Major changes at Zazzle

Sorry I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, I've been very busy working on my three Zazzle stores.

My main store Wildmacnz which houses my clothing, household goods, greeting cards and poster designs etc. 

My business store Wildmacnzbusiness which is where I house all my business card, flexi magnets and other business related designs.

And lastly my Electronics store Wildmacnzelectronics which houses all my phone, laptop and tablet case designs.

I hadn't looked at any of these stores in nearly three years. With all the stuff going on in my personal life with my husband being laid off and then us moving house and town, I just ignored them and as is usually the way, life kept happening and things changed without me realizing. One of the major changes being that Zazzle had hidden a lot of my designs that hadn't sold, so they are no longer visible to the public. I never noticed anything as my sales were getting better over time so I just thought everything was as I left it. 

What a big surprise! But actually it was a good surprise. It took some of the pressure off me. How you ask?

Well, for a long while before my personal life took a sudden left turn, I was creating designs and then putting them on as many products as I could, that suited the design. I never used quick create, I didn't like the idea of my designs going on everything at once especially when not every image is suitable for every product. When new products were released I put all the existing images on the new products if they suited, however this didn't leave me much time for creating new designs. Just keeping up with the old ones was becoming a full time job! I started to slip further and further behind. It felt like I was trying to run up a downwards traveling escalator that was speeding up.  In short I put too much pressure on myself to create a large store, thinking that this was what I needed to do to get seen in the marketplace and get sales. I was wrong. My sales picked up even though a lot of my products were no longer visible for sale in the marketplace. I was focusing on the wrong things.

This reshuffle from Zazzle eased the pressure off me to create more and more and made me look at fine tuning what I already have. It allowed me to take a step back and really think about:

1. What I really wanted to sell in my stores. 
2. What I wanted my stores to look and feel like to a customer
3. What I enjoyed creating. I hate making some products so why am I making them?
4. Why have some of my products not sold? Wrong design for the product? Have I aimed at the wrong audience for a certain design? Is the design just old and outdated now, especially designs with the date on them?
5. Keywording and descriptions. Are they letting me down?
6. What have I sold? This was an eye opener. Some of the designs that hadn't sold were on on products I hated making. Could this be related? 
7. Do I really need three stores or should I condense down into just one or two?

These are all questions I've been slowly working through for the last few weeks as I delete crap/outdated designs and products I hate making, that haven't sold anyway, and rework my keywords and descriptions on designs I want to keep. It's a painstaking process, but one I'm very happy to do. I can see light at the end of the tunnel in the form of a lightweight streamlined store filled only with designs and products that I'm happy to make and are more likely to sell well.

This is my most popular tie. My watercolor painted scooter design on a yellow background. This scooter is also available on other colored backgrounds. My scooter sells well on multiple products so it makes the cut and will stay in my newly designed store.

The top picture is of a new wrapping paper design I created last week. Now I have time to create new designs which is the part I really enjoy doing. 

I love another new feature that Zazzle introduced whilst I wasn't looking, 

Collections. (see pic above)

Collections are a great way to showcase groups of products either by theme, product or by grouping useful things together, such as, matching birthday cards, gift wrap and envelopes for example, or matching designed cups and plates. I've only just started using this feature but I can see loads of possibilities with it.

All in all, although Zazzle has created lots of new work for me, I welcome the changes as a new beginning for my stores. As I try to simplify other areas of my life, be it creative or home life, it makes perfect sense for me to simplify my stores too. 

I hope you may find this post useful if you have a Zazzle store that you haven't looked at in a while. You may be surprised with the changes. It can be a shock, but I think it's good to take a step back from time to time and reassess what it is you really want to accomplish. Sometimes it's hard to see the wood for the trees.

Have a great week :) 

I'm back

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” 
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can't believe it's been nearly eight months since I last posted here. I was only meant to take a short two week break, maybe a month max but, things happen and here we are eight months later.

A lot of things have changed in my workspace. I'm still sharing the lounge but I invested in a good sized second hand desk and a cubby type bookshelf to store my growing collection of art and reference books. I still need to look for a decent office chair though. I also picked up a second hand medium sized wooden box with a tilt top lid to paint my watercolors on. The space inside it is handy for holding my desk sketch/idea book and small works in progress. I even managed to pick up a second hand three drawer mobile unit to store my art supplies in. I've put little trays in the top two drawers that I can pull out to use their contents when needed. Ideal for colored pencils, felt tip pens, gel pens etc. and it all tidies away to keep my desktop clutter free. Well it works in theory anyway, my desk now seems to be attracting school papers and bills etc instead. Grrr. The paperwork of life is such a pain.

