Branding

As an Etsy seller, one of the many things you need to deal with is branding.  In my opinion, after having a desirable product and excellent photos, branding is what sets shops apart.   I know that as a consumer, I appreciate and take notice of consistency of brand and a good brand can become instantly recognizable.  Like many Etsy sellers, I don’t have a marketing background.  As a result I simply channeled the consumer in me which helped me think about what I notice when buying a product.

Branding starts as early as picking your Etsy username.  In my case I spent a long time thinking of names which drew upon what inspired me to be creative.  The name  “californiablue” just felt right.  I liked the sound of it, and I liked the fact that it was all one word, all lower case.  I sensed from the beginning that with this name I could possibly build a brand reflective of my inspiration and sensibility.

For me the next step was to create a logo for my packaging.  I found myself using  watercolors then pastels to create a fictional yet familiar California landscape.  I then decided to stylize my watercolor/pastel with Photoshop.  I am definitely an amateur when it comes to Photoshop, but I was able to play around with the filters feature and achieve a softer more stylized appearance.  Next came choosing a font.  I wanted the font on my Etsy banner, blog and packaging to be consistent.  I had no idea how many fonts were out there!  Dafonts.com was a great resource, and ultimately I selected a font called Powell Antique which was free :).  My finalized logo appears on my boxes and my earring cards.

Even though I’ve been happy with my original logo I have felt that it was visually distracting when put alongside my products.  As a result, I have been reworking my logo and feel that I’m getting closer to a simpler and better design.  I’ve even played around with the spacing of the text in “californiablue”.  The final image above is a draft of my new earring card.   This card would be printed on a nice textured beige paper which will coordinate with boxes of a similar color that I purchased from Rio Grande.

I think the lesson I’ve learned is that branding is a work in progress, and it’s ok to modify and streamline it as you go along.  Just as the style of your products evolves, I believe your branding needs to evolve as well.  I certainly didn’t think when I opened my Etsy shop that branding was something I would need to be concerned with, but these days with so many talented Etsy sellers, I think branding can help set you apart.