Celebrating March!

Happy Sunday!

It’s that time for my monthly review where I reflect on the past month, celebrate my wins, and make a plan for the upcoming month. Let’s jump right in—

March Goals & What I Accomplished

1. Add another 200 designs to my Spoonflower shop, following my new workflow.

Done! I’ve been loving my new process. It’s allowing me to work with my creative ebbs and flows and giving me more space to focus on other things in the business.

2. Enter any new Spoonflower design challenges.

Two new challenges this month, “Heritage Revival” and “Bold Florals”. Here were my entries—

I’m always down for making florals, so these were pretty aligned themes for me.

3. Write and send a newsletter issue each week.

Still going strong!

4. Start researching and planning for an upcoming “super secret” project.

I completed this, and it won’t be secret for much longer! I’ll be sharing more with you next week.

Other Things Worth Celebrating

I’ve been creating more just for fun

I had the recent realization that almost everything I make has been for work, and I was craving some time where I could make “bad art” that no one gets to see and I can just throw away.

I’ve also picked up some new creative hobbies—sewing and carving / block printing rubber stamps. I’m quite bad at both right now, but I don’t care because they’re just for me.

I have a drawer filled with rubber and fabric scraps all over my house and just seeing them there and knowing no one else has to know about it fills my soul with joy. ☺️

I picked up tennis just for fun

You maybe didn’t know this because I rarely talk about it, but I’m completely obsessed with tennis. I watch it all the time. I recently cancelled my cable and all I have is a subscription to the tennis channel now because that’s all I watched!

My husband and I got sick of just watching and decided to go out and buy some rackets and play around on the weekends.

Again, I’m so bad, but I don’t care. I’m very much in the season of embracing being bad at stuff and loving it!

The Numbers

Because March marks the end of the first quarter of the year, I’m going to share my numbers for the whole quarter. I’ve found in business it helps to zoom out and review longer chunks of time since growth very rarely happens linearly.

Spoonflower Sales

In the first quarter of this year I made 42 sales and earned $47.11 in commissions through Spoonflower. Comparing this to Q1 of last year, where I made 9 sales and earned $31.41 in commissions.

I have a few insights I’m taking away from this. First, I’m happy about the growth. Growth isn’t guaranteed, so I will always take that as a win.

However, I can’t help but notice how inconsistent and unpredictable the results are. My sales volume has more than quadrupled (which is incredible!) but my earned income doesn’t reflect that growth because of the inconsistency in the types of products that are sold and how I earn commissions through those.

I love being able to serve the people I do on Spoonflower, but it has really highlighted to me how little control I have over my own income. I’d like to take more ownership over my own shop and sales and also take home more of the profits from each sale, otherwise I won’t be able to keep this dream going!

This is the main driver for the “super secret” project I’ve been working on, and I’m excited to share more about it with you next week!

Email List Growth

This quarter, I welcomed 9 of you into this tiny little community, and I’m so happy to have you here. I don’t really have any business goals or growth intentions for this newsletter. It’s just a place to share what I’m working on with people who care and are maybe on a similar path. So I’m happy to have each and every one of you and humbled that you’re wanting to be here.

My Goals for March

Add another 200 designs to my Spoonflower shop.
Write and send a newsletter issue each week.
Launch the new project! Again, you’ll know all about it next week.

That’s it for the review! April is always a busy month of travel for me. I’ll be on the west coast for for a couple of weeks and then in Key West, Florida for a friend’s wedding at the end of the month. But I’ll still be carving out time to share what’s going on with me, so I’ll talk to you next week!

~Rachel

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