Episode 559 How To Do A Spring Edit of Your Shops

0:00Ever wonder how artists go from unknown to unforgettable? The University of Arts and Design just launched How Artists Become Known. It's a free seminar series, and we're starting with Van Gogh. Watch now at uad.education. Welcome to the Making Design Podcast. I'm Karina Gardner, and I think it is probably time for you to do, just like me, a spring edit. What's a spring edit you say? Well, that's when I take a look at my shops, and I make some adjustments for some of the stuff going on. Why not a fall edit? Well, fall is a time when we're selling a lot. There's usually a lot of products being made by crafters, and as designers, we just don't have the time to do a real edit in the fall. And so because of that, I highly recommend a spring edit. All right, so what should we do in a spring edit? It's basically anything that you think you

1:01need to do to clean up your brand. Now, this depends on where you're at in your business. If you're just getting started, you don't need an edit. Don't worry about it. But if you are someone who is a little bit into your business, I would say you're into your business or so, it might be time for you to really take a look at everything you've got going on. So here are some of the things that I tend to do. I do like to retire the bottom 20% of things that I've got. If it hasn't sold in the last 12 months, I usually will let it go if there's a fee involved. Now, not all of my shops have a fee involved. For example, my silhouette, there's no fee for holding it there. So I don't let go of it. I leave it. But my Etsy shop has listing fees. So I'm paying 20 cents or whatever per listing. And so I will go through and anything that hasn't sold for at least a year, I will consider letting it go. Now, I don't do this with everything.

2:03And that's because I still believe there are things that might be worth holding on to. And if I'm being totally honest, I usually let things go for about two years before I do an edit on it. Now, this might be for some of you. You know, I've taught you guys to just let things marinate. Don't take things down. And the answer is yes. Do not do it if you can help it. But in places, especially like Etsy, which right now are evolving, they've changed some of their strategies, they definitely changed their keywords and their titles. I'm going to recommend that you retire anything that hasn't sold in the last 12 months or 18 months. On other sites like spoon flower or silhouette or any of those other types of sites, I would leave everything up. I wouldn't retire them. Only when you have to pay a listing fee, would you bring in this strategy, okay? The second edit I would consider is tightening up your product line. So if you haven't niche down yet,

3:07you don't have like a thing that people know you for. I'd really get very solid on that in the next little bit. And the reason is because you really want to go into fall very strong. And so if you can clean up your lines, really tighten them, bring in stronger collections. So it doesn't feel scattered. People are going to be far more interested in what you're doing, okay? So I would say if you don't have a niche yet and sometimes in your first year, you're just kind of playing with everything so you can get a feel for it, get in and really start thinking about how you're going to niche out and how you're going to be special in the product area, okay? Another thing that I tend to do in the spring is I will do updates on mockups and my photography. So if I have stuff that I don't have a lot of mockups for, I might add to it if it's a best seller. If it's not a great seller, I might even add a few mockups to it. I also have found a few mistakes in my stores because I had virtual assistants working on them, including like RGB

4:12problems versus CMYK problems. And so those are some of the things that I'm fixing right now in my store. Now do I do it all at once? The answer is no. So I think that when you have thousands of products and I have over 2,000 products in particular in my Etsy store, I have closer to, I don't know, 8,000 or so in my silhouette store and then I have a lot in my Karina Gardner store. Because there are so many products there, you can't go in and just do a full on audit. Instead, what I like to do is I will take the most recent, not the most recent listing, the oldest listing. So the stuff that's coming up that's been the oldest. And I slowly go through them once a week. And so that's what I've been doing every Saturday. I will go through the first several pages of my products and either renew them, update them, add mockups, fix the photography, add a video, and then that way you slowly but surely make your shops better. Sometimes I see people go overkill

5:17on this, right? Like they sit down and then they take five days, six days, eight days like to do all of this. And they try to clean up their shop out once and then they feel super burnt out. The thing is we always have to fix our shops. There's no way around it. So why do it in eight or nine days? Instead, just spend an hour each week cleaning up your shop, it will feel reinvigorating, it will feel like your spring cleaning, and it will just clean up your shop in a way that will make a lot of sense. Okay. In terms of your brand, I will take a look at my messaging in my shops, especially if I've got banners and I will consider simplifying my messaging or making sure I'm doing the things that will actually help people follow my brand. So this last winter, I did a series called Start Your Design Business in six weeks. And that series was basically six hours of me teaching

6:18everything all in one spot, all at one go. And because I did that, I was able to put that directly into our capstone at the university and then of course into design suite as well. And it's all the stuff I've been teaching, but like I didn't have it all in one place. And I think this really helped me because when I did this and I was looking at all my stuff, I realized as I was looking at people's banners and stuff that everybody could use a little bit more simplifying of their messaging and editing their brand so that it's cohesive and it makes sense. Like everything goes together, especially your imagery and your logo, really seeing how it pops on your screen with your products to see how it's going to work. And so part of my spring edit is taking a look at the branding, making sure it's exactly what I want it to be. And if it doesn't need to be fixed,

7:20I leave it, but you know, I will take a look at it and see if it needs any other edits. This is a great time if you're ready to refresh your color palette. This is a good way to do it. If you have any confusing offers like sills on one thing plus coupons another, this is where I kind of go in and I clean everything up. And then finally, the thing that I was just looking at is I need to update my bio information. So my bio, I update, I update probably over two or three months just to reflect what I'm currently doing and I've noticed on several my sites, I need to completely update my bio. So this is the time to kind of look for those things because that's going to help the algorithm. It's also going to help the SEO so that you will go into your fall nice and clean and fresh and ready to go. Okay. So that's that's the spring audit you guys are spring edit. I guess you could call it an audit as well. That's a spring edit and it will make you feel so

8:23organized, so clean and it really, it feels like you freshen everything up. You know what's going on. I kind of think of it. It feels, it feels the same way to me as when I do my budgets once a week. So I do, I sit down with all the budgets for all the companies and my family budget. Once a week, I have an hour where I do it and the same thing for my shops. I actually only take 30 minutes for my shops and I just kind of do an edit on anything and everything to see what's going on. And it keeps me in touch. It makes me see what needs to be fixed and it will just keep you up to date and I don't know why but it feels so good. So I hope you have a chance to do this and I'll see you soon. I have a gift for you. My third book, The Intentional Design Year is out and I want to give you access to read it. To get the digital copy for one month for free, go to www.designspeakhorses.com slash Intentional. Make sure and do the www.because for some reason that's the only way it will work.

9:27Anyway, this will get you free access to read the book for an entire month. If you love it, you can always go to Amazon and get the whole book plus the prompt journal.