We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gerri Pizzini a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Gerri, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How do you feel about asking friends and family to support your business? What’s appropriate, what’s not? Where do you draw the line?
Hmmmm… asking friends or family to support your business is an interesting topic! In general I pretty much just don’t ask… it’s a tricky thing and what I’ve learned is sometimes my “expectations” simply don’t turn out. Lol. I’m an abundance thinker and part of my nature is to lift others up and share everything I’ve learned and know to help other artists/businesses get started… I have a handful of folks who reciprocate and hundreds of customers who share my info and promote my business, yet… I also see people that are only single focused on their business and are more of a scarcity mentality and expect help or information but no reciprocating ( yup… back to those silly expectations I occasionally have ) Hee Hee. What I have learned is my success is based on sharing and helping others and reminding myself to have zero expectations of others… and when folks help or support our business the gratitude I have is compounded even more! I show support to small businesses as much as possible from purchasing from them and sharing/engaging on their social medias etc. I feel great helping others, and yes… of course giving away free product to friends and family too ( that would be another article ;) … All in all my summary is just be comfortable with friends and family and think/behave in each situation with good intent and no expectations:) Love your friends and family and run your business :).
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My business story is a fun one! I’ve always been an artist and creative thinker, as well as have worked in sales based jobs my entire life. Combining sales and my creative side has developed naturally over the years…Throughout early college days I designed art on shirts ( sold at spring breaks!)… had a cartooning gig with LA Times, and designed cartoons for an advertising agency ( Paradise Promotions)…even did door to door sales ( yikes:) thru all that I remained self employed and continued evolving! I’ve landed on what I love 30+ years ago… designing jewelry and mixed media art and selling mostly at higher end art fairs and street festivals/music venues…. My goals have always been to create things I love hoping my customers love as well :). I now make amazing gemstone and vintage glass jewelry as well as custom paintings/mixed medias and enjoy promoting live and and on social media!
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Oh goodness… my resilience? How much time ya got? Lol. I think my entire self employed career should be hash-tagged #Resilience ha ha… Where do I begin? Well my main business is outdoors at art festivals and weather is huge factor. I’ve been in tornados, storms, wind, snow, ice, bad shows, worked with awful promoters, had horrid locations, driven thousands of miles for nothing, and of course created/sold items no one wanted ;)… a story from my journey: We set up a show on a beautiful weekend and gorgeous venue in Minneapolis a few years ago and this has always been great money for us. This particular year I got a call at my hotel around midnight stating my booth was destroyed by a “wind shear” and all my jewelry was gone. What? I was nauseous and raced back to the show. My tent was destroyed. Legs cut in half by the wind. Some jewelry left swirling around a drain and my displays scattered everywhere! Hard to not just sit on the gravel and cry, but with the help of many bystanders in the area we all cleaned up and gathered as much as we could find! The best part is my son drove two hours in the middle of the night and brought new tent with and we stayed up all night detangling jewelry and reset up the next day ( and I wish I could say this was an isolated incident, but I’ve been thru this many times ;)…. Resilience keeps us on our toes and moving forward !!!!!
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
I’m old lol…. And I’ve only been on social media for around 8 years… in that time I’ve collected around 10,000 organic followers on the different pages etc and have learned on my own how to promote my shows and engage with my customers… that being said, I floundered a lot! I played the games of spending money to “promote” a post ( worthless in my opinion) and realized it’s about fun and engagement!!!!! My best marketing was giveaways in a fun way… I would talk about my upcoming show and let people know to come and shop and say hello and receive a free item with purchase! My best example: At a holiday show in Nebraska years ago I did a social media blast saying: come by my booth and say Merry Christmas to us and you get a free Santa bracelet! I had 232 people do just that! And my sales that year were up at that show over 25%. The Santa bracelets were just a dollar each worth of beads and that was the best advertising and cost I could have hoped for!
Contact Info:
- Website: GerriPizzini.com
- Instagram: GerriPizzJewelry
- Facebook: JewelryByGP (GerriPizzinisJewelry)
- Other: Email me: GerriPizzjewelry@gmail.com