Art wise nothing new has happened really. I haven't painted in a while. I started creating business cards and letterheads etc in Photoshop for my Zazzle store and that snowballed into opening a separate store for business items. Then I created a number of new photographic and computer generated designs for elsewhere in my store and that's kept me busy for months. Right now I have three boy's birthday card designs waiting to be painted and some more half designed cards for girls that I haven't quite got right yet. Once I've finished these designs I'll have them to paint too.

Elsewhere I've been going through our house again and getting rid of unnecessary clutter. This seems to be an ongoing process. Some things I donated, some things I sold, which paid for my desk, bookcase and mobile unit and some things I threw away. So between all this and keeping up with the kids I completely forgot about my blog.

I've decided to try to plan out my week a bit better and make sure I leave myself some painting time so it's not all full on computer work all week cos that gets tiring after a while. Perhaps alternating days will liven things up a bit. I've also got to get rid of this idea in my mind that if I don't produce a finished piece of art at the end of every art day that I've wasted my time. I'm not sure how many of you have the same nagging voice in your mind, but I find that it stops me enjoying painting when I'm forcing myself to up my output and sometimes it stops me from starting a piece of work. I need to relax more and just let it all flow out as it comes. My morning walks are always a good way to blow away the cobwebs and get new ideas coming. Time spent in nature is never a waste of time. Anyway, hopefully this will be the start of weekly posting from now on.

Take care and have a great week :)

Why I left microstock

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity 

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

I've recently pulled all of my images from a microstock site and a few people have asked me why. I hope this helps to explain my motivation behind my move.

Although I have only recently returned to drawing and painting as a way to express my creativity, I had, for the past three years, been learning about photography as an art form and trying to find ways to improve. I guess if you suppress your creativity in one area it will always find another way to come out. 

I had always thought that photography was going to be my creative outlet after I read a book about Robert Capa. It totally got me hooked on photography.

I bought my first 35 mm film camera in 1986, around the same time I gave up my painting, and a month later bought my first film SLR. I happily used these and captured many pleasing images, mostly on slide film until my first child was born in 1999, where I realized that it was getting really expensive to take so many pictures of my son and when money was especially tight one year I sold all my gear. A few months later I bought my first compact digital camera and used it for taking mostly family photos. 

Fast forward the next few years and several camera changes and in February 2009 I heard of microstock photography and bought a Canon Rebel digital SLR and uploaded a few shots. Most were rejected as non-stock worthy, hardly surprising as I hadn't researched what microstock agencies wanted before I uploaded. I laugh about it now but at the time it was rather soul crushing ;) I uploaded images for about a year before I realized that I'd totally lost my enthusiasm for photography. It had stopped being fun and started to become a rather boring chore, I'd even stopped taking my camera to family occasions which is a shame because I can never go back to take those missed family moments again. I stopped uploading then and did a lot of soul searching before I could decide what to do next. 

My problem? 

What I wanted to shoot wasn't what was selling well in microstock and what was selling well, I didn't want to shoot. I'm not into shooting models brushing their teeth etc or hammers and things isolated on white backgrounds. It's just not me and I'm guessing a lot of people out there feel the same. I think it comes down to this, I don't want to shoot an advertising shot to sell a product, I prefer my shot to be the end product, a piece of art I guess. I prefer the art side of the business to the commercial side and microstock is more on the commercial side so it wasn't for me. My art shots sold through the micros but not as well as they sold elsewhere as a finished product. 

Which brings me to my blog post here today.  I felt I had come to a crossroads and needed to make a final decision on which way to turn. One way would mean continuing as I am, creating images I want to using a mix of photography and painting and finding a market that appreciates them as they are or the other path which would mean investing in lighting and better equipment and sinking a lot of money into a direction I really didn't feel comfortable in. I chose the first one, I like to follow my own path through life I guess. The best part is that my 13 year old son also wants to join me on this path. We share a Zazzle store together. The polar bear fishing on the top left of the following image, and also the "Play hard" hippo on the bag 2nd from bottom on the right, are his creations. 

This is a link to our store http://www.zazzle.com/wildmacnz

I hope that you will be able to understand my reasons for leaving the micros and perhaps if you also feel that you have reached some sort of crossroads in your own work, this may give you the courage to try something new, to make your own path going forward because we all have our own unique gifts to share and should be able to share them in a way that makes sense to us.

Have a great week :)