How to Find Customers for Your Weird Creative Business

Have you noticed what is going on all around you? If you have a creative product-based business, congratulations! You’re taking advantage of the only time in history it’s been easy to do what you do.

Do you have a quirky creative business? Wondering how to find customers who would want to buy exactly what you make? Those people are out there, and they would love your product if they knew about it! You just need to find them, and it’s easier now than ever.

Let’s imagine, for instance, that you had made a collection of greeting cards with curse words on them in the 1980s. How the hell would you have sold those? Maybe taking out ads in the back of offbeat magazines and hoping the right people would mail you a SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope) to get your catalog? See if you can convince Hallmark cards to try something edgy? It would have been a long, hard road.

What if you designed and sewed dolls that looked like monsters, but it’s the early 1900s? Are you going to go door to door with them? It’s not likely you’re going to become the Henry Ford of monster dolls.

But now? Martha Stewart has a yearly contest for American made products. Amazon is challenging Etsy to a duel. Shopify helps over 175,000 businesses sell their products on multiple sales channels. Small creative businesses are making a huge impact.

We live in exciting times. You can now make a creative, unique, unusual – even downright weird – product on your own. It’s easier than ever to figure out how to accomplish your ideas, thanks to the internet. Then, you can take that idea, and (for free!) spread it out into the world.

Instead of watering down your idea or trying to make it appeal to more people, you can hunt the entire globe for the perfect people for exactly what it is you do – no matter how odd or how quirky.

Instead of speaking to a large audience composed mostly of people who don’t care, you can speak to a tight group of people who are fanatics for your particular product.

The kind of product that never would have been successful in a big box store can sell like hotcakes on your own ecommerce site. You no longer have to figure out what your local community would like and sell that. You can make what you like and find the people who agree with you.

This is a beautiful thing!

What do you need to make this work for you?

A product that is worth finding out about.

You need to stand out from all the noise and make something that stops people in their tracks with a “wow!”

Here are some of our posts that help with this and show examples:

Make Marketing Easy With A Unique Selling Proposition

Sourcing and Creating Products: Shop Sweet Lulu

A Unique Brand Vision: Aheirloom

Aeolidia’S Creative Biz Crushes On Instagram

A compelling story.

The new marketplace is all about the story your business tells. It may look like Aeolidia is a design and development studio, but really we are storytellers. You have your amazing product and you’ve found an audience and we help tell your story in a way that makes people feel like they need your products.

Here are some of our posts that help with this and show examples:

Make Magic For Your Biz With A Strong Brand Story

How To Identify & Attract Your Dream Customer

Bamboletta: Made With Crafts(Wo)Manship And Love

Start Right By Choosing A Business Name With A Story: 5 Junes

A fitting and memorable logo and brand identity.

If people go to all the trouble to find you, you want to make sure they will remember you. This is part of your story, and it needs to work for you.

Here are some of our posts that help with this and show examples:

Why Your Full Brand Identity Matters

Launch And Sell A Product To Brick & Mortar Stores: Hipcity

Begin With Your Brand: The Paper Seahorse

Using Your Brand Identity: Siamese Social Club

A way to find your perfect customers and keep them updated about your business.

This could be your own website, your social media accounts, a marketplace shop, attending trade shows or craft fairs, a newsletter. You need to be online, because that’s the only place with enough volume of shoppers to be able to find the ones that will totally get what it is you’re doing.

Here are some of our posts that help with this and show examples:

Start An Online Shop With Shopify

Printable Ecommerce Setup Checklist

Two Great Email Newsletter Guides To Finally Start Your Mailing List

How To Bring Quality, Targeted Traffic To Your Online Shop

Ready for some support with all this?

Call on the Aeolidia team! We are master storytellers, able to distill the heart of what you do into a brand identity that your ideal customers will relate to and into a website that will make perfect sense to them.

We still have a couple of openings for brand identity design and custom Shopify web design in January, and we’re expecting a busy year. We’d love to talk to you about transforming your business now, and get you on our schedule.