This is the hardest episode I’ve written so far. A completely raw and open look at the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned from being in business for 13 years.

Being made to cry.

So I guess this episode is sort of going to take you on a timeline of my business journey from when Pink Giraffe Photography was first born to where I am now.

It was July 2007 when I launched Pink Giraffe Photography. I had been on a local business course and I was a Princes Trust start up business. Next job was to design and get some business cards printed.

I used a local business who someone recommended to me and had my first crappy business experience.

When I got the cards they were poor quality and there were mistakes on them, even though I had provided proofs of the design.

The guy at the print shop did not appreciate being told he’d made a mistake.

He got quite angry and made me feel small and inexperienced, like I didn’t know what I was doing. I went home and actually cried.

Never again.

I vowed never to cry in business again after that experience.

I was new, I was inexperienced, but I wasn’t in the wrong. I had let him make me believe that I was wrong for questioning him and his product, just because he was older and had been in business longer.

I learned to stand by my opinions and knowledge. I knew I was right, but I let him make me feel like I was stupid. 

I also vowed to never put anyone else in that same position. 

13 years on I now have a lot of experience, but I will never make someone else feel like they are wrong purely because I’ve been in business longer.

Trying to appeal to ‘everyone’.

In business it is very easy to get sucked into the idea that to get more customers you need to appeal to more people. It’s actually the complete opposite.

To get more customers you have to narrow down the demographic of who you are appealing to. 

You need to niche down and thoroughly identify who you are trying to serve.

When I started as a photographer I told my business mentor that I was going to “photograph anyone, but specialise in alternative photography”.

I knew I wanted to work with people who were unique and different. For me they would look so much more interesting on film, so I thought I would just be a regular photographer and do the alternative stuff on the side. 

My mentor said: “don’t be a photographer who does the occasional alternative photoshoot, be THE Alternative Photographer.”

I didn’t get it at first, but he spent some time explaining it to me.

He said that when people are looking for a product or service, they aren’t looking for just anyone who can do the job, they want someone they can identify with. Someone they know will understand what is important to them, someone who will have empathy and know what they need.

By marketing myself as THE Alternative Photographer, I was immediately telling my ideal clients that I was the right photographer for them.

Once I got going with this I had an amazing time and my services were often recommended to others being I was serving such a niche audience. I photographed biker rallies, pagan celebrations, faery festivals, tattoo conventions… it was amazing. 

Being able to adapt to new situations 

So I kept going on this alternative path and led to some incredible experiences. I did have to close my photography business. You know because you are reading this, Pink Giraffe didn’t die with it.

I had two life changing experiences, literally within 24 hours of each other. I found out I was pregnant and then the next day was told I had swelling on the brain. That swelling turned out to be Multiple Sclerosis.

I won’t go into all of that here, but you can imagine that swanning off around the country building my portable photography studio and scrambling around to get the perfect shot, wasn’t really going to be on the cards for me.

Added to that I had to spend 17 weeks on bed rest during my pregnancy because of complications.

I must add he’s fine. He’s almost 11 and all turned out well.

So I spent those weeks in bed working on my laptop and trying to figure out how I was going to continue my business while coping with a baby and being diagnosed with MS.

The biggest lesson I learned was that to survive you have to be able to adapt.

You have to be able to take a new set of circumstances and switch what you are doing around to make it work for you.

So I did. I actually started dyeing baby clothes in rainbow colours and selling them on eBay. Having a boy meant a severely limited range of options in baby clothes. I wasn’t keen on pale pink, blue or lemon and I certainly wasn’t going to dress my son in beige! So bright and funky rainbow clothes it was.

Taking on projects you just don’t love.

This did ok for a few years and even survived our move from Merseyside to Lincolnshire where we live now. The alternative theme continued as I started to make clothes from scratch. I did a lot of design work and got into costume making.

At one point I took on a side business to Pink Giraffe, I called it Pink Giraffe Eco. I sold via the internet and to my local community. The products were all eco friendly and green and I genuinely felt it was something I could do to make a difference in the world and to my local area.

I got it so wrong. 

Just because I was passionate about using the eco products I was selling, didn’t mean I would love working in a business where I had to sell them.

I just didn’t love what I was doing at all. It was ‘salesy’ and I don’t really like that. In my other work I’ve never really needed to ‘sell’. I know it’s a big part of running a business, but hard selling just isn’t my thing.

I want my customers to fall in love with my products so that they absolutely wanted to buy them and I didn’t have to try and sell stuff to them. No matter how eco friendly someone is, they are never going to fall madly in love with cleaning spray. It’s just not going to happen.

The relief I felt after I let that business go was immense.

From that point on I decided to only work with products and people that I knew I could spend all day everyday working with. If I was going to run my own company then I didn’t see the point in doing something I didn’t enjoy.

Employing staff and not being able to trust them

At the same time as I had Pink Giraffe Eco, I also launched a cleaning company with my husband, Chunky. Having previously owned and run a nightclub together (now that is a whole other story) we knew our way around employment law and the responsibilities of having staff. We’d had a great team of people at the club and it was great fun, but the staff were always working alongside each other and under a manager or assistant manager.

