Miso site

Miso shop

Miso blog

Claire says” As a new reader to Craft Boom, I’m finding it very entertaining and learning a lot - thanks! I saw your post about looking for business owners to get in touch, so I thought I’d tell you about how we got started and see if you could use it

Back in 2005, me and my best friend Jo were stuck at our boring office jobs, bemoaning the fact that we were bored. It was coming up for winter and we decided to learn to knit again, having learned and forgotten when were both at school as kids. We started wearing our creations and friends and family immediately started asking us to make things for them, and so our business began! We named ourselves Miso Funky, as an homage to our love of all things
Japanese and of course to our funky stylings

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I just love this: it’s so daft!

Pretty soon we wanted to learn more new skills, so we branched out into making jewellery and sewing. We are very much “have a go” type gals, so we’ve enjoyed self-learning lots of new skills like embroidery and decoupage. Pretty soon, we’d worked up quite a large product range and opened our online shop (http//shop.misofunky.com) with the help of our friend Marceline from Asking For Trouble (www.askingfortrouble.org/crafts).

We’ve learned a lot over the past year or so about getting and retaining customers - we’ve ran promotions at different times of year, offered discounts to groups and worked with local press to try and gain as much exposure as possible. One of the main things we did to gain exposure was to start our own regular alternative handmade market (”this is very clever, and it helps other crafters” - CraftBoom!) . We’d been looking around for a local craft fair or market to sell our stuff at and found nothing, so we did the only sensible thing - started our own! Through that, we discovered that there are actually a lot of people in our town (Glasgow, Scotland) who are on the same wavelength as us and many of our new crafty colleagues and ourselves formed the Glasgow branch of the Craft Mafia earlier this year to further our promotion of the idea of handmade over high street and support each other.

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Characters like Hamish are dotted around the site. This gives the site a lot of warmth and fun personality, which is a great selling point.

Balancing time between work, crafting and family is difficult, and we are both very lucky to have supportive other halves who don’t mind driving us to venues in the early morning! The most frustrating part for both of us is that we still have to work at our day jobs, but as business is booming,
hopefully not for too much longer!

Our main tip is to just take the plunge and give it a go - it’s definitely worked out for us. But be prepared to put a lot of hard work in to promoting yourself, even on places like Myspace, Facebook, etc. People start to take notice once they have seen your name pop up in a few different places and will click through and on to your website. For us, without our website, we’d be lost and we’re very lucky to have a friend who knows what they are doing there! It’s definitely worth investing in a good web design as your site is what is representing to you to your biggest market - the entire internet!

Thanks!

Claire ”

Thanks for that Claire! Some great start-up tips there. You have a great ‘just do it’ attitude (I couldn’t run a whole craft market!) and it’s wonderful to see that you are having so much fun with what you do. I really like the way that you put so much emphasis on fun in your site; it suits your products very well. I wish you all the best of luck with your shop.

If you’d like some groovy exposure for your site and you have some Craft Business wisdom that you could share with us, click here for more details

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