Good Afternoon and Welcome Back…
For those of you who are familiar with my website, I am sure you have noticed the new look and feel of The Alluring Bead Boutique.
It has taken me a very long while to bring my visions of my Business and my Brand to fruition.
I plan to share a lot of information and my experience with you here which will save you a lot of time and frustration when you decide to bring your beautiful jewelry designs to the public.
The First Step - Define your Brand
I listened to a ton of Webinars by some really successful Jewelry Designers and Entrepreneurs.
I feel that the most important part of defining your brand is to define your vision statement.
This includes the following:
- Jewelry Style
- Customer Type
- Your Style
- How your Brand will look (Elements of Design)
- Your Aesthetic
- Your Philosophy
(More on the Branding to come in Later Posts)
This Graphic is one of my Favorites.
It is so reflective of how I see my lifestyle as a Designer and the colors and layout correlate strongly with my Aesthetic Style.
For a long time, this was the only element I had that I felt this way about. If you follow my YouTube Channel and my other Social Media, you have no doubt seen this picture a lot.
A litte Backstory.....
I started my own Website about 8 months after I started making Jewelry.
It made sense to me because my vision for my business includes teaching and giving back to the Jewelry Design Community
Not only did I need a place to sell my Jewelry, but I also wanted a home for my Blog, Patterns and Tutorials.
I was already active on my YouTube Channel and was gaining a lot of subscribers there.
I needed a place where I could add more value to my brand in the written form and where my followers can download PDF’s and access valuable resources.
Just starting out, I could not afford to buy any of those gorgeous themes and marketing packages that most of those webinar folks are trying to sell .
So I have spent the last 2 1/2 years learning to build my own site in the WordPress Platform. I have also learned quite a bit about the different web hosting companies as well. (More on the coming in another post.)
All while making jewelry, patterns, tutorials and trying to build an online presence.
That left me very little time to “Get it Together” so I kept rough drafts, notes and scribbles and ideas for my Brand in a little notebook, dedicated to my Brand.
Every spare moment, I would take it out, rewrite notes, add and subtract elements.
The keywords that kept coming to mind for my brand were Friendly and Feminine.
In December, when I knew my web hosting was coming up for renewal, I started looking for Themes based on my keywords.
Then I finally found exactly what I was looking for.
There are not many feminine themes out there that aligned with my vision for my Brand, but I have found two really great options for my style.
Bluchic.com has some very beautiful themes and extra value Social Media template packages. But at this time they were still above my price range.
Then I found SugarandCode.com and was thrilled.
I currently use a Sugar and Code theme on this website.
I am in love with it.
- Simple to Install and Setup
- Great Video Course Included
- Some gorgeous Free Photos