When you first start to think about designing your brand, you immediately begin thinking about the logo you want to create, the colors you want to use— all of that fun stuff that makes creating a brand sound exciting!
But there is definitely an order you want to use when branding your handmade business, because each step builds on the one before it.
If you skip a step – or do the steps out of order – your brand won’t reflect the customer you want to attract— and that is really quite crucial if you want your handmade business to succeed!
So in today’s article we’re going to talk about each step and explain why it’s such an important part of the branding process.
PLUS, I’ll be showing you some really professional branding examples that our Tizzit HQ members – members who had no branding experience! – have designed completely on their own by following this simple process!
Ready? Let’s dive in.
Before you start thinking about brand ideas for your handmade business, there are two important things you need to do first: defining your ideal customer, and getting what I call “brand clarity”.
When you define your ideal customer, you are defining very specific characteristics about your best potential customers in two areas.
The first is demographics, which is factual data such as:
Next is psychographics, which is information about their attitudes and aspirations, like:
It’s a common mistake to stop at the demographics level when trying to define your ideal customer profile, but if you stop there you will not know enough about your ideal customer to make good decisions about your brand, your logo, and so much more.
You have to dig deeper, and I have a rule that makes it very very easy that I call the “focus on one person rule.”
I won’t go into it in this article or it will be too long, but my article about how to define your ideal customer profile walks you through this process step-by-step.
Once you define your ideal customer, you next want to work on brand clarity.
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In a nutshell, brand clarity is about understanding your brand and what your brand stands for before you actually design it.
It requires you to dig a little deeper and make sure you have considered 4 key ingredients:
1) Mission and Vision
2) Market Knowledge
3) Uniqueness, and
4) Consistency
I have two articles that will be very helpful for you to review when you are working on brand clarity.
The first one talks about what makes a good brand, and gives you a good overview of what factors help a brand succeed.
The second helps you gain a solid understanding of why branding is important and all the amazing things it can do for your business – I bet you may be surprised at some of the ways a good brand can increase your sales!
Once you have worked on your ideal customer and brand clarity, you are now ready for the fun part – designing your brand!
To craft a good brand, you have to dig a little deeper than things like fonts, colors, and appealing visuals.
There are actually four key ingredients to a good brand that you need to work on, the first is choosing your name.
Deciding on a name for your new business is very exciting but also can be very hard!
You want the name to be so many things: catchy, memorable, likable, and different.
But if you’re not creative – and actually even if you are creative, it’s easy to get stuck and struggle on this one.
So I came up with something I call “The 3x5x7 Method to Naming Your Craft Business” that makes coming up with good name ideas MUCH easier. I’m not going to dive into this process today, but be sure to take a look at it as it will make your naming process much easier!
Once you have chosen a name, it’s time to create a mood board!
Your mood board is your inspiration board, where you will collect photos that “feel” like what you want your customers to experience and feel when they interact with your brand.
So essentially you are going to go and grab images on the internet that inspire the same emotions and feelings that you want your brand to inspire when people look at it.
Collect lifestyle photos only — not graphics or other brand logos.
Examples of mood board photos could be pictures of people, places, landscapes, home decor, travel – anything that creates the ambiance that you want your brand to embody.
There are software programs out there such as Canva that make creating a mood board quite easy and fun so don’t be intimidated, anyone can do it!
Let’s take a look at some of our Tizzit HQ members mood boards:
First up is Allison Moffit of INNER NATURE JOURNEY. Allison is getting ready to sell physical self-care boxes and products, with an online hub/education component allowing her customers to explore different science-based self-care practices.
Allison’s mood board imparts a feeling of simplicity, calm, and nature. When I look at each picture I can literally feel my body start to relax.
Next let’s take a look at a mood board from Mel. Mel is owner/creator of Mimi handmade, and she makes fun and stylish baskets for home organization and decor.
Mel’s mood board does a beautiful job at creating a mood and emotions in anyone looking at it – don’t you immediately get a feeling of fun and happiness just looking at the pictures?
Our third example comes from Marie, creator and owner of Studio Wanderlust Co. Marie creates colorful travel and national park posters & prints that have a retro and vintage feel.
Her mood board is full of exciting travel pictures mixed with eclectic home decor pictures— definitely makes me want to take a trip and go adventuring!
Finally, let’s look at a mood board by Kirstin, owner and creator of Kris Chris Creations, a shop that makes one of a kind handmade bags.
