She loves the coffee mug idea
But when I started talking about Zazzle she started talking about
Gear bubble
Which I have not heard of
When I tried to look it up on Google the first thing that came up was is it a legit business
Which made me less happy that she brought it up
So she started telling me about it and apparently it's set up to mass produce things for you on demand and it's integrated supposedly with Amazon and Etsy and eBay
So you just design your item and put it on your gear bubble store and then it's just automatically gets uploaded to your Amazon or Etsy or eBay store and then when people buy it through your other store the gear bubble people ship it out
And I'm like yeah I don't know that doesn't sound like what we want really
and she's like no it's great I've already paid $300 for a seminar on how to do it
And I'm like wait who did you take the seminar from and she's like oh gear bubble and I'm like so you paid them $300 for them to show you how to use their technology that doesn't sound right and she's like and they have a Facebook page you can join and I'm like I don't really want to join a bunch of Facebook pages I mean I'm not saying I won't join any Facebook pages but I don't want to just join a bunch of random
and she's like well I've already joined so you could just use my passwords and get on there and see everything she's like none of the people who are trying to do it are very happy though they say it's really hard to do and I'm like okay
So they find it hard to use the creation tools to make their products she's like no no no they don't have any problem with that they're having trouble getting the stuff to work while it's integrated with Etsy and eBay and Amazon
So I'm poking around the site on my phone and I click on the link for the you know integrate with those places and it says just $97 a month
and I'm like okay well I don't think we want a store with this place and she's like oh I already have one and I'm like have you used it she's like no
and I'm like once we figured out how to get traffic to the store and we're selling lots of stuff and we are having trouble keeping up then maybe that would be a time to look into something like this but I mean it doesn't make any sense to pay $97 a month to mass produce things to sell online when there aren't people buying them it's just going to cost money it's not going to make money
And we had talked on the phone the other day about the branding which was coming together a little more after I kind of got a feel for what kind of stuff we were doing because before I had seen her paintings but that's not really what we're marketing to sell online right I mean the little ones yes but not like the $1,500 ones although I don't know she made some noises like she was pushing for that and I just I don't know
so we had some discussions about the branding and I think that the the niche the concept the idea is that these are instances of making yourself happy or giving them as gifts to make someone else happy like you know I don't want to say that it's only good during the pandemic but right now everybody's been thinking about how you know trapped they are and how they can't do the things they want to do and they are scared and they need just a little thing that makes them happy
And even though that's a thing for right now I don't think it's just a thing for right now and I don't think that people are going to forget this realization that they've had that they just need a little drop of happiness you know and so I've been trying to come up with something
and a lot of my stuff is not right for her you know it's too ironic or it's too borderline snarky you know it's like the happiness situation or hardcore happy or Happy camp or just happy with an exclamation point after it
but when I say I'm they just don't sound right they don't resonate in fact that drops of happiness is maybe a little closer than a lot of the other stuff but it's not right drops of happiness that's not going to stick
but anyway I had been thinking along those lines and I told her and she's like yes yes yes that's absolutely the right direction to go and she was like she's working with this woman apparently she's been working with her for like three years the one who's sort of an artist and sort of a poet but also sort of like a life coach and sort of like a branding coach and you know I don't know
Apparently my mom has been working with her for 3 years and she is the source of this mythology about my mom being this person who you know did all these practical things and spent her whole life in the service of other people and has just now as a 77-year-old woman discovered that she's still creative and she wants to make her creative mark in the world and so this woman is pushing that as her story right and that might be a compelling story but it isn't my mother's compelling story
And I asked her I'm like how did she get the impression that you were this housewife who had been you know putting everyone else's needs first and has suddenly decided you're creative how did she come to believe that that was accurate and she's like well I've been going to her for several years and I haven't done much well okay so maybe she looked at my mom and said most likely scenario is that she's a woman who put everyone else first because that's what most women do I'm not saying that's accurate necessarily but it is a widely held belief but I mean it isn't at all true about my mother in the first place I can't think of any evidence that my mother put anyone else ahead of her ever I just don't think that's even mildly accurate but even if it was
My mother was supporting herself with her art and her galleries and real estate that she purchased with money that she made when she was working as a computer programmer when that was like a really rare thing so she was doing all of that from the time I was I don't know four
