Setting Goals and Making Updates
It’s late autumn now and how the time flies. This year has been a whirlwind of changes, projects, and shifting goals. When I started Bird Brain Leatherworks at the start of this year, my goal was to hone my craft, make a name for myself in the various furry, queer, and kink communities of the PNW, and to make enough money to help cover my expenses while I looked for more permanent work.
So much has happened in 11 months that it would be tiring to share it all, but the good news is, I’ve made some decent progress on all three of these goals. Thanks to the orders I’ve received in the past year, I’ve been able to hone my craft and really develop my process regarding leathercraft. I’ve made some headway in becoming known in various communities out here, not as much as I’d like, but I’m going to keep working and I hope you all will keep spreading the word about my work! Finally, I now have a stable job and a reliable income.
Alongside this progress, however, new challenges have come as well. I’ve had to move for work, again and while I’m still in the PNW, I’m no longer based in Seattle like I initially hoped. It also means I’m having to once again find communities to connect with and build my name and reputation in positive ways. The largest challenge however is that the stable job and reliable income simply isn’t enough to survive on, and the move strained my meager savings more than I hoped it would. This means that I’m working two jobs whenever I can on top of the work I’m doing for the leatherworks.
So, I’m resetting my goals a bit, and with them, announcing some recent changes to how I do things.
The First Goal: Creating New Things
The first of these new goals is that I want to continue honing my craft in new ways. What started with my secret cuffs and a few collars has allowed me to expand to a variety of fun products, ideas, and custom leather pieces. I want to keep doing more where I can. I’m hoping to introduce new designs and more variety to the projects and store items I produce. As I get more proficient in leather tooling, stitching, laser engraving, and airbrushing, I want to be able to do more work using these skills to make projects shine.
To this end, I’m hoping to introduce new items over the next year or so as I develop them and get comfortable with their construction process. This includes more distinctive custom pieces, expanding my cosplay and wearable goods catalogue, and developing new ideas as they come along while still maintaining things like my collars and cuffs that have become a staple of my work. Expect new shop items to trickle in as I can develop them.
The Second Goal: Finding The Niche
My second goal for this upcoming year is to improve my communication with customers and establish community within the work I do while continuing to connect to communities around the PNW. I’m a shy, introverted bird by nature so selling my skills, connecting with communities, or building one around my leatherwork is a daunting challenge, but it’s one I want to put effort into
Communication, especially with commissions and customers on the other hand, is something I can put immediate and direct effort into, and I am inspired to do better after seeing how some other artists are organizing and communicating with their customers. I try to do my best to respond to emails and messages in a timely manner but with the move and new job, I have admittedly gotten slower. Paired with the influx of bulk orders I’ve gotten, and I’ve noticed that I’ve been both working slower and have been slower to respond to messages than I would like.
While there’s not much I can do about my working speed (working two other jobs just means I have less time in general to craft) I can be better at providing updates! The first step I’m taking is going to be updating my website to more accurately reflect turnaround times of 3-4 weeks that is more accurate for most orders and 5-6 weeks for bulk or exceptionally custom orders.
The next thing I’m doing is taking a page from Sleepy Stag Suits (A lovely fursuit maker with some exceptional organization and client communication practices, please check them out!) and adding a Public Trello for my WIPs to better showcase where I am at in various commissions and custom projects. This Trello is live and can be found here. It should be straightforward, but I can also create a writeup for this blog at some point to better show how it all works. I’m hoping this will help me continue to be transparent with my customers and better highlight the work that is going on for potential customers as well!
I am going to be working to create a telegram channel or discord to highlight my WIPs, finished designs and discuss upcoming ideas or inspiration for store items as they happen. I’m also hoping to be a bit more consistent at posting on social media to highlight my work. This is still very much a work in progress, but I hope to launch it before the new year.
Finally, I had the amazing opportunity to sell my wares in person two times at various swap meets and events this past year and I am really hoping to do that again and more often as my work schedule allows! Keep an eye out for my booth which might pop up at events occasionally in the Portland area or back up in the Seattle area. Oh! And if you know any events or places, I might be able to set up a booth in either of these general areas, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
The Third Goal: Crafting a Business
The third goal is changing a bit from last January. Originally, I set out to sell my leather goods to supplement income while looking for more stable work. This had a side effect I didn’t anticipate. I fell in love with doing it. Leatherwork is something I am passionate about and deeply enjoy doing, so much so that I realized I would enjoy doing this full time someday. I honestly never expected to enjoy the process as much as I did this past year. So, I want to try to make it a reality.
This has its own set of challenges, mostly regarding finances and available time. I’m a therian furry trans woman living in the Pacific Northwest, I don’t have access to the money needed to turn this into a business overnight, I barely manage to put food on the table right now with the two jobs I do have. At current, the leatherwork mostly pays for leather material expenses, overhead, and occasionally some of my time. If I want to make this a significant business and a livelihood, then that needs to change.
The first thing I need to do is adjust my prices. I’ve hesitated to do this for a while, mostly because I lacked the confidence in myself. But friends and partners and the critters in my life have all encouraged me to raise my prices to be more comparable with the quality of work I do and similar shops out there. I’m finally doing this. Part of me still fears I will stop getting orders and I know there is a chance I might, but the truth is, I need to value myself as an artist and value my time and effort if I ever want to make this my career. I’ll still try to make things accessible and affordable where I can, but I need to better account for the work and effort each piece gets.
Alongside updated prices, I am looking at changing how I offer customizable orders, and more unique custom work. Right now, all custom work is closed while I play catch up on orders, but when I reopen them, I will likely be limiting what customizable items are available at any given time and only opening a few custom commission slots to help ensure I don’t get overrun with orders at any one time. This will help keep me working at a more efficient pace which will hopefully mean orders take less time, and I can reopen commissions more often.
In this same vein, I’ll be creating a custom commissions sheet to better showcase what I am offering at any moment and what pricing looks like. Hope to see this created before the new year as well.
That’s it, those are my goals that are driving me right now. I want to make a successful business I can live off, and I know I have a long way to go. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to everyone who has helped me, bought items from me, commissioned me, and supported this shop or told friends about me. You have made this bird’s dream get that much closer to reality.
There are several new items in the shop, all of which are premade and ready to ship! Please consider ordering something or at least checking back soon once my custom orders are available again. Money is extremely tight, and the move ate through every bit of savings I had, so any order of my premade items would be so helpful to ensure this shop stays open and I can keep making fun things out of leather.
Thank you!
Birdy
New Items in the shop