Her mood board is a combination of unique and fun patterns, similar to those on the bags she creates which are all one of a kind. It’s feminine and fun, modern and vibrant yet also absolutely timeless.
So you can see that each of these mood boards is completely different and invokes a whole different set of emotions, which is brilliant because that is just what we want them to do!
Next up is picking your color palette, and I want to start with one very important piece of advice:
You don’t want to randomly pick colors that you think look good together.
Which some of you might be happy about because you’ve been staring at color wheels for days and had your eyes glaze over since there are infinite colors to choose from!
Believe it or not, you have already picked your color palette!
How?
Your mood board!
You’re going to choose colors that are in your mood board for your color palette— so that your color palette reflects the mood that you want to create for your brand!
Tricky, right?
Let’s take a look at our HQ member color palettes:
First is Allison’s Inner Journey palette. You can see that her color palette is extracted from the pictures on her mood board. And as you would expect, the colors she is using invoke the same calm and peaceful emotions as the pictures on her mood board.
Next let’s take a look at the color palette for Mel’s Mimi Handmade.
When you look at Mel’s color palette it matches up with her pictures – and their fun and happy feeling – perfectly!
Marie’s Studio Wanderlust color palette is another good example of a cohesive color palette; she has extracted colors from moodboard that invoke a feeling of traveling and new adventures.
Finally, let’s look at Kirstin’s Kris Chris Creations palette.
Her palette has a beautiful combination of the colors from her mood board which also reflect the stunning combinations the shopper will find on her tote bags.
Now let’s move on to your logo.
My best advice for this is to keep it super simple.
Your logo doesn’t need to say visually what you do. If you sell yarn, you do not need a yarn ball in your logo. . . if you knit, you don’t need knitting gear in your logo.
Essentially, your logo doesn’t need to be literal. . . and it needs to stand the test of time— so keep it super simple.
And so essentially, this means that your logo is your business name, written in a special font.
The trick here is that this font shouldn’t be a free font that everyone has seen and knows about, it should be a paid premium font. So your investment there is going to be about $10 to have the legal right to use that font.
Of course for my example here I want to show you the Tizzit.co logo!
You can see that the letters are very unique, and because it’s a custom font it is more visually memorable to you – it stands out more and catches your attention, but it’s really just the word “Tizzit” written in a special font I purchased.
So that’s your logo, now onto your font and typography.
These are the fonts that you’re actually going to use for your headings and your body copy, whether on the internet or even on your packaging, and everywhere that you need to write stuff for your brand. . .
. . . so these need to be pretty easy to read.
You also want them to visually complement one another, as in you don’t want them to clash.
I won’t cover all the rules of typography in this article, but I just want to mention that you don’t need to go super fancy here, especially not with your body font.
Because the body copy is there to be read, it needs to be easy to read. So this actually is where you would use free fonts, like Montserrat or Lato – all these fonts that we’re used to seeing and reading in books and online – and stay away from very pretty hard to read cursive or decorative fonts.
So let’s take a look at our Tizzit HQ members’ fonts all together:
What I want you to notice, and what’s absolutely brilliant, is how UNIQUE and DIFFERENT each set of fonts is! Each maker’s logo is very unique thanks to their custom font, and their fonts invoke the feel of their business.
The next step is to put all of your choices together in a brand style guide.
Your brand style guide has your logo, a second version of your logo, your fonts, and your color with the color codes so you always use exactly the same color.
You make this guide so that you can always use these items consistently across all platforms: on your site, on your shop, on your social media.
And if you work with someone like a graphic designer, a social media assistant, or you hire someone to do your packaging or whatever else, you send your brand style guide to them so that they have all the information they need to keep your brand consistent.
So now let’s take a look at the brilliant and professional style guides our HQ members created!
Each of these style guides looks completely professional and does a beautiful job conveying the emotions and feelings they want their products to invoke in their shoppers.
They all followed the same process but the end results are vastly different because so are their products, vision and brands!
Each of the handmade sellers in the above examples designed their brand just by following the course inside the HQ – which is everyone’s favorite course because it’s super fun, actionable, no experience needed, and super rewarding!
. . . and I would absolutely encourage you to check it out!
It will take you through each of the steps above with step-by-step tutorials that make creating your own style guide easy and FUN!
Your Tizzit HQ membership will also give you access to a wonderful community of handmade sellers that you can show your branding ideas to for loads of helpful comments and feedback, we’d love to have you join us!
Thanks for reading and until next time, aurevoir!
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