Through being an early user of Pinterest, Erin has amassed a loyal and wide-ranging customer base. We spoke with her about transitioning from a personal brand to a business, making the leap to full-time self-employment and why she says it's so important to appreciate the present moment.

Name: Erin Dollar

Business: Cotton & Flax

Started: Winter 2011 

How did you create your awesome business? 

I studied printmaking in college and completely fell in love with it. I learned mainly traditional techniques to make fine-art prints on paper and was selling those for a few years on a personal Etsy shop. 

After graduating, I lived in Portland and shared a communal printmaking studio with some friends and got interested in trying out some designs on textiles. I started adding some of these experimental fabrics into my Etsy shop and they sold pretty well.

The response continued to be so good that I decided to branch out and start a new company under a different name specifically for these. I named it Cotton & Flax, which reflects the all-natural materials and nontoxic inks I use.

Who was your very first customer?

I was initially selling more informally to friends before I founded Cotton & Flax. So, by the time I started the company, I already had a customer base that was familiar with my artwork. It was an easy transition to introduce new products and share the new brand name. I had quite a relaxed approach to marketing when I was first starting out because I was living in a creative community of artists and it seemed natural that people would care about my work and want to purchase it.

Today, I generally make most of my sales through my e-commerce site and I advertise products myself by doing interviews on podcasts and blogs. I also run printmaking classes where people can find out about my work. 

I was an early adopter of Pinterest and managed to gain a really large following there. Posting enticing product photos and lifestyle imagery has been a great way of sending people to the shop.

 When did you know your business was going to work?

I just went for it once I started seeing enough sales from my personal Etsy shop that I felt I could sustain myself! 

I put the full force of my energy towards my business because when you're splitting your time between your day job and your passion project, it can hold you back. Pulling the trigger on devoting myself 100% to the business was the moment I knew it would work.

I think I probably did quit my day job a little too early, though! I've never been one to write out a business plan and I started Cotton & Flax pretty fresh out of college when we were in the middle of the economic downturn and the jobs available weren't that enticing. 

What has been the biggest surprise for you so far?

How much there is to keep learning! 

I'm always discovering new things or trying to improve upon them. I thought that by year five I would have it on autopilot and I would be able to focus 100% on creative work, but that's never really true when you're running a business. 

By the time you've figured out how to automate one part of it, something else important seems to crop up!

How do you price your products?

Pricing is super challenging and I've been thinking about it a lot. Moving into wholesale has really helped me in terms of gaining more brand recognition and having people find my products more organically by going into stores and then looking me up online. However, it would have been easier to do this had I initially priced my products with wholesale in mind. 

When I was getting started, I didn't think about marking products up in order to sell at a lower price point to retail stores — I was just thinking of my online consumer. I had to build wholesale margins into my product later as the business was growing in that direction. That meant considering what those margins would be at the wholesale and retail price points and being really thoughtful to build in enough room for me to live, because that's what I'm trying to do here!

What does a typical day look like for you?

It's pretty consistent. I tend to wake up around 7 or 7:30am and then I go to the studio as early as I can as I get work done in the mornings and early afternoons. Around 4:30pm my brain tends to get more distracted. 

I spend eight to nine hours in the studio at least five days a week, then I work from home in the evenings on admin tasks. As I've grown the business I've tried not to get burned out, so I’m careful about how much work I bring home with me. There's always more to do and it's hard to turn away from it.

If you could go back in time, is there anything you would do differently when you were just starting your business?

I was impatient for success when I started, so I wish I had paced myself better and taken the time to stop and celebrate every time I accomplished something amazing.

It can feel really empowering to live in those moments of success and not be itching for the next thing, even if that's the reality of how to keep a business moving. It's important for me to take a minute to appreciate everything I've done.  

What would you like to learn today from a network of other small business owners and self-employed professionals? 

There's so much! 

I suppose what I'm most curious about now is moving the company into licensing designs. Figuring out how to structure that into the business has been really challenging, so I'd love to hear how other people here have gone about licensing their work and how they grew their product-focused business into more of a design brand. 

Stop the press! 

Can *you* help Erin transform her product-focused business into a recognizable design brand? 

QB Community members, if you have experience with licensing your designs or taking your product business to the next level, we want to hear your story!

Share your own experiences with us in the comments below. :-)