We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Deaney Bautista. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Deaney below.
Deaney, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Covid has brought about so many changes – has your business model changed?
Covid-19 made me do a 360 on the products I offer and how I did my business. You see, I started my business Deaney Weaney Blooms offering digital templates fellow crafters can use with their cutting machines such as Cricut and Cameo Silhouette. For the first couple of years, I just designed and created digital products. It was a source of passive income and ran well with my full-time job at the time. When the pandemic hit, I lost my full-time job and became stuck at home for several months with my newborn baby.
By the end of 2020, I was able to make and set up a paper flower wall/ backdrop for a wedding. After several months of being isolated from the world, to be able to talk and interact with somebody other than my husband and my baby was like a breath of fresh air. And so at the start of 2021, I decided to offer flower backdrops and make steps to enter the wedding market and industry in North Carolina, where we were based at the time. I signed up for the Knot and the Weddingwire, participated in and sponsored a bridal show and I also started to join Styled shoots organized by people in the NC wedding industry. I was really ready to network and rock it that year until my husband surprised me that he got a job offer of a lifetime and we were to move to Rochester, New York.
After our big move, I let myself heal from the frustration and hurt brought about by the sudden move and what seemed to be wasted money and effort. The strangeness and the newness combined with the restrictions from Covid only made me more motivated to connect with people. I was fortunate enough that the city we moved into, Rochester, New York had a thriving creative and small business community. Networking here was much more organic than where we were previously.
So for myself and my business, 2020 became the year of restrictions and change of directions, 2021 was a year of coping and healing, and 2022 was the year when I bloomed where I was planted. I was able to put up flower walls for more than 10 events, I was able to design and make a display for a retail store, I was able to join numerous markets, and I was also able to teach in person and by the end of the year, my revenue grew by 200%.
And so, I find it amusing that when Covid hit, a lot of businesses changed their models to selling online, on the other hand, because of my need to connect, I changed how I did my business.
Deaney, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My first name is Deane (Dean) but my artist/ creative persona is Deaney. I am the designer, artist, and founder of Deaney Weaney Blooms, a paper flower studio based in Rochester New York offering beautiful handmade home decor, backdrops, bouquets, potted blooms, bookmarks, and earrings (a small portion of the products). You can check and find them at dwblooms.com
The main material for Deaney Weaney Bloom’s products is cardstock, however acrylic plastic and wood are also used for some items for durability. I design the templates for each paper flower, cut them from flat sheets of paper, and assemble them by hand. I also do offer digital templates that crafters and makers can use with their cutting machines and create themselves. You can check these out at dwblooms.com/workshops
I started making paper flowers almost 6 years ago when I was about to get married. I saw this beautiful bouquet made of book paper created by a fellow artist. Given my background in design, one of my first thoughts after “Oh, that’s pretty!” was “I can make that!”. After creating the paper flowers for my own wedding, I was able to make my own templates and I started sharing my creations in Facebook groups. That’s when I realized I can sell the templates, and so for the first 3 years of Deaney Weaney Blooms, digital templates were my main products.
For the next 3 years, as I have described previously, I have dabbled in large paper flower wall rentals, I joined artisan markets for which I sell decor and even earrings (dwblooms.com/earrings). I can say 2022 was when I really thrived. Somehow, I feel I was able to plant myself where I am. Aside from the things I mentioned previously about being able to provide flower walls to events, teach in person, etc, I was featured in 2 podcasts, a newspaper (Democrat and Chronicle), and a magazine (585 Magazine).
And my favorite excerpt from that magazine article is “To speak to Bautista about herself and her business is to discover she is more akin to a bear or a panther. She takes every single opportunity and sinks her claws into it to pull herself up further.” “If you give her an inch, she will grab and pull to give her a mile”
And so having mentioned this, the thing I am really proud of was how I was able to bounce back from the hump of moving from a place I was already comfortable in, to a new one that I was initially uncertain of.
