Crafting Your Brand

Branding. What a simple word and is usually only associated with color schemes, logos, and the “look” of your company. However, branding goes so much deeper. It incorporates your story, your position in the market, how it makes people feel, aesthetics, and your connection to consumers.

Your brand is arguably the most important thing about your handmade business.

Your Story

Stories captivate and hold attention. They make you relatable. And relatable makes people feel comfortable with you and what you are offering. Have you ever noticed how the “successful” reality show stars share their stories with you? They need your votes and if you relate to them, then you will vote for them. Think through your company/product story. Why did you create this? How does it impact your life? How will it help others? What are your values and beliefs. Anything that you can outline helps your audience find you and support you easier.

Your market Position

You have to define who you are selling to from the start. Who is most captivated by your story in a way that they are willing to put down money to try your product. You should be able to break this out into gender, age groups, hobbies/skills, professional/hobbyist, location, etc. The more analytics that you can gather on your audience the more successful you will be in reaching and delivering exactly what they want.

How You Make Others Feel

Are you sophisticated? Elegant? Whimsical? Country chic? Do you make people feel safe or want to try something new? Does your product foster excitement or fear? The personality that defines you and your company will control how others react when they discover you.

Aesthetics

This is the section where we discuss the actual physical look of your products. You need a cohesive design across your logo, website, product labeling, social media accounts, and any other part that makes up your process. When a customer comes across your products or accounts, they need to know by recognition that it belongs to your company. Remember that different markets react differently to colors, fonts, packaging, etc. Defining your audience will assist you in making decisions that will not detract the people you want to reach.

Connection to Customers

Are you connecting? Do you respond quickly to customer service requests? Your timeliness, or lack thereof, will define who you are more than you realize. If having so many social media/email accounts becomes overwhelming then look into a service that combines all messages into one place. It is truly a business-saving tool.

Consistency

After all of these steps, you will still need to be consistent with every point mentioned above for the life of your company, specific product or until you officially rebrand. Your brand will take consistent attention and focus. But it pays off more than any amount of investment.

What’s your secret sauce?

Don’t wait until tomorrow to get yours