Prep for the Holidays EP3: Get ready to start creating!!

Are you ready to streamline your holiday prep and crush the busiest selling season of the year?

In this week's Prep for the Holidays episode, Melissa helps you get your supply game on point so you can focus on what you do best—creating amazing products your customers will love!

Let's break down the essential steps for securing raw materials, supplies, and packaging, as well as securing your creative collaborators to ensure you’re not scrambling last minute. Now's the time to stock up on paint, paper, jewellery fastenings, yarn  - whatever it is you use to make - to replacing broken tools and booking your designer. I’ll guide you through maintaining a robust inventory to keep your creating smooth and stress-free - and save you money!

Tune in and gear up for a successful holiday season.

This episode is brought to you by our Premium Subscriber Community on Patreon and Buzzsprout

You can find Melissa at finelimedesigns.com, finelimeillustrations.com or on Instagram @finelimedesigns.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the and she Looked Up podcast. Each week, we sit down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. I'm your host, melissa Hartfield, and after leaving a 20-year career in corporate retail, I've been happily self-employed for 12 years. I'm a graphic designer, an illustrator and a multi-six-figure-a-year entrepreneur in the digital content space. This podcast is for the artists, the makers and the creatives who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the and she Looked Up podcast. As always, I am your host, melissa, and today is episode number three in our Prep for the Holidays mini-series. So if you're not familiar with the series, just to give you a brief recap, this is a series that's running between now and the end of the year, with each episode being a deep dive into one particular item that you should be working on to prep for the holiday selling season. These episodes are meant for artists, makers, creative service providers and content creators, because I know for all of you, the holiday selling season is where a lot of you make the majority of your revenue for the year. So the idea behind these is that when an episode airs, that means that that particular topic that we're covering is something that you probably want to be working on that week. You can listen to these episodes in your favorite podcast player or you can watch them on YouTube. We do have video with them, so it's not an exciting video, it's just me, but hey, here I am and, yeah, we'll have a special playlist on YouTube where you'll be able to watch them all in one spot if you want to binge the content, although I do recommend you try and keep up from week to week, just to make life easier for you.

Speaker 1: 2:14

So today, in episode three, we're going to be talking about ordering raw materials, supplies and packaging all the things that we need to actually make the thing that we are going to be selling. Last week we talked, or in the last episode we talked, about why that was the time to figure out what it is you're going to be selling, making, producing for the holiday season, and now that you know what it is that you're going to be selling or making, day season and now that you know what it is that you're going to be selling or making or any of that stuff, you need to know what you need to actually get that job done. So if you are going to be actually making a physical item, you're going to need your raw goods. So that could be anything from paint to paper to yarn all the things that you might possibly need. So not only is it your main material. You need to start looking at things like do you have the brushes that you need? Are they in good shape? Do you have your canvases? Do you have your hooks or needles or scoring tools? Do you have anything that's broken that needs to be replaced? If you're printing, do you have enough ink? There's nothing worse than printing something like greeting cards or art prints and running out of ink a critical color in your ink in the middle of the process and not having backup supplies. So now's the time where you want to work on loading up all your supplies and making sure that you have enough to get you through to the end of the year.

Speaker 1: 3:47

There's some really good reasons for this If you can order these things in large amounts now and I'm not saying to go out and order ridiculous amounts, I'm saying order the amount that you need to get you through the rest of the year. But if you can order them now, you will probably. In some cases, you'll be ordering enough to earn free shipping, which is great. But if you don't, if the company you're ordering from doesn't offer free shipping, you'll be able to order now your items through the cheapest shipping option available, which is usually ground, and it doesn't matter if it takes a few extra days because you've got lots of time. The worst thing is, like I said, you run out of ink. It is October 30th. You are trying to get your prints ready for a market next weekend. You run out of ink. You run to Staples. Staples doesn't have it. You have to order it online. You have to do express shipping because you need it overnight, because you need to do the thing now, and it winds up being very expensive. So this is a good way to save yourself some money. It also means you can organize everything in your studio space or wherever it is that you do your work. You can make sure where everything is on hand, you can have it labeled and you can feel organized and ready to go, so that you can start production and get making.

