I took a Brother home sewing machine and a $30 craigslist desk and built a six figure sewing business that supports a life I love… while generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue each year.
I’m sharing every tool, trick, and business process I’ve learned from costuming celebrities, manufacturing clothing, and selling products... aka, what I WISH I knew when I first started out building a craft-based business.
Just a few years before sewing the first American flag, Betsy Ross ran away across the river to get married in a bar against the wishes of her entire family. She sat near George Washington in church and built a friendship with him that lead to her legacy-filled role as the first seamstress of the American flag.
After sewing the flag, she went on to operate a successful business for decades. I wonder what advice she'd have for us sewing business owners today? Would it be the importance of choosing a good church pew?
I'm no Betsy, but I know what I wish I did. In this episode, I highlight five things I wish I had done when I first went into business, as well as some important things to note in doing business in a craft-based industry.
When I first started my sewing business, I thought my biggest struggle would be finding paid work. I doubted that I could find enough clients to pay me to sew for them, which was actually a reflection of how I viewed my trade… little did I know, my biggest lessons and struggles I would have over the next four years actually all related to growth, and how I would cope with it.
Fast forward to four years of lessons, mistakes, windfalls, nightmares, and insane amounts of plot twists and growth, and I can confidently say that the four lessons I’m sharing with you come with a lot of thought and retrospect.
While it feels like year 40, I now have a good handful of gray hairs, a few annoying regrets, enough perspective to sink a ship, and so much gratitude for the journey and love for the process. But four years in and I’m just now starting to figure a few things out. I've made this list of four things I’ve learned about launching and growing a sewing company in four years.
If you’re an Astronaut, the process of getting dressed for work is labor intensive. You might have known the spacesuits Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong were expensive… but I bet you didn’t know the seamstresses who made them came from Playtex.
The success of those suits were a matter of life and death. I’d imagine the phrase ‘good enough’ was not one that was said that day about their uniform.
What if I told you, that the spacesuits these astronauts wore only passed half of their field tests?
How do you know if your handmade work is good enough to sell? In this episode, we go behind the scenes at NASA and pull the thread on imposter syndrome, taking imperfect action, and learning how to let the market decide what's good enough to sell. I teach you how to let the market decide, and why.