Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Krista Flamm. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Krista, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?
Yes my husband and I have been able to earn a full time living off of my creative work for over 10 years now. I started creating pillows and wall decor as a supplimental hobby after my husband was diagnoised with a progessive blindness that led to him losing his career. I never intended it to be a full-time job or living.
The hardest part of a business is just starting one, there is so much to learn about and keep up on when running your own business that it can be very overwhelming and cause most to give up or never even start.
Our sales were inconsistent for the first 8 months of business, but during that time I learned to network and learned all about my market. I followed trends very closely but always put my own touch or twist on those trends in order to stand out. My advice is to take a trend from anywhere such as clothing industry or decor industry and make it better with your own touch. Keep your mind open and you will find inpiration from the most unexpected places. For instance, I designed a pillow after being inspired by a cute tote bag I found. One of those pillows was purchased by a celebrity in 2011 and she loved that pillow so much that she featured my pillow in People Magazine. That was a huge break for us and led to us being able to hire a crew and push our business to the next level. We’ve been featured in a few magazines and those features were always far better than any advertising ever has been over the years.
All businesses have their ups and downs and my business has been no different, don’t get discouraged with the downs, that is where you learn the most and will grow the most. Look at the slow times as an opportunity to revamp and work out the kinks in your business to make everything run stronger and more effiecently. There is nothing wrong with letting yourself take a break and breather every now and then.
The most important advice I would give any artisit or creator is to not give up, keep at it, but make sure you love what you do, when you fall out of love with your creative work, so do your clients. Keep evolving your business to be what you love and you will be successful.
Krista, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am a mother of six children and my husband is legally blind. I’ve always been very creative and when my husband was diagnoised with his blindness I started creating and selling cute items for children, I just wanted to be able to stay home with my kids. I actually started by making bug and animal character pillows with large crossed eyes, and our business name was BedBuggs Boutique on Etsy. I found myself as a top seller in the baby nursery catergory on Etsy very quickly. I was also making floral headbands and selling them as well but decided to enlarge my flowers and attach them to a decorative pillow and then later to canvases to be hung on the wall and those flower decor items really took off. As we grew out of the animals and bug pillows we renamed the business to Daisy Manor and our nitche is no longer just Baby Nursery or little girls room, we have expanded to all age home decor.
I like unique things, and home decor is pretty generic. Most wall decor is flat and 2 demensional and of a hard or shiny surface which has more of a masculine feel. We add pillows and curtains to our rooms to create a softer, cozier, more inviting flow to a space but we all have spaces that need softening that we can’t use pillows or curtains and that is where our floral wall art comes in. Flowers soften up a space and give it a more natural inviting feel. Pictures do not do these flowers justice, they are very stunning in person and they instantly grab attention so they are the perfect center piece for anyroom.
We offer several different floral designs, in over 50 colors and many different sizes and styles, so our customers can customize their floral decor to work with their existing decor. Nothing is more frustrating than being restricted to the same generic decor found in big box stores and Daisy Manor elliminates that problem. All our pieces are handmade to your specifications, so everything is made just for the customer not pulled off a shelf and sent to you. With our products you don’t need to worry about walking into a home with the same decor as you.
While our flowers look similar to large paper flowers you may find in a craft store, as beautiful as paper flowers are they are very fragile, tend to fade and they can’t be in humid enviroments. We use very high quality wool felts, not to be confused with the cheap craft felts found in craft stores. Wool felts do not peel, they have a very petal-like appearance and it is a material that is made to last for decades. Our flowers help dampen sound, which is very nice in a baby nursery or a room with hardwood floors, or even sound studios (we have clients who have lined their sound studio walls with our flowers). Wool felts also are humidity resistant, so yes you can hang our flowers in bathrooms (as long as they don’t get directly wet, and are allowed to dry out). Also wool felt is resistant to dust, our flowers don’t collect dust. Our flowers are handsewn and designed to be reposable, so should your flower get smooshed no worries you can simply repose each petal to your liking, which is very theraputic. Also these flowers are very easily spot washed with a damp cloth and mild soap.
The best part of my business is being able to work with different clients all over the world. I enjoy working with designers just as much as any one working on a vision for their own home. My clients always have the best ideas, and many of our top selling peices were inspired by the clients that I have had the honor of working with. I love being able to work one on one with people through a project and being able to have my peices included in their beautiful homes. I hope that my pieces inspire everyone who sees my work to be beautifully unique!
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being a creative to me is being able to stay home with my kids and being able to work with them. My kids are all far more creative than I am, and they all are very hard workers. There is also nothing more satisfying than puting my heart and soul into each peice for my clients and their reactions when they get their peices. I love knowing that I made someone’s day and that my piece is being proudly displayed in their homes or businesses.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
The biggest mistake I ever made in my business was being too dependant on a single platform. Etsy was where we started our business and made hit our first million dollar mark. Etsy helped build a career for myself, my blind husband and many amazing women in our small community. I loved the community when I started on Etsy, everyone was very positive and uplifting to each other. And Etsy is definately where I learned the most about marketing and business in general. However, as our business grew so quickly, I never took the time I should have to build my own website. I should have spent all my advertising money driving traffic to my own webpage not to Etsy. We never had an issue with Etsy until we grew into a larger business. While I’ve had my own webpage for about 8 years, I never gave it the same attention that I gave to my Etsy store, and I thought Etsy would always be there for me. The biggest problem with Etsy was the constant changes on the platform and the larger the platform got the more problems we had. Etsy fees kept climbing and the algorithms and glitches became a daily pain and our growing business was too dependant on the unrelyable platform. Etsy admin started randomly to micro manage us because we were such a large seller, there was even once in our busy season when they put our shop in vacation mode (which severely hurts your rankings in Google), even though we were still within our listed creation time. Despite having nearly 30,000 sales and over 5,500 5 star reviews and no violations to Etsy Policy, in February 2020 Etsy shut our shop down without warning and refused to explain why. They shut off our funds, and even refunded several orders that had already been shipped. They also kept using our product images across the internet to bring traffic to Etsy, despite our products no longer being there. After two weeks of being hung up on by Etsy Staff and no response to emails we took the issue to social media and one Etsy Director finally reached out and told us we had to formally apologize to them in order to be reinstated, they never explained why our shop was shut down in the first place, so imagine our confusion that we were required to apologize to them. After taking the issue to an attorney it appears that it is common practice that once a seller becomes too large on a platform they become a liability and large platforms have a long history of randomly closing larger shops down all the time. I had no idea about this and never thought Etsy would do that to us. Had I been building up my website and driving traffic there I would have never had to go through the nightmare of rebuilding my business during the pandemic. Long story short, don’t ever put your trust in any single platform beyond your own website, they are very easy and useful tools to build your busness but they are not your business, and those platforms do not care about any business as much as they care about themselves. Take my advice and focus on your own website where you have full control, don’t give that much power over your business to a single platform.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.daisymanor.com
- Instagram: @daisymanor
- Facebook: Daisy Manor