Maker Marketing: Perfectly Flawed
To make your creative idea by hand and sell it is both an act of triumph and an exercise in futility. Your object is perfectly flawed. This “never quite rightness” is your power. I get it, decades alongside the maker has shown me how difficult it is for you to appreciate the deep value of your imperfect process. But hey, let’s give it a go.
What if we took our product descriptions and attempted to describe the endless stream of errors, adaptations, shifts, and mistakes that happen constantly as you’re making them? Could we create more language around what doesn’t feel right?
Could we do better to describe that it’s worn where you clasped it, rough from where you yanked it, uneven from where you drifted, chunkier from where the other stuff wasn’t available, brighter because you thought of your grandma, or wonkier because you felt like it.
Maybe you’re thinking that to write a product description complete with details of what went wrong, including what you hope to improve next time, is a questionable strategy. And yet I challenge us, is it possible to lean into that just a bit more? Could you practice illuminating all those itty-bitty details that transpired to bring our “thing” to life?
It’s a hunch, but after thousands of days marketing handmade work, your original, sometimes unbalanced vision and effort is exactly what people are looking for. It bears repeating, humanness is in demand, and you’ve got it in spades.
Perhaps this is all self-indulgent reactionary chatter about AI? Maybe. Well, why not take that pendulum for a ride? What happens if we swing that thing back to imperfection? Could we amp up our authenticity and sprinkle a few more oopsies in there?
I’m going to give it a go. My personal challenge for next time is to write a product description for a sculpture full and overflowing with shifting details that may or may not have worked. Here’s a little practice round:
Meet our new fox. It originally looked rather dog-like, so we turned to our daughter for recommendations. She suggested a fuller tail. We also felt the snout needed work. We tried again with a few adjustments, and that helped for sure. With a fox deadline to meet, we painted it and pondered it some more. It seemed to have a rustic, folk-art quality, not quite achieving a polished, sophisticated foxy look… but content it remains. We might say just right, and at the same time not quite right. [We will definitely wait to hear what the fox says. Ha!]
Meet me back here in a month, and you can be the judge of how perfectly flawed we can claim to be. I can tell you that our full-time art business has worked for twenty years in spite of ourselves. See you soon!
