Earlier this week, I shipped out my last ever batch of rug looms. It’s taken me the best part of a month to get all these looms sanded and prepped, thanks to a communication error with my manufacturers resulting in a shipment of 120 loom parts that did not fit together. So I’ve spent weeks routering the edges by hand to make them fit, and in the process realised that I need to stop selling these looms for good.
It’s hard though, because I loved being a loom-seller. There was something so romantic about packing up each loom and shipping them to far-flung corners of the world, to Norway and Mexico, California and South Africa. I loved seeing photos of the looms set up in people’s homes, and seeing what they wove on them. Even though these looms were so expensive and time-consuming to produce, and my mantra this year is “stop working for free” it was still hard to let them go.
I think the battle with these rug looms points to a larger struggle that I have, between my creative soul and my business brain. There are so many areas where I logically know I could be more efficient and effective, and yet it seems like my actual personality is dragging me in the opposite direction. I’ll come up with multiple ideas for new products in a single week and then abandon them all. Or else, I’ll launch something simple which then balloons into a much more extravagant project. Even when I do have a deadline and start working more efficiently, I only seem able to do that if I’ve given myself months of creative exploration first.
I know I’m not the only creative business owner who struggles with these things- the clue is in the name! There’s always going to be a tension there between the “creative” and the “business”. I’ve known this for years, and I’ve spent my whole career trying to do better.
But lately, instead of thinking “This is how to run a business, so I should change myself to be better at running a business” I’ve stared to think, “This is what I know about myself. How can I build a business around that?”
What would it look like to make the most of my own working style - slow weeks of exploration interspersed with periods of intense focus? Or to allow myself to develop products organically and intuitively with my audience, instead of always trying to do things “strategically”? Would acknowledging the ebb and flow of how I work change the types of projects I take on, or how I structure my weeks and months?
It’s a brutal environment for businesses right now, and even as I write this I can feel a friction between what I know would be best for myself, and what I think will help the business survive. There’s a sense for me of “I don’t get to choose” because times are tough, and sales are down, so I just need to do whatever it takes. Maybe you feel that way as well, if you run a creative business - like the option to thrive just doesn’t exist, it’s all about survival.
When I sat with this statement, this idea that “I don’t get to choose”, I realised that I’d confronted this in my life, and in my business before.