I wasn't living with her yet
She was running around doing whatever she was doing she wasn't married it was just her and she was living off Hershey bars and Coke cans based on what was in her car
by the time I was 11 I was living with her and she had me working assembly line production shrink wrapping 8x10s I mean she had a commercial shrink wrapping machine and she was periodically coming through checking my work and telling me how I was not cleaning it enough and I wasn't keeping the the shrink wrap is on this roll that has like two sheets that are connected so when you're pulling it through it's one sheet on the top and one sheet on the bottom and you put the artwork in that you seal off one end and then you put the artwork in there and then you line it all up and you pull the handle down and that seals it on one side and then you turn it and you seal it again and you seal it again and you have to keep the heating element at the right temperature and cleaned off or else it makes a kind of a messy line when you shrink wrap it and she didn't want to have to do it again or clean it up so she wanted me to do it right the first time so she would come through and yell at me if I wasn't doing it right
And you know I was doing like a couple of hours at a time in the evening it was you know my after-school job
And she was paying me for it like I don't know a buck fifty an hour or something
I think when I got my quality level high enough and my production quantity high enough I went up to like as much as $3 an hour which you know is nothing to sneeze at because minimum wage was probably around that or I don't know how often they changed the minimum wage when I started working minimum wage was $3.35 oh sorry when I started working for other people the minimum wage was $3.35 but that was when I was like 17 18 something like that
She also had me cutting mats
Just the inside cuts she didn't want me using the big mat cutter to cut down the big boards both because she was afraid I would injure myself you know cut my hand off or something and also because she didn't think I would be able to maneuver them well enough to get them perfectly straight but the inside cuts I could do and double mats and then later she got an oval mat cutter and then I was cutting oval mats and had to sharpen the blade with a whetstone
so I wouldn't say it qualified as a DIY project it was like full-on production with hundreds and hundreds of pieces at a time
nor do I think she was checking to make sure that my homework was done before I was doing that
So I really don't understand how
except I think I do I think that what she did was she was complaining about having to take care of her sister and take care of her husband and you know all these things that she had to do that were sucking away her life
And I'm not saying she didn't do any of those things for some period of time and she did spend a lot more time with Shirley so I mean you know I'm not trying to say she didn't do anything I'm just saying the characterization of her entire life being spent in the service of others is offensive to me That's what I'm saying
so when I realized that this is the mythology this woman has been working with her for her brand I really did not think that much of what this woman had to say was going to be useful to me because I'm not going to do that I'm jolly well not
But I understand where it comes from now because that woman probably said something at some point about my mom being you know spending her life in the service others and that fits in very much with how my mother feels like she was she was the best most wonderful you know whatever personal relationship you want to put in there the fact that that has no bearing on reality doesn't matter because she's a narcissist
and I am a little bit angry so if I sound angry I am a little bit angry but I'm not that angry
And I'm certainly not angry that she had me shrink wrap things and cut mats I enjoyed all of that stuff more or less it's hard to enjoy shrink wrapping but
But none of that stuff is useful to me The work she did with this Mary Ann person
And she said she had some verbiage that she'd emailed her about you know exact phraseology or whatever but then she also told me that she'd gotten some of the descriptions for the cards from that woman and I'm like oh well I hope you saved it because I didn't like it and I changed it
I did not know it was the professionals work because it just sounded like my mom's regular disingenuous sounding talk
But you know my mom has spent a lot of time over the last 20 years taking seminars on branding and things like that because she used to I mean branding I guess was still important but it wasn't quite so prevalent in the everyday world you know it was like they were brands for sure but you know she was just her own brand her name or her last name and gallery sorry I don't want to put the names and she worked you know pretty hard and she didn't charge a lot of money she had a very competitive product that was you know semi mass produced well I mean it was mass-produced but it wasn't like made in a factory it was made in a home factory You know and she would do calligraphy things she would write out these little sayings they were I mean they were nice right and things like that are still popular just not in the style she did them and not the kind of thing she did but I mean the idea is Tyler's and is never going to go out of style The idea that you've got some sort of an image that you're going to look at that has you know words of wisdom or a poem or something on That's a good idea right so she would write them out she had a calligraphy pen and ink she would write them out and initially she wrote each one individually but then once she found the things that people like to buy she would write it out and she would get a print made of it and she would do these little watercolors on top of them and they were just like splash splash splash you know three flowers and a butterfly kind of thing but just real loose and she would do she had like three different colors she had the you know the flowers and the stems and the butterfly and she would just paint you know she'd paint the flowers and then she'd paint the stems and then she would paint the butterfly she would just do big batches of them so it was very much a mass-produced commodity