Speaker 1: 5:04

If you are a creative services provider. You might not be making a physical thing. For some of you, you will be doing things like actually working one-on-one with customers or clients. So if you are a photographer, obviously you're going to want to make sure your gear is in good shape. You're going to want to make sure that you've got your marketing materials that you might provide to your clients beforehand Things like posing guides, what to wear, that kind of thing. You want to make sure you have all of that ready. You want to make sure it's printed. If you are considering creating educational materials that you're going to sell, particularly for things like Black Friday, cyber Monday. So let's say you want to do an e-book, for whatever reason, this works for content creators as well, because I know a lot of you do e-books to sell for Black Friday, cyber Monday that whole weekend. I'm just going to call it Black Friday instead of saying Black Friday Cyber Monday every time. So we'll just call it Black Friday, also Boxing Day for those of us up here in Canada where we do a lot of these kinds of promotions as well.

Speaker 1: 6:09

But if that is something in your plan and you're not going to create the thing yourself, now is the time to start getting your spot with a designer. I am a designer who does eBooks and I cannot tell you how many people pop into my email the first week of November wanting an eBook ready for Black Friday and it's a no-go. I'm full, I'm booked, I'm busy and I can't do it. So, frankly, if that's something you want done, the best time to start approaching designers is right now. Get on their calendar for the summer, where a lot of them it's a little bit slower, they have more space and they can get your project up and done and ready and you could have it in your hands by September or October and be ready to go. That also makes it easier to market the product. So, same with if you're a content creator. So if you are planning out your content that you're going to be creating, whether it's a blog post, a YouTube video now is the time where you're going to start wanting to order any props or a product that you're going to need.

Speaker 1: 7:17

If you're in the food content space, you're going to want to make sure you have your ingredients sourced. It's not always easy to find a turkey in the middle of July, so you might need to go and pre-order one from a butcher, I don't know, but things like that. So any photo styling, props that you need, all of that kind of thing. Now is the time to start sourcing all of that stuff so that when it's time to actually make the thing, create the thing, write the thing, you have everything you need in front of you and you don't need to worry about that. It just makes everything so much easier and, like I said, it is cheaper in most cases. Might not be cheaper to order a turkey right now, but in most cases it's going to be cheaper for you to actually order those things. Don't forget things like shipping and packaging materials as well. So if you are somebody who makes a physical item that you actually send out, you also want to start doing an inventory of your packing materials. Look at your sales from last year. That'll give you a fairly good idea of what you need to have on hand this year.

Speaker 1: 8:25

If this is your first year, it can be a little bit tricky, and we're going to be doing another episode very soon on where to source packaging materials. There's lots of different places out there. Some of them are very good at doing small quantities, so we'll talk about that in another episode, but right now, what you want to do is figure out what you need and start making some lists Might mean sitting down and ripping apart your studio space or your office space and figuring out what you have. You don't want to over-order, but you want to make sure that you have enough. So this is great.

Speaker 1: 8:59

This is a great time of year to do this. It's also a great time of year to set up a spreadsheet for all the things that you use regularly. So if it's paint colors, if it's specific types of paper, and keep an inventory. I just keep it in an Excel spreadsheet for myself. I keep an inventory of things like my sticker paper, my card paper, my fine art print paper all the things that I need. So I always know what I have on hand and I can look at the quantities. I also have it set up.

Speaker 1: 9:29

This is a little bit nerdy. You might not want, you might not be as nerdy as me, but I also have it set up that if any of those things fall below a certain threshold, it alerts me in the column that it's time to reorder. So things like that. There's more sophisticated inventory systems out there that you can also use if you do large quantities, so those are also worth looking at. But if you're going to go through and count everything up now, it's a great time to set up a little bit of an inventory system for your raw materials and your shipping and packing materials.

Speaker 1: 10:01

So that is it for this episode. We'll be back soon. As I said, the next episode we're going to be talking about where to source your packaging materials, so tune in for that one. That's it for this time and we will talk to you all soon. That's it for this time and we will talk to you all soon. Thank you so much for joining us for the and she Looked Up Creative Hour. If you're looking for links or resources mentioned in this episode, you can find detailed show notes on our website at andshelookedupcom. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our newsletter for more business tips, profiles of inspiring Canadian creative women and so much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the show via your podcast app of choice so you never miss an episode. We always love to hear from you, so we'd love it if you'd leave us a review through iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Drop us a note via our website at anchyllookedupcom, or come say hi on Instagram at andshelookedup. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.