Let’s talk about running a successful surface pattern design business.

If you are creating designs and you are wanting to get to that next level from being a hobbyist who isn’t selling their designs, who isn’t getting their designs out there in the marketplace to becoming a successful designer where you’re able to monetize and earn and income from your designs and you’re working your way up to actually working full-time in your design business then there is something important you need to think about.

Creating patterns is actually only one part of your design business. Sometimes people forget that if you are wanting to set up a design business, that it actually is a business and what that means is there are a whole lot of things that go along with that outside of just actually creating the design.

Treat your design business as a business

That means that not only do you need to be allocating time to your designing but also to spending time on the business side of things as well. There is so much more to having a successful design practice than creating gorgeous designs. 

What you need to do is make sure that each and every week that you set aside time for your business tasks, because that’s, what’s going to get you selling your design. So that includes things like it you are wanting to try and get some clients that you need to set aside time each week, fortnight or month to schedule your time to research and email new clients, to email. You also need to then put in reminders so that you, you know, follow up on those clients as well. I recommend actually scheduling those in because what will happen is because they’re not the most fun or joyful part of our business they can easily be forgotten.

Done is better than perfect

One of the things that I know that you’ve probably heard this said a million times before, but I really love this saying is ‘done is better than perfect’. And I’ve seen this so many times with my students where they really worry about getting things perfect before they want to actually put it out there. But in terms of a lot of those elements within your business, it’s better to get started putting the work out there rather than getting stopped and blocked and not moving forward because you’re not going to get anywhere if you are doing that.

Have a listen to this episode of Design and Shine where we dive deeper into allocating time for business tasks in your surface pattern design business.

You can download my Pattern Design Secrets eBook here