are in your area — there may even be some directories looking for small businesses like yours!
With a new and larger customer base, people are eventually going to want to know more information. Social media is great to utilise here; creating your own personal website is getting easier but it’s a matter of investing your time in creating an online business page when you could be investing your time in creating more products. A solution is to make a smaller page on social media that you can update when you have the time, or you can run your business from just one platform without worrying about stretching yourself too thin across more platforms. UPlanIt is a DIY event planning platform that’s free to use and has amazing features to manage your business digitally. To create your supplier account, all you’d need is a logo, a banner (which could just be a photograph of one of your proudest creations), contact details and a couple of lines saying what you do as a business. Obviously you make cards, but what do you make them for? How do you make them? How can you make them environmentally friendly? Let people know in this section if this is your side hobby for now — that way they’ll understand when you’re busy. A lot of small businesses start off as a hobby while people go to their main job to keep them going so it’s not out of the ordinary to start small and still be successful! If you’re using social media, one of the cool aspects of it is the freedom to share your updates whenever you want; when you’re working on projects when you’re creating new ideas, or even when you’re hugging the dog on the couch! This kind of personalisation helps customers see you as another human rather than a business entity, and helps them empathise with you and your process. If they see you using specific items and putting so much effort into your work, they’re more likely to understand your workload and the cost of your wonderful products.
After all that, you may start to realise your workload increasing quite quickly, but we’ve got helpful tips to help you with your time management too! First and foremost, work on the priority orders — ones that are due soon, ones that require a lot of embellishments or attention. A time management tool is a key feature of UPlanIt; when you have orders you can prioritise them with notification e-mails reminding you of upcoming deadlines, and list yourself as unavailable if you’re at maximum workload. Ensure you put your health first, so if you’re suffering from any long-term conditions and you have a flare-up, be sure to let your customers know if you think there’ll be a delay. Don’t be afraid to ask for help from those around you if you need to get an order done! Second of all, there’s the issue of having time in between those orders to manage your online presence. We understand it takes some time to expand your online presence, so if you can, set aside 30 minutes to an hour of your day to work on working on your pages. Create a portfolio of your creations to advertise to those who can’t make it to your fairs, and ask your peers for advice on how to attract more people. Join groups on social media sites and pop a post or two advertising your skills and your business — everyone has to start somewhere, and with such great connections available online, the possibilities are endless! If you have access to your analytics for your page (Uplanit, Facebook, and Google provide this for free) have a look at how your posts are doing among your customers. What are they interacting with the most? What is popular with people, and what’s luring them in? Schedule some posts advertising your cards and craftsy goods so you don’t have to worry about updating your profile every day, then at the end of the month go over the data from your posts. That way you’ll be able to find out what people liked the best, and focus your energy on producing more of that product or similar items.
If you find you’re slowing down on personalised orders, don’t fret! Have a look around places like Pinterest for inspiration and create seasonal items that you can sell alongside your bespoke card orders. Things like Christmas card collections, Easter cards, Birthday cards — even Halloween or Samhain cards! Explore different holidays that occur throughout the year to see if there’s a market that needs to be broken into or a craft style that doesn’t exist in high street shops — you can use that opening to put your products on the market and get your name out there as a trusted creator and supplier, leading you to more personalised orders. If the time comes that you need a partner to help you with the orders, tag their work in your portfolio so your customers know who is making their order. Your partner may even come up with new ideas that you can add to the business!
Good luck with your future creations; check out UPlanIt’s amazing features as well when you get the chance! If you want to know more about us, check out our website https://uplanit.co.uk/become_a_supplier or e-mail us at info@uplanit.co.uk. We’re always listening to our social media, so don’t hesitate to send us a comment or message on our Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram!
See you next week.
Facebook: UPlanIt / Twitter: @uplanit_online / Instagram: @uplanit_online
