The Guilt of Selling - And How to Work Around It

Illustration by Deborah Panesar

If you run a business, you know how important selling is. We have to sell in order to survive, and of course to pay for all the fun (and not so fun) stuff that comes along with being an adult (or one that is pretending to be). 

After all, only you can keep the proverbial lights on in your small indie empire.

For the vast majority of the year selling and selling tactics don't seem to be an issue - the odd discount code here and there, a sale, a promotion or an offer. They do wonders to bring in new customers and clients and, hopefully, boost sales. But then comes along Christmas and it's foreign cousin, Thanksgiving, who brought their unwanted and shamed twin brother, Black Friday.

It seems Black Friday stirs up some pretty intense feelings in not only customers but also businesses. Black Friday is a mixed review entity. 

Like the typical un-liked cousin who turns up for family dinner, you don't want to acknowledge them but there is this sense of obligation to have to accept them and entertain them for all their unlikeable traits. 

Personally, I've never wrangled with the sense of guilt around this selling period, perhaps because my customers have been only too engaging in the Black Friday sales I've hosted and the savings it's meant for them. But last year I started to notice a lot of designer-makers share through their social media how they wouldn't be taking part because of the mass consumerist aspect of it, and how instead they would donate to charity or host a sale a different time. 

Queue floods of guilt and shame, and also a lot of questions.

If we stand against Black Friday, what does it mean when we do hold promotions and sales during the year? Don't these things entail the same consumerist driving ideals? And what about when we have post Christmas sales? or even, when we're just trying to sell anything? 

And down and down the rabbit hole we go. 

I came to a pretty stark conclusion that in the end, it would mean no selling at all if you didn't want to be a part of that lifestyle. And as much as that would be a wonderful ideal to live with, it's not necessarily possible with crippling outside forces such as a weakened currency or a more spend wary audience who maybe don't have the disposable income they once did. People are far more careful with how they spend their money, and they want to make the best possible financial choices.

So what can we do, as indie businesses or designer makers to keep our businesses afloat without selling our souls to the Black Friday devil? How can we help our customers, and ourselves, to make more from the money we have? 

Firstly, we need to stop feeling guilty for selling, in any shape or form. You are a business, and if you are serious about building your small and perfectly formed indie biz into something bigger & better, or even for the satisfaction of knowing that every penny that pays for your living costs was earned by your hands, then you need to accept that there will be an element of awkward selling. 

Hustling is hard. And if it's making you feel uncomfortable then that's probably a good thing because it means you're stepping out of your comfort zone. So keep doing more of it and see what happens.

Secondly you need to look at your business, no one else's, and ask yourself these questions: 

• Can my profit margins handle a Black Friday Sale? 
• Do I have to mark down all my products, or can it just be a select range? 
• How have my sales performed in the previous years of Black Friday? 
• What is my customer response to past Black Friday sales? 

Only you can answer these questions around your business. If you own an Etsy shop you can check your analytics based on days, months and years via the statistics page to see how sales performed at this period of time, and even see what kind of keywords and tags worked for you to bring in those sales.  

Lastly, decide how you'll market the whole thing to stay in line with your brand. A Black Friday super promotion will only feel tacky and salesy if you use the same template as say Amazon or eBay on your own business. So think outside the box and consider some of these ideas:

• Donating some of your Black Friday sales to charity (if your pricing module can handle that)
• Promoting it in a humorous or sarcastic way that actually laughs at Black Friday
• Take discounts off the table and offer free shipping or free gifts instead. 
• If using discounts, use them sparingly - only apply it to products that have a decent profit margin and where you will earn a wage from them. Follow this super handy article from Etsy to make sure you're not undercharging your items. 

Above all, remember to keep it personal. I can hazard a guess that the main reason people buy from your small business is because you are the face of the brand, and they want to buy something from a human and not some warehouse out in the middle of nowhere. So make sure that every step of your Black Friday journey is unique, individual and personal, just like your brand. 

And should all of this still make you curl up and die inside, then Black Friday selling is not for you. Accept it, and plan a different way to generate sales and interest over the peak selling period with either a blog post, newsletter, or maybe a giveaway. Take advantage of the high numbers of people trawling through the internet that weekend, and make it work for you. 

This year I have decided to take part in a Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale but only on some selected lines. I'll be releasing more information around this exclusively to my mailing list subscribers, so be sure to sign up if you want this information to land in your inbox! 

Let's keep making mistakes!

It's been one year since I proclaimed from the rooftops (well, my Tumblr page) that I was going to stop working on my business and to instead pursue designing and illustrating full time.

