Answering an FAQ: What Inspired You to Start Your Business?
One of the most frequently asked questions I receive as an illustrator is “how did you get started?” or '“what inspired you to start your business?”, and there are a lot of answers to that question. I don’t really remember giving much thought to the “getting started” part, I kind of just did it. I began! With most ideas that pop into my head, if I’m excited about it, I get started on it in that very same day.
When all of this began, long before Simply Sophie Designs even had a a name, I was with two of my friends from high school, watching the first Kissing Booth movie where we were all working on various creative projects and crafts while watching the funny flick. My friend and now roommate was working on a pom pom rug and I believe I was too, and my other friend was working on a portrait of friends with Adobe Illustrator. I was fascinated! To give you some context, I’ve always been a creative and artistic person. I used to fill up many sketch books with drawings, water color paintings, and charcoal renderings. I would journal and doodle, make collages out of magazine clippings…anything creative I could get my hands on, I was doing it. But, as I got older I was ready for a new medium for my creativity and the many capabilities of Adobe Illustrator were just too intriguing to pass up.
Feeling inspired, I just went for it and bought a subscription to the Adobe Creative Suite. I started creating some portraits out of pictures of friends and family saved in my camera role after my friend taught me how to create the portraits. At the time, I thought my creations were AMAZING. Now I look back and naturally, I cringe LOL. But this was my first attempt at digital portraits, and I didn’t quite know what I was doing yet. But that’s the thing about starting out, you’re not going to know everything and that’s okay. Things that are worth doing usually are not easy!
I remember having conversations about starting up a little portrait business with my college roommates during my junior year. While creative projects are fulfilling to me, I’ve also always had an entrepreneurial spirit, so one of my first thoughts was, is there a way for me to make money on this? My first sales were to my roommates. I was selling custom portraits and a couple of prints with quotes on them. I was charging $15 for a full-detail custom portrait of two people. That’s yet another thing that makes me cringe. I was only charging $15 to do hours of work!!! But again, I didn’t know what I was doing. We all start somewhere! I’m still learning as I go and I’m sure there are things that I’m doing right now that one day I’ll look back on and think '“why did I do that?”, but that’s life!
Word spread quickly on my college campus and I was filling portrait orders pretty consistently. I started ordering a couple of basic packaging supplies like plastic sleeves and little gift tags, but I wasn’t shipping any orders yet. My college campus was basically my only audience. At this point, word of mouth was my only advertising tactic, and honestly, it worked! I was utilizing the campus printing shop to get my portraits printed for my customers and fellow students would come by my dorm or meet up with me in Starbucks to get their portraits. Thus, a business was born and it finally got a name, Simply Sophie Designs. It wasn’t my favorite name at the time, but to be honest with you, I couldn’t come up with anything else and I just thought, “well, it’s an alliteration so it’ll work”, because for some reason creating a business name in which each word starts with the same letter sounds more legit lol.
Eventually, I created an Instagram for my business, which helped me make even more sales. I was posting sporadically about orders, occasionally doing some fan art for influencers, hoping I would get shoutouts on their stories, and showcasing some of my packaging when I finally started shipping. But within my first year of business, I was barely posting, and once summer hit and all of the students went home, I didn’t receive many orders for a long time. Which I was okay with, I just didn’t have the motivation at the time to devote time and energy into upping my marketing strategy. I wasn’t taking this thing seriously. Simply Sophie Designs didn’t feel like a business yet.
Here’s a before and after of what my feed looked like in the beginning compared to now! We love a growth moment!
When I got back to school, this dry spell became slightly better, I started to receive some more orders here and there. But all of the sudden before Christmas, I started advertising my portraits and pet portraits as gift ideas for Christmas and a whole FLOOD of orders came through. It was unexpected, but exciting. I had people coming to my senior house multiple times a week to pick up orders before the holidays. I eventually had to put out a message announcing I wasn’t accepting anymore Christmas orders! Seeing a large stack of orders for the first time was what made me feel like I was starting to run a real business. I was spending every Saturday morning going to FedEx to ship out orders, doing all of my transactions through Venmo, and basically using Instagram alone to sell my product.
After that Christmas, I made the LITERAL life-changing decision to purchase an iPad and an Apple Pencil. I didn’t start out with those items, those tools were investments for my business. It was a hefty purchase, but it was basically a Christmas gift to myself and my business that was finally starting to feel like a business. My boyfriend came with me to Best Buy after Christmas to make the purchase, we had just graduated and I was working full-time as a Communications Management Assistant at an advertising agency in downtown Indianapolis. When I brought my iPad home I was so excited I could hardly put my Apple Pencil down! I was staying up until the wee hours of the morning trying to learn the ropes of Procreate. I still stay up late, finding it difficult to put the iPad away. But I’ve always been a night owl. In fact, I’m writing this blog post at midnight lol.
Yet another transformation! This photo on the left was my first workspace photo I ever took in my little senior house. The photo on the right is my new space in my apartment!
Procreate changed so many things for my business. Finally having the ability to physically draw things out, sketch, paint, color, and create digitally was an absolute game changer. Before, I felt like a self-taught graphic designer, with Procreate I was finally starting to feel like an illustrator. I started to become much more active on Instagram, posting consistently and doing several other things to grow my audience that I might talk about in a future post. Things started to go up from here, slowly, but surely. After a few months of grinding out illustration after illustration and growing my sales from month to month, I was finally at around 1,000-2,000 followers by April of 2020. This month, even more started to change for me. I found a mentor through a page I began illustrating for, and her guidance helped me to push my boundaries, break out of my pastel color pallet, and tackle serious topics like mental health and body positivity. This is where I really felt like things got serious, and this is where my brand really started to mean something to me. I found a mission within my work, I narrowed my target audience, and I started really speaking to the people that follow me.
I was hoping to get to 10k by the end of 2020, but right now I’m at over double that. It’s been an insane year and I’ve learned so much along the way. Now Simply Sophie Designs is more than just custom portraits. Although the portraits are what started all of this, it’s now morphed into this beautiful thing that I can use to spread positivity while talking about things that are important to me such as mental health, self care, body positivity and more. My business has allowed me to provide for myself financially, I started freelancing and grew my client roster, created more sticker designs, expanded my product line by producing greeting cards, and even moved all of my production (except for stickers) in-house. No more trips to FedEx for me! There are still so many other things I want to do, but this is the story of how it got started. I hope you’ll stick around for the rest of the journey!
