Designer Presence Tip

Happy Friday! I have an important designer tip and some store news to share with you.

DESIGNER TIP – ONLINE INFORMATION

This week, I was in the process of contacting a few select designers for a special opportunity. I wanted to communicate directly with the designers instead of going through the owners of the stores where they were selling. I was really surprised to see that for a significant number of these designers, it was really hard to find a way to contact them. For a couple, I could not find ANY way to contact them.

Have you considered how to let people get in touch with you? Because this is a very competitive market, I think it’s important to do as much as you can to develop a strong online presence. That includes letting potential customers and business partners get in touch with quickly and easily. You can lose sales and miss opportunities if people cannot contact you. This is especially important if you are exclusive in one consignment store. The best design income opportunities and relationships I’ve developed after 6 years designing have come by people contacting me through my blog and Facebook page – never by having a store owner forward an email sent through their site’s contact system.  I don’t think you should depend on consignment store websites to provide information about you to customers – you must develop a presence yourself. I encourage you to think about this aspect of your business and develop a plan to build up your online presence.

Some avenues to explore are buying a domain with your designer name, blogging and having a Facebook fan page. On your domain and blog, be sure you put up contact information.

When I was on Blogger, I simply used a yahoo email graphic in my side bar with a link to email me. That cuts down on spiders who collect email addresses and spam you. If you are concerned about your email being published out on the web, get an extra email account just for that purpose and have it forward to your main email. This could be a very important step in increasing your customer relationship, sales and business opportunities.