The curious creator’s dilemma:
“I want to experiment in other areas of my craft, but those areas are not aligned with my brand.”
I feel this pull all the time. I pushed back on it for some time, assuring myself… “If you want to make real progress in your niche, you have to focus exclusively on that area. Don’t let yourself get diluted by transient interests.”
I’ve always felt an internal tension with this perspective. The ever-present pull towards other pockets of the craft feel worthy of exploring. Maybe it’s pure interest that pulls me, or maybe it’s a sense that there’s real growth on the other side of these seemingly unrelated detours – growth that will serve the main niche. This post will dive into that.
Bottom line hypothesis up front: You can have an outside voice and an inside voice.
The outside voice is your brand. It conveys clarity, familiarity, and cohesion. The inside voice is your secret weapon for experimentation and innovation – it’s everything you do that supports your overall craft, regardless of whether it fits your brand or not.
Let’s explore.
Outside Voice: Brand Perception
Successful brands get to where they are not by accident, but by design. They are surgical in ensuring their message is clear, consistent, recognizable and relatable. Brands build a loyal following when people know what the core message of the brand is. It aligns with their identity. They know what to expect. Because of these effects, it’s low-effort and rewarding, psychologically, to be a believer in the brand.
Clarity beats Creativity
Your brand mission needs to be crystal clear so others can recognize you, resonate with you, refer you, and support you. No one hops on the bandwagon of something they’re uncertain about.
A simple test is asking yourself: Can I summarize the core of what I do in one sentence?
If it takes a paragraph, you probably have not yet trimmed the fat of your message, making it harder to communicate and harder to gain recognition.
Here’s mine: “I design and build heirloom-quality custom furniture.”
It’s clear, concise, and general enough to give me flexibility in how I achieve it. The key is to come up with a clear message that you can align with over the long run without feeling creatively constrained. Think: specific enough to differentiate, general enough to adhere to.
Once you have your core message. You should find a way to weave it into everything that you do. Every social media post, website description, or conversation should be infused with your brand values.
If you hammer the point home of what your brand is about, you attract the right people whose interests align with yours, and that’s a good deal for everyone.
Consistency builds Loyalty
As a furniture maker, I’ve learned something important about the power of consistency – the time between someone’s first exposure to you and ultimately becoming a client is not quick. During that significant window of time, you have a choice: build trust in your brand or break it, create clarity or confusion, distill your message or dilute it. It all depends on your brand consistency.
For the record… it can be damn hard to be consistent. As an ambitious, creative person, you come up with new ideas all the time. For every new project, you somehow find a way to think about it differently or execute it in a new way. This is great because it’s proof of your evolution as a maker/designer/thinker.
But…
If in the process of evolving, your core themes are at risk of changing, and in the process you lose that sense of familiarity that attracted people to you. They no longer know what to expect from your brand, and that’s uncomfortable.
If I look at my Instagram timeline from years ago, it’s so easy to notice this trend and I instantly feel the disorientation. Projects I shared ranged from boxes, to dog bowls, to clocks, to ring boxes, to headboards, to signs, to spoons, to chairs. I don’t know what I was doing.
Wel, yes I do. I was experimenting.
I was getting in the reps to find what spoke to me. It was a necessary step in the process, as long as I eventually converged to a more focused subset of work.
Does that mean achieving brand consistency confines a creative person to drudgery and redundancy? No. Like always, there’s nuance to be uncovered.
A brand can and should evolve while staying consistent. What do I mean by this? Here are some simple guideposts…
-The voice of the brand stays the same, but perspective deepens.
-Aesthetics remain recognizable, but the quality becomes elevated.
-Values go unchanged, but the method of execution is refined.
Using these degrees of freedom, a maker gains an open invitation to evolve their craft while allowing consistency to compound the impact of their work. Authority, reputation, and poof of standards, accumulating in the background.
Inside Voice: Going Wide to Go Deep
Permission to be scatterbrained.
This is experimental work that doesn’t make it to your portfolio, your website, or even your Instagram post, but it’s just as essential to your ability to generate original ideas that excite you.
Think of this as cross-training for craft.
To explain this idea, I’ll share some examples of project types that don’t fit in my “heirloom custom furniture” category but strengthen my ability to design and build custom furniture. These are both past projects I’ve completed and future ones that exist only as concepts in my head.
Kid’s Toys
When I shift from making fine furniture to children’s toys, something interesting happens. I feel immediately unconstrained. The application is so different that ideas come to me that weren’t accessible before. Some design rules for toys might not apply to furniture, but others might. This is an opportunity to figure that out.
Of course, children’s toys have constraints. First and foremost, they need to be safe. No sharp edges, no small parts that can come loose to choke on, no unsafe finishes. But aside from that, the sky is the limit.
The most significant design challenge with toys is how well a maker can synergize form and function. You can’t emphasize one over the other, as can be the case with furniture.
A toy car needs to function, meaning it needs to roll across a surface via something that resembles wheels. But if function was the only concern, nothing about the toy would appeal to the child’s senses or imagination. The shape, contours, color, and features all contribute to the toy’s appeal. They help tell the story of what the car is, and that impacts the child’s imaginative play, so these features can’t afford to be an afterthought.
Another difference between furniture and toys is the use of color. When you picture toys, images come to mind of vibrant colors that stand out and stimulate the senses.
Well, adults like color too, just employed tastefully and intentionally.
This is one of my biggest takeaways every time I transition from building furniture to making something for my son, whether that’s a toy, a sign, a clock - I always expand the color palette, and I always enjoy the result.
Color, when used intentionally in furniture, can have a striking impact. Used in the right furniture style, pops of color can enhance the accompanying wood in unexpected ways. The result is interesting contrasts, design coherence of a room, and powerful effects on your mood when interacting with the piece.
The synergy of form and function and the intentional use of color are two lessons we can take from toys and apply it to furniture to elevate designs. It seems unrelated, until it isn’t.
Small Projects
When the piece you build can fit easily in your hands, a couple of creative liberties emerge: the ability to prototype, practice techniques, and experiment with form with a lower consequence of failure.
Unless you’re working with incredibly rare exotic hardwood, screwing up on a smaller project is lower stakes than on a large piece of furniture. When the cost of failure is low, affinity for trying new things tends to increase.
Advice: Fail small.
This is a common entrepreneurial rule, and it translates wonderfully to woodworking. The faster you can test, fail, and iterate, the quicker you’re going to evolve an idea and achieve your best work.
The lower cost of material also affords the maker more freedom to practice techniques and experiment with different forms without high consequence of failure. A few examples come to mind:
-Practicing challenging joinery
-Bent lamination
-Steam bending
-Multi-material pieces (metals, fibers, etc)
-Carving (Hand and power tool)
-Hand-cut veneer
Here’s a good rule of thumb for when to start small first…
If the project requires:
-Tools you’re not skilled with
-Complicated jigs you’ve never built
-Materials you’ve never worked with
Conclusion
As a creator, you should strive to open the aperture and exposure yourself to any kind of work that helps you grow and learn. But you need to have direction for that growth. All efforts should compound – building your knowledge and skill to support one singular mission. This part may come natural to you, as it always has for me.
But I’m growing to understand the importance of clarity and consistency in what I do so that I can build a loyal following and make a positive impact. I’m growing more aware of my outside voice.
Moral of the story: If you stay disciplined and true to your core message, the future will bring you more opportunities to experiment, innovate and grow, not less.
Other related blogs
For those looking to expand creativity in their craft, check out this blog post.
Want to improve your woodworking design skills? Check out this blog post.