We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Delaney Wilson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Delaney below.
Alright, Delaney thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
My business, Topophilia Co, was inspired by my love nature and the desire to create something that is influenced by the places I visit. I stumbled across the term topophilia one day while reading a nature book and fell in love with the meaning and thought it was the perfect way to described my art. Topophilia is defined as “the love of or emotional connections with place or physical environment” (Collinsdictionary.com). The perfect way to describe the feeling with each place I travel; a strong connection and beautiful memories that I transform into art and stickers.
My art is directly inspired by my travels and childhood home:
It all started when I was young. I was born and raised in Satellite Beach, Florida which is located on a barrier island where we were surrounded by two bodies of water. The Atlantic Ocean is to the East and the Indian River Lagoon is to the West. Exploring these two ecosystems throughout my childhood inspired my love of nature and exploration. We would walk up to the beach in the summer nights to watch the sea turtle lay eggs, see the manatees crowding the canals to escape the cold in the winters, or see dolphins playing and the pelicans flying above all year long. Spending most of my life (22 years) on the Florida Coast have inspired my tropical and marine life stickers.
Once I graduated college with a BA in Geology, my partner/photographer Austin and I decided to move to Vail, Colorado for a couple years. It was the perfect central point to travel the Midwest while trying out some new sports like snowboarding. There we ended up buying an old van that we converted into a camper for weekend getaways. This made it more affordable to travel to places like the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming to the deserts of Arizona and Utah to the rolling hills in South Dakota and Nebraska. The Midwest is beautiful! I fell in love with the mountains and the abundance of wildlife we found there. I have created several stickers that were inspired by my time there; for example, my moose, bears, mountain and cactus stickers.
After exploring the Midwest, we decided to continue west to explore the West Coast. We decided on Eugene, Oregon as our central exploration hub and couldn’t have made a better choice. We’re an hour from the coast were we see coastal cliffs and tide pools, or a couple hours from the mountains where we can go hiking. We can even travel north to Washington or South to California. These areas have inspired my whale and flower stickers.
Everywhere I go I get inspired to create new stickers to share with others.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
About the Brand:
Topophilia Co is a nature inspired vinyl sticker shop on Etsy. The shop is a great place to get nature inspired stickers with themes of hiking, traveling, wildlife, quotes and even puns! During the pandemic, I was stuck at home and I used a lot of this time drawing images of wildlife or places I visited on my iPad. After a few months of creating and entertaining the idea of starting a shop, I finally decided to order a Cricut Machine and setup an Etsy page to sell my designs. I came across the term Topophilia while reading a nature book and fell in love with the meaning. “Topophilia: the love of or emotional connections with place or physical environment (Collindictonary.com).” With a few weeks of prep and trial and error, Topophilia Co was born! I love creating ways to spread messages of sustainability and conservation with a product that can be put almost anywhere!
About the Owner:
My name is Delaney Wilson and I am the owner and artist behind Topophilia Co on Etsy. I have always had a love for being outside in nature and learning about the natural world. I love to travel and see our beautiful country; in fact, my partner and I have a goal to visit all of the United States National Parks. This goal has us exploring all over the country seeing the beautiful scenery and wildlife that inspires my artwork. When I’m not creating or traveling I am a full time Early Childhood Educator sharing my love for nature with the younger generations.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
I knew my business partner and photographer, Austin Gladfelter, for almost a decade before Topophilia Co became a reality. Austin and I first met from mutual friends as freshman in high school. We hit it off and have been dating ever since. Austin and I both grew up in Satellite Beach, Florida and shared the same love for the ocean, travel, and wildlife. When I moved to South Florida for college, Austin moved down with me and became a photographer for a local business who cleaned trash from the oceans. This opportunity allowed him to expand his photography skills and become the professional product and landscape photographer he is today. After graduation, we decided to start traveling. We packed up and moved to Colorado and then Oregon. These new places inspired both his photography and my art. Austin’s support for my hobby made it possible to start Topophilia Co. Austin also took all the product photos and some of the landscape photos you see on my Etsy and social media page. I am extremely thankful to have such a talented and supportive partner in business and life.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Social media can be such a great tool for small businesses, but it can also be very overwhelming and even frustrating. In the beginning, my sales were only coming from Etsy searches and not from my link on my Instagram page. I was hoping to bring more store exposure from Instagram, so I decided to try a few different strategies to help build an audience that would lead to more visits to my Etsy page.
When I started my page, I was posting daily. I would include fun facts and as many tags as I could on each post. Creating posts everyday became very overwhelming, so I decided to try out the app “Preview” to help me schedule and plan out future posts so they were ready to go when I needed them. It really made posting much easier. I was able to plan out weeks of posts and also preview the layout of my page. Once I had a few weeks planned out, posting regularly became much easier. I was able to focus my time on other parts of the business.
A couple weeks went by and I was slowly getting more and more page interactions, so I decided to try something new to try to help boost followers. This is when started to search similar pages and businesses that shared my same eco friendly message and following as many people as I could from their page. I would follow the max I could each day and hope for follow backs. This method was extremely time consuming and didn’t produce the results I was looking for. I was getting a couple views a week on Etsy from Instagram, but it didn’t lead to any additional sales.
After a few more weeks, I decided to start holding giveaways. I started off doing holiday giveaways which were slower at first, but built up my following. After I had more participation, I started having giveaways for when I would reach a certain amount of followers, then I moved to bi-weekly giveaways. Production costs for my stickers are low, so it wasn’t a huge loss to give a few free stickers each month. This was definitely the quickest way I built up a following. I would give participants who did not win a coupon code as well. I received more sales from the giveaways than anything else.
Once I had a good page interaction, I would also post on my Instagram story with surveys on new sticker ideas that people would enjoy. It was a great way to get my following involved and get some inspiration! I would choose a couple of the ideas and create stickers based on what they requested. This was a great way to make extra sales based on what customers wanted.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TopophiliaCo
- Instagram: topophilia_co
Image Credits
Austin Gladfelter