Branding, Rebranding, Updating “the Look”: It All Started With New Earring Cards

Today ends an online course I took with Laura Bray on Multiple Streams of Income for Artists and Crafters. What a great course! I recommend it. Although I was already enjoying several streams of income, I was also driving myself crazy trying to do too many things. I needed some help focusing my energy on specific goals, and one of my goals has been to create a more cohesive public image, a small part of the process of branding.

(Side note: my cattle rancher husband understands the original practice this business concept comes from pretty well, since he had a little run in with the branding iron last week. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bad; his cheek has peeled and healed.)

I still don’t know all I want or need to about branding, but I do know that with the coming arts and crafts show season, I want my jewelry booth and displays to better complement the business card I designed–which I really like, and which usually gets compliments. So I started with an idea for new earring cards. Somebody mentioned that they used business cards for their earring displays, so that got the creative juices flowing, and this is what I came up with:

I make both long and short earrings, so I used business card dimensions for one earring card size, and for the longer cards I created a design that would give me 2 earring cards printed on a single post card. Vista Print, where I usually print my business cards, was running a special on postcards, so I uploaded my postcard/earring card design. Whey the new cards arrived, I cut them apart and glued them on some plain black plastic hanging earring cards I bought when I first started this jewelry making madness. I did notice that the biz card size cards came back more purple than I intended, so I need to double check my color balance in that Photoshop file for future printings. They’ll still work, although they’re not the blue shade I really wanted.

I’m still experimenting with the walls for the new booth design, but since the earring cards have ivy leaves on them, I decided to go with an ivy leaf stencil on unbleached linen. We have lots of great linen scraps from when my husband built stretchers for an artist, so I figured why not find a way to use them? I’ll post pictures of the new stenciled linen wall panels as soon as they’re finished! The final result should look a lot cleaner than what is in the picture–I hope. That’s the plan, anyway.

In the meantime, the next project is repainting my tabletop display risers. I think it will all come together in the end.