And we would have to periodically change the map colors or the background colors or you know something so that they maintained their you know freshness but people bought them
And then at some point they kind of stopped buying and she foundered a little
And somewhere in there she married Bob and he I think wanted her to get a job or maybe it was just when the malls and art shows and stuff stopped working out maybe she got a job then and she blamed it on him I don't know she definitely blamed it on him
And then for the last I don't know 20 or 25 years she's taking these branding seminars she took this I mean she was spending thousands and thousands of dollars going to this woman who was an equestrian
She had a horse ranch
And she spent a lot of time talking about archetypes and I don't know if it was her if it was somebody else that was or maybe it was when she was at the watercolor arts society but she got this idea in her head that what she had been doing was beneath her
But she was an artist and she should do big paintings and get you know big bigger price tags now I mean not like world famous artist price tags but you know when you're going to charge like $500 to $1,200 for a painting even if that is a reasonable amount for a painting you have limited who can afford to buy it right
When she was selling things in the mall and we had things that were you know 6:50 and 7:50 and 999 and 16 and you know 25 and 50 and the most expensive thing we had maybe was a large framed print that was maybe I don't know $100 or $125 framed for a you know 24x30 maybe
and this is long enough to go that those prices would have to be adjusted up I mean if you go to frame something that size now it will cost you much more than that for just the frame but she was buying the Nielsen frames which were metal and cut into pieces and you put them together and I was doing that too You know
So I mean the business that she was doing was more based on doing volume sales than the idea of doing large things for large ticket items
That has never really worked and that is what she wants to work she wants to make these big sales of the bigger watercolors that are more prestigious so that she can feel like she's a real artist That's what she wants
But then she wants to have small things that people will actually buy so she can bring in some money
And I keep telling her that there's nothing wrong with that but that I don't think it's one brand I don't think the smaller things are the same brand as the big things and I just think that she thinks that what we're going to do is we're going to sell a bunch of these little things and we're going to get a big market and then we're going to somehow get those people who wanted those things to buy the big things and I'm like prints
Maybe not Prince of all of them but I mean we can integrate some of the things into you know if we go for this happy thing we can integrate some of it it can I mean to my mind it's a little tricky because they really don't feel like the same thing but if she's just bound to determined then okay maybe
I feel as though that isn't the best way to go about it but she's pushing pretty hard that this is what she wants and really only because she's acknowledging that there's a pandemic and she can't have decorators coming through the studio
So I just have to figure out this happy angle and I feel like it's right there somewhere and I'm just not quite seeing it
Anyway I didn't get as many cards done today because I was doing a lot of other stuff but I have two that are almost finished designing and today it was going a little slower with the designing I think initially I pulled out all the things that I just could look out and go Bam but I think I've used a lot of them and so now I'm looking at things plus I was initially just slapping things together with stamps which I thought was a good idea and I feel confident that that's what she would do if she would just stick a couple of like squares together with a stamp cut out butterfly and call it a day although she does have some collages that are really nice looking that basically she does she puts them together and she paints over them with you know some color to kind of tie it together and I wouldn't necessarily call it a collage it doesn't look like a collage it looks like a cohesive piece not that the collages don't look like a cohesive piece but you know what I mean it doesn't when you're looking at it you don't think immediately oh that's things stuck together you just think oh that's a mixed media piece and those look pretty good but they aren't her typical like collage cards they're like she has one framed in a really big mat and it looks really good but it's like I don't know $65 or something
Which I'm not saying it's not worth I'm differentiating it from her collage cards and stuff so I don't know I don't know
I need the version of the happiness situation that goes with her stuff because that doesn't but that's kind of the working title that I have running through my head because that's you know the kind of thing I would say it's
Something is suboptimal
Happiness situation
I have a particular sort of way that I string things together and it's more me than it is her
