Craft for Profit: Professional Use of Color

There was a time, pre-60's, when the world was black and white. Televisions were monochrome, and publications offered black text and grayscale images. Even in imagination, when you think of a pattern that is considered "vintage", it's usually black and white that you see. During this era, craft items could be any color under the sun (or as many as dyes were able to obtain at that time) and no one thought anything of it. In pictures, it looked ... well, it looked gray.

When the 60's came around and the world suddenly exploded into color, let's just admit that the fashion ideas of the day abused the novelty. Seriously, yellow and bright red aren't the best color combination no matter how well they work "technically" on a color wheel.

Today, we know that color is the best means of drawing attention to any media. Any media; this has some effects on us as crafters that many people don't take into consideration. Media means anything that we use to present information, make sales, and gain customers. It includes the pictures we take, the graphics we use, and the items inside both of those things.

And it all comes back to color. Want to make the most of your crafting so that you can earn the most return on your efforts? Be professional with colors, and you'll see a dramatic impact on your craft business.

Of Hobbyists and Professionals

I've been slow in coming to this overwhelming realization. When it hit me a couple months back, I was staring at a listing of my latest handmade items for sale and wondering why I cringed at the presentation. It wasn't the photography - which could be better, but wasn't hideous. It wasn't the order of the items, and it wasn't the type of items themselves. What slammed the problem home was a copy of Tone Finnanger's book, Sew Pretty Homestyle, sitting on the desk next to me.

Let me start by saying that I recognize the fact that each of us have our own tastes. Different people have different ideas when associating colors with products, so there's no answer on what the "best" color would be for any item at one time. Tone's book is absolutely bursting with bright pinks and greens, softened by creams and browns. They're very trendy colors, and they're a color choice that has brought a lot of criticism from readers who couldn't imagine using them in their own home.

The point is this: I glanced over at the cover of Sew Pretty and realized that every single page in Tone's book shined because it was tied together through the careful use of a small color palette.

Once it hit me, I started feverishly racing through the websites that I love most. Shops filled with lovely handmade items that always inspired me because they just looked so pretty - and drove me insane because they used nothing more than a banner and product thumbnails just like me, but looked so much better than my own shop. I found the same answer: every shop that just plain looked great contained items that were crafted off a color palette.

At this point, I was more frustrated with myself than anything else. I have a degree in design - and yet, I never tied the two together. As a hobbyist who wasn't concerned about making money off of my craft, I never had to worry about color other than how it worked in the item I was creating. The moment I decided to be "professional" with crafting, I should have thought more about brand and the ways that color palettes work towards creating one - it's a subject I write about and work with often enough. But I never did.

So here's the bottom line: Color choices work into brand awareness. Getting brand awareness about your handcrafted items is a huge thing - it can make or break a business, as savvy crafters who've become big names (think Debbie Bliss or Amy Butler) can attest to. Color, then, can be the distinguishing mark between a hobbyist and a professional.

Brand Awareness and Retail Space

Today, most crafters are earning the largest chunk of their income online. They sell on websites like Etsy and eBay, operate their own website shops, and submit patterns and articles to magazines through the use of the Internet. Keeping this in mind is important because it affects our "retail space".

In the real world, with our handmade items displayed in a boutique or at a fair, customers have the opportunity of actually picking items up and looking them over. Retail space - simply the space used to display our wares - still has to make an impression, but it's not of overwhelming importance. If we've grouped our items together in a not-so-pleasing color array, customers can still physically get to what they're looking for.

Online, retail space is all we have. The way our products are displayed can make or break a sale. By using too many colors in our items, we actually run the risk of decreasing our marketing efforts. Using the wrong colors, or a variety of colors from different products, can make a unique item blend in with other ones scrolling by. If we limit our color palette and make careful choices, we create a much more uniform look to our digital shops that creates brand awareness and boosts our presence.

Large manufacturers - big box companies - know that the best way to make a product stand out from competing ones is with colors that pop. They're always striving for color brilliance. By following this principle, your crafted items have more shelf appeal and are much more likely to be snatched right up.

Creating - and Sticking With - a Color Palette

Mother Nature has created and worked with a consistent, striking color palette from time's beginning. Just thinking of "nature" brings to mind a series of colors that we can count on with every season; continuing this color palette has meant that Mother Nature could sustain life.

This idea is important to us, even if for much more monetary reasons.

Developing a color palette that will work for your products for years to come can be an intimidating prospect. If you're not comfortable looking at it that way, try this goal: create a color palette that will work for one year. At the end of that year, you can make changes and adjustments based on your successes.

So the real question becomes, "How do I make a color palette in the first place?". It's really very easy, if you take a bit of time and have some fun with it.

1. Do research: Look around the Internet at commercial stores and handmade boutiques that sell the same type of items you craft. If you're all about creating baby clothes, you'll want to focus on those kinds of shops. Much more into stuffed animals, handbound books, scrapbooking supplies, or jewelry? Again, just look to the people who are already earning an income selling these items. Take notes on their color choices, how they handle colors and patterns, and what combinations look best to you.

Another really stunning source of research are Japanese craft books, and the sewing books by "big names". Both of these types of books are created by artists who really keep a careful eye on color and pattern use.

2. Get examples: Take a visit to your local craft store, and pick up "swatch" amounts of fabric, paints, or beads (depending on the medium you craft in) that have colors you pinpointed as being the most interesting. Bring these home and try to arrange the colors in interesting ways.

3. Narrow your choices: A tight color palette, which is what we're after, contains no more than 12 colors. Usually, this means three shades of four different colors; brown, pink, turquoise, and lime for example. Don't go higher than this, or you're not going to achieve the effect you want.

4. Create a palette: Cut out squares of the fabric, paint squares, or fasten beads to an index card. This is your color palette, representing the colors you're going to stick with for at least one year. A serious bonus (beyond making your items and displays look so much more stunning) is that you'll have an easier time picking supplies because you already know what color scheme you're going for.

Attracting the customers you want to have is much easier when you communicate with the language of color. Use your palette in your products, your pictures and graphics, and you'll see it become an effective marketing tool that really sets you apart from the competition.