With our cleaning company our staff needed to be extremely trustworthy, reliable and able to work on their own initiative. We had a lot of clients who were elderly and who could be considered vulnerable. Our cleaning staff would be going into their homes without a supervisor or manager to oversee their work. 

We thought we could create a great team of staff, just like we did at the club, if we paid above the national living wage and treated them fairly.

As well as the residential contracts we also had a commercial contract to clean a local visitor attraction. The site was also a wedding venue and a wedding planning company was based there. We had the contract to clean both the park and the wedding venue.

Having built a good relationship with the owner we were happy to have their contract and it was a beautiful place to work. 

It went wrong when the owner got in touch to say she had seen our cleaner on the CCTV system. She had been at work for approximately 10 minutes and then went and sat outside the on site cafe drinking coffee and smoking for the next hour or so.

We definitely gave our staff more than adequate breaks, but this wasn’t one of them.

We did try and find more employees, but they just didn’t live up to our expectations. During an interview, one applicant thought it was appropriate to use the F word and slag off her previous boss.

I was dumbfounded. 

We didn’t hire her.

We closed the cleaning company and decided we didn’t want to employ anyone ever again.

What I learned is that regardless of how well you treat someone. Paying them fairly, treating them like they were a valued part of a family business, some people will just be awful.

It’s who they are.

I think we can apply this to our customers in the dance costume business too. Some people will not be happy or grateful for anything you do. They will always be unhappy about something. 

If you struggle with this one, it might be worth going back to episode number 3 where I gave 5 ways to deal with customer objections.

Making people’s minds up for them.

So now we’re getting closer to more recent events. I had been making clothes for several years now and my long time friend Michelle, who I know from school, asked me to make her daughter a pole dance costume.

I had always wanted to have a go at making dance costumes so I leapt at the chance. I used to dance when I was little and I loved designing my own costumes, so this was really exciting for me.

I made my first pole dance costume and almost immediately got asked to make more and Pink Giraffe Polewear was born.

The next few years were all about pole dancing. The pole dance community is quite a small one and so very tight and everyone seems to know everyone.

I did wonder if they would accept me into their community. By this point I’m using a wheelchair full time and so I’m certainly not a pole dancer.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

They have been the single most amazing group of people I have ever worked with. No one has ever questioned why I am involved with the pole dance work. Sure they’ve asked how I got into it, but not in an accusatory manner like I had expected.

For someone who had worked with so many people who existed on the fringes of society, I had expected the pole community to treat me like an outsider, like I couldn’t possibly belong because of my disability.

In this case I am more than happy to be wrong. It has been amazing to work with the pole dancers and design and make some fabulous costumes for them. I’ve learned that sometimes when you think a new idea won’t work because of how other people will receive it, you can seriously miss out on amazing opportunities. If I had listened to myself too much and not gone ahead with Pink Giraffe Polewear, I wouldn’t be sat here now doing this podcast show. And I wouldn’t have had the amazing amount of fun that I’ve had working with a bunch of people who I had wrongly thought wouldn’t want to work with me.

When it came time to stop making costumes I was truly devastated. I really do miss it, but that’s why I’m here doing this.

I wanted to stay involved with the costume making and so I set about trying to work out how I could still run Pink Giraffe, but without the physical aspect of making costumes.

That is why I’m here now.

Keep listening if you want to hear all about the mistakes I’ve made and more importantly, what I learned from them.

Here’s some highlights including timestamps so you can easily find the info you are looking for.

• The Prince’s Trust (0:46)
• Being made to cry (1:08)
• Niching down Trying to appeal to ‘everyone’ (5:24)
• Being able to adapt to new situations (9:14)
• Taking on projects you just don’t love (13:16)
• Employing staff and not being able to trust them (15:20)
• Making people’s minds up before you’ve met them (20:51)
• Where we are now (23:01)
• Competition pricing course and 1:1 (25:36)
• End of season 1 (26:09)

Info & links mentioned in this episode:

Digital Playbook PDF ’10 Things you can do in your sewing business right now’ – https://www.pinkgiraffe.co.uk/shop/10-things/

How to price your custom costume for profit – https://www.pinkgiraffe.co.uk/courses/

Get updates from The Dance Makers’ Show Podcast – https://www.pinkgiraffe.co.uk/podcast-updates/

Links to other episodes of interest:

S1 E2 From hobby sewing to small business owner – https://www.pinkgiraffe.co.uk/s1e2/

S1 E3 5 Ways To Handle Customer Objections – https://www.pinkgiraffe.co.uk/s1e3/

S1 E110 Things to do in your sewing business while the world is in lockdown – https://www.pinkgiraffe.co.uk/s1e1/

Thank you so much for listening to season 1 of The Dance Costume Makers’ Show. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have enjoyed making it for you. 

Please sign up for my podcast mailing list. You’ll be notified whenever a new episode or series goes live and you can unsubscribe at any time. – https://www.pinkgiraffe.co.uk/podcast-updates/

Stay safe x

​

Big credit to the guys from Purple Music for allowing me to use their track for my intro and outro music.

Music: