On this week’s Podcast I chatted to Camila Prada – who we have featured on the blog before as one of our Success Stories. Her ceramic jars and mugs have personalities all of their own and she has made a successful handmade business from her unique designs.
Camila started as an artist and sculptor at Uni but soon turned to design when she moved to the UK to pursue a Masters in Ceramic Design.
After working for a large company, Rosenthal, as a freelance designer, Camila learned a lot about royalties and the business side of her work and after they had a change in the company structure, she decided to go it alone with her own designs and creations.
All her time with a big company has informed her decisions about where to take her creative business and she has always been interested in using a platform like Kickstarter as a way to grow her business.
She has words of wisdom for other Creatives who might want to go down this path:
“People who haven’t done a Kickstarter before might think that it’s about making money and it’s really not. You have to supply something for every single pledge.”
Listen in for all the gems of wisdom from Camila and her experience with running a successful Kickstarter.
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Quotes and Highlights from this Episode:
* Camila’s (now closed) Kickstarter Campaign.
* “I loved the course and I learned so many things and fell in love with industrial ceramics which is the overlap of industrial design and creative design” {Camila}
* Making money as a freelancer can be hard since it’s like running your own business and working for someone else at the same time.
* “The common tension between artists and companies is that they wanted me to present my works in a certain way and they wanted me to make changes that I thought were not the way that I wanted them to be.” {Camila}
* Kickstarter is all about projects and products and it has a designer undertone.
* It can help you build an audience (note that they won’t promote your campaign for you) and you have the opportunity to have a big launch using their platforms.
* It helps to build a connection with your community that you can’t always get in other ways.
* It can bring in new people.
* If you don’t know if there will be the interest for your product then Kickstarter can be a great way to test the waters.
* If it works then you have the money to go ahead; if it doesn’t then you know there wasn’t enough interest and you don’t have to go ahead with it.
* It’s a way of mitigating risk in your business.
* To do a campaign you have to get really clear about what your goals are and it’s easy for those things to fall by the wayside when you’r...