OK, so here we are, July 6th and we are just now beginning the start of our 31 days of creating our Halloween collection - we are a little late!
To start things off, before we even get into the fun part of designing the collection we have to think of the marketing of a collection. Without promotion and marketing how do we reach new customers?
This always is the most challenging and stressful part because we really don't do any craft shows for Halloween. All the shows are for Christmas, since that is our biggest season. Even though Halloween is getting more popular, we only create a fraction of the ornaments for the Halloween season.
So to promote and market a new Halloween collection that actually isn't created until half way through the year is the tricky part. Over the years we have compiled a nice little following of people who had ordered some of our Christmas designs and signing up to be on our mailing list. We have approximately 800+ names on that list and of course we have a Facebook page and a twitter account. We are new to both Facebook and Twitter, so we feel we aren't using them to their full potential...yet!!
We've done a few ads over the years, which have been good. But the cost is high and selecting the right magazines to advertise in are tricky. So for this year we thought we would try another direction. We are pursuing some free advertising outlets and trying to get some free PR in all the halloween magazine they have been producing lately. We created these teaser jpegs and emailed them to the magazines editors along with an intro letter back in February.
The responses we got was......
.....not really what we expected, unfortunately. We got many changed positions and no longer with the company replies. We did get one reply telling us to contact them in June when they are working on the Halloween issue to only be told they are going to pass this time. Bummer!
So because we are already halfway through the year and all the Halloween and Fall issues are at already in production, we will now regroup and plan another approach for next years submissions.
Now knowing what exposure (or lack of ) for this collection, we now know how to determine how big or small this years collection be.
** Even though our Halloween collection didn't get the magazine attention this season, our Christmas designs have and will be featured in a few magazines this coming holiday! Stay tuned for more info on that!**
Our next post will be Research and Sketching and how we select new designs to become part of the new collection.
Stay cool!!
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