For 2023, one of my projects is to create a series of videos detailing how I manage and create my paper flower walls. I share them on my Youtube channel, youtube.com/deaneyweaneyblooms. 2022 really rocked for me, and even if I enjoy networking and connecting to people, the things I did last year were physically exhausting. And so for 2023, I want to take the time to tell the stories, the lessons, the steps, and the process I made for myself so that others hopefully will learn from them.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I started my Instagram account in 2016 even before I established Deaney Weaney Blooms. It was the avenue where I share the first few pieces of paper flowers for my own wedding. I remember being in awe and envious of accounts that had a thousand even ten thousand followers. I remember I hit my first thousand followers after a big account, Cricut, shared my work. After that, I just continuously shared my work, probably 2 years in I had a video post go viral that lead me to gain 10,000 followers. It felt like an achievement, especially at the time, but honestly, doing it regularly was just tiring. I remember, the next year, I paused for a couple of months, and I did lose followers and it also just felt like it was so hard to gain traction and build up followers again from there. But I just continued on until by the spring of 2022, I finally gained 20,000 followers by just continuing to post regularly, though, at that point, 10,000 to 20,000 felt like a crawl. Then by the summer of the same year, a reel of mine, assembling a blue paper dahlia went viral and from 20,000 followers by the end of June, the account grew by almost 100,000 by the end of July. As I type, I currently have 146k followers on my Instagram account.
But let me tell you about the reality of going viral because this rang true to me, and even some Instagram gurus or experts also highlight this, the follower count doesn’t always equal sales coz, not all who follow you are your target market. So let me reiterate that having thousands of followers is not the answer to everything.
But do not get me wrong, there are also a lot of lessons I gained from this social media journey:
• What content does my audience like. And so I made more of those.
• What my audience frequently asks- the never-ending “What paper do you use”, at first it irritated me to still even get it after I have posted a number of times what paper I use but then from this I made and am about to make a series of paper reviews where I share the types of paper I normally use. So it’s educational for them at the same time, for me, I gain views on my Youtube channel and also hopefully earn from the affiliate links I placed.
Building my presence on social media also gets me to connect to people locally, which really is important to me. Sometimes it honestly feels awkward that I feel I already know a person so well even though I just met them a few times just because I have watched their stories. But then again, it’s fun and social media is a great way of showing you’re a real person who is undergoing the struggles just like everybody is.
I also was able to build an audience on Pinterest and recently on Tiktok. Youtube has always been a struggle for me but hopefully, I get there. With Youtube I am now being more intentional and consistent with my content, that’s the big difference I am making. But the bottom line is, Social media just feels like this big behemoth to tackle. But it’s not impossible to deal with but can really be exhausting. So my advice to someone who’s just beginning to grow their audience is, it pays to be consistent but don’t be hard on yourself when you don’t and can’t. Pause if you must, but don’t quit.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Our move from North Carolina to Rochester will always be a red highlight of my journey— it was a bump, even a dark phase. But I am pretty proud to say, I was able to move past that, it wasn’t easy and I also was not alone. I got inspiration and strength from others. You see, when my husband told me we are going to move by March, I had events already booked for May and September. I was a bride myself and I HATE vendors canceling on me. And so the compromise I asked was I stay in our NC home for an additional 6 weeks just for me to be able to fulfill my 2 May weddings and I just decided that for my September wedding, I will just be traveling a thousand miles (2 way). And so I stayed back in NC alone, my 18-month-old daughter at the time stayed at my inlaws in Indiana.
By this time I was ready to drop the paper flower walls, and probably just pursue a normal and typical job in Rochester. But I had these beautifully styled photos from the styled shoot I participated in back in March of that year. Now, one of the amazing things I discovered when I was trying to venture into the NC wedding industry was the power of local Facebook groups. I honestly had more leads when I posted in an NC wedding FB group than I had from the Knot and the Weddingwire. And so one evening, out of the blue, I just looked for an FB wedding group, which thankfully there is, and posted and introduced myself there saying I’m coming to Rochester by the summer. And from that single post alone, I was able to book my first wedding rental in Rochester and was able to meet this amazing lady who honestly gave me hope about starting anew in Rochester.
Then she also was the one who first opened the door for me, the leads she gave me snowballed into little and big opportunities. So I did realize that by by not giving up, you also meet angels that help you along the way.
Contact Info:
- Website: dwblooms.com
- Instagram: @deaneyweaneyblooms
- Facebook: facebook.com/deaneyweaneyblooms
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deane-bautista/
- Twitter: @deaneyweaneyblooms
- Youtube: youtube.com/deaneyweaneyblooms
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/deaney-weaney-blooms-rochester
- Other: https://fans.creativefabrica.com/creators/deaney-weaney-blooms-paper-flowers/
Image Credits
Profile photo and photo of the 2 post backdrop: Mylee Dondiz of Margarita Media (https://margarita-media.com) Paper wings: Tanvi Asher of Peppermint/ Salty Boutique (https://www.instagram.com/she.is.salty/) The rest are taken by myself