Reading through this post (which for some reason makes me cringe and want to delete it forever from the eyes of the internet) I can recall so vividly how burnt out, tired and quite dejected I was feeling about the whole thing. The 'tipping point' part of that whole post was true - something needed to change in order to for me to change how I felt.  

12 months on, what can I tell you?

Well, I did not succeed in making this dream a total reality. I'm here to tell you today that I did not end up making not a particularly smart business / life / wellbeing decision that I only realised the other day.

And I feel so damn positive about the whole thing.

Genuinely, I have never been more ecstatic than realising I had made this mistake. I felt it in my entire body, this happy revelation, that I gave it a damn hard try, and no one can take that away from me. I slogged the year, I trialled and boy did I error. I made some monumental fuck ups, some of which are embarrassing and some of which are truly teachable moments. 

Bathe in the glory of your fuck-ups, embarrassment and face-palm-worthy errors because these are your sign posts and slip roads to a new direction. 

Some of you might be curious how I came to this state of delusional bliss where I seemingly lost my mind in the many fuck-ups and laughed? It's quite boring really - but I did some sales forecasting. 

I kid you not - I spent two days (out of curiosity more than anything) making a detailed year on year comparison of my sales from 2013-2016, which I'll explain below. I've made a template of the model I created should you wish to embark on this mind-numbingly revelation-worthy task [NOTE: remember to save a copy of it, not input your information directly onto it, as it's a public Google Sheet and all your financial information will be shared with everyone which is not good]. 

The madness first started after reading this super helpful Etsy Blog article, to try and forecast Christmas sales for my shop. And when the results were tallied, all the information from each months revenue and number of sales input into my spreadsheet, I sat back and thought, damn, I underestimated the power of my wonderful little illustrated business. 

So then I went off a tangent and I pulled up ALL my accounts for the same timeframe (2013-2016) and started inputting all my revenue information, month by month, year by year, to start painting a picture of what my year on year sales were like. I even went as far as to break this down into the each revenue stream, so I could get a better idea of where my money was coming from. 

And when all of that was done, I sat back and looked at the cold hard evidence which only number crunching can give you - and I realised a number of things: 

1. I made decisions last year based on feelings and not on financial evidence. 
2. I did not appreciate what I had till I stopped doing it. 
3. I busted some serious ass this year, and although it wasn't my strongest from a money point of view, it's been the smartest I worked in a long time.

Who knew that all this meaning could come from something as mundane as sales forecasting? Admittedly there are heaps of businesses who do this every year, and are probably wondering why I never got on with this before, and you're right. I'm a little late to this smart financial forecasting party. But I'm here now and I'm loving it. 

I'm geared up and I'm positive about where to take my illustrated business.

I'm excited to get back into making and designing products to sell. I can't wait to head out into the world again to meet my customers face to face at craft fairs and events. I'm looking forward to the thrill and the anxiety of launching new ranges and approaching stockists and being so fully immersed once more in the designer maker world. 

It's been a learning curve this year working solely as a freelance illustrator whilst my shop took a bit of a backseat - and I've been so grateful for all the projects, commissions and opportunities that came my way. I've learned so much about how I work, function and thrive as an illustrator, and I'm excited to come back to normal business as it was pre 2016. 

Most importantly however, the one thing I've learned that I feel you should take with you from this moment on after reading this: Embrace how much this may also be a fuck-up. 

No great business ever grew or became the power-house they are without taking some wrong turns; trusting the wrong people, investing money in the wrong thing or even taking their business down a route that maybe wasn't such a good idea. Mistakes = progress and progress is better than sitting and waiting for it all to happen. 

So before I leave you to go out into the world and embrace all your error-making ways, that only a human can do, I want to leave you with a profound quote from Amanda Palmer:

““Everyone in this room is going to be gone pretty quickly — and we will have either made something or not made something. The artists that inspire me are the ones that I look at and go, ‘Oh my god — you didn’t have to go there. It would’v been safer not to — but, for whatever reason, you did.’ And every time death happens, I’m reminded that it’s stupid to be safe… Usually, whatever that is — wherever you don’t want to go, whatever that risk is, wherever the unsafe place is — that really is the gift that you have to give.””

— Amanda Palmer via Brain Pickings

Read the full article that this quote was taken from, 'Vincent Van Gogh on Fear, Taking Risks, and How Making Inspired Mistakes Moves us Forward' by Brain Pickings and also take some time to watch this incredible interview with Grace Bonney, the owner of Design*Sponge, on Marie Forleo's blog entitled 'Overcoming Fear, Accepting Imperfection, and the Real Deal with Work Life Balance.'

Now I'd like to hear about your monumental fuck-ups that you're grateful for (if you have anything, perfect human) - leave them in the comments below or tweet them to me @deborahpanesar

Keep up the trial and error and don't be ashamed to shout about it.