Dawg Prints 👩🎨🐾
In the world of marketing, we often tune into this sixth sense of detecting what’s up and coming; the next hottest trend. In late May of 2023, I started noticing a lot of momentum surrounding TikToks of “DIY Mollie Mae-inspired“ canvases. I actually fell in love with this style, so I took a leap of faith and spent a small fortune on all of the supplies needed to create my own: a ton of paints, endless tools, wooden letters, spackle, canvases, etc. Rather than recreating the original monochromatic white style, I decided to put my own twist on them by making them multi-colored, fun, and school-inspired. I turned my sister’s old bedroom into a full-on artistic assembly line and spent days making different pieces, even taking two commission requests from friends. But once I finally had a collection to post for sale, I could not get a single fish to bite. I had already set the profit margin somewhat small to see what attention it would initially get – but I got nothing. I incrementally lowered the price and quickly found myself underwater in profit. Long story short, I ended up keeping some to decorate my current home and sold the rest via Facebook marketplace sparingly over the last year. Though I knew this wasn’t going to be a full-time side hustle considering I didn’t have the space in my college town, I was sad it didn’t remotely last for the whole summer. 20% of small businesses fail within the first two years and this one hardly lasted me a few weeks. Trial and error is always quite the learning curve, so I’m not too upset that I tried and failed in this case! 📉
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