Oh my God I just thought of something really funny I was asking her how old this Marianne woman is because you know her stuff sounded sounded so much like the kind of thing my mom would say to me and I thought well maybe it's a generational thing so I asked her you know how old is she and she's like oh she's 62
And my immediate thought was oh so she's way older than me but I actually 62 isn't way older than me That's like 9 fixing to be 8 years older than me which is not much older at all
but I don't know if I'm stunted or what but I'm just I don't think I'm much like people my age usually are
When I have occasion to talk to people my age they are really interested in things like their kids being a college and mortgages and vacations and retirement and CSI I don't know they just seem like super boring people super boring now perhaps all of the people are super boring but generally when I meet somebody young they're not boring
They might be stupid and they might not be all that interesting but at the very least they've got s*** going on I don't really understand and that's kind of interesting
Now she's a creative type
In creative types aren't usually like you know their age right I mean mostly they're a little more fringy so they're not like those people who want to talk about their vacation homes and their mortgages in there retirement and their kids in college
And maybe she's really good and she's duplicating the sound of my mom's whatever because that's what she helps people do is turn their ideas into a brand
So maybe my initial assessment is inaccurate
That could well be I don't have any basis
No experience with her personally
But the very idea that my mother
Would be letting somebody work up branding stuff for her based on something that was so completely a lie just she knows that isn't right and that she wouldn't say anything
To disabuse this woman of her completely erroneous beliefs about what my mother spent her life doing you know I mean I'm really proud of her that she supported herself with her own business and you know didn't have jobs and wasn't reliant on men I mean all of that stuff is what I like about my mother you know but she wants to just toss that away so that she can have some feel-good kudos that she did so much for so many other people like that somehow makes her more valid as a woman
I really dislike it
and I have to come up with this branding and I'm just not seeing it I'm just it's just out of reach I can see it over the edge of the hill and it's kind of blurry and I can't read it but it's so close I feel like I'm so close to it
And what I think I've really always believed is that my mother doesn't know what she's doing has an ever known what she was doing she was just winging it and pulling herself along with a kick in the seat of the pants or whatever just stay in one step ahead of it
And so there isn't any reason why I shouldn't be able to do that and I've always sort of believed that but it's just that her life was so chaotic and I guess what I really mean is my life was so chaotic and I just didn't want that you know
I wanted a paycheck coming in that was steady that I could count on I didn't want to have to be running around like a chicken with my head cut off having to hustle I guess
but also like with the coffee shop I had people pretty regularly saying things to me not like customers but like people I knew saying things to me like I should open my own coffee shop since I know how to run a coffee shop and it's like well yeah sure but the thing about Starbucks was that it was a brand
The idea is you have to have the following You can sell them stuff that's great but when you have the following then you can market things to those people and you can make money
But if you're just one little individual thing you don't have that following so you don't have what you need upfront to really be successful now you can absolutely build a business but you know people make the mistake a lot of times of thinking will you know how to do this so just go do your own and it's like yes but you don't understand that I will not have a large chunk of what allows me to be successful at doing this it's not apples to apples you know
And that's part of what makes the internet such a huge deal like the great equalizer or whatever because you have the ability to get followers from all over the world all over the country just by doing like a few things right now what the few things are you have to do That's a little bit less clear and it's very dependent upon chance
Like that German guy you know he started last year in like September or October and he made I don't know three or four videos and he had said you know that he was making the videos but he wasn't really getting any followers and so he pretty much decided that he was going to stop making videos and you know he would just send videos directly to the two or three people he knew that were interested in watching his progress that he had you know initially been putting them on YouTube just so you'd have a convenient place to send them to look at the videos but then when it didn't seem like anybody was really looking at them it just didn't seem like it was worth doing and then the pandemic hit everybody stuck at home and they're looking for content and there's this whole cottage fantasy trend and the tiny house trend and it just you know kind of all came together for him so one day he looked at his YouTube page and he had like you know 10,000 followers or something and he was like oh s*** I'm going to start making videos again
And then he got a patreon and you know he's wanting to get 100,000 subscribers for Christmas
And I'm pretty sure 100,000 is a threshold for something on YouTube I can't remember now it's not the one where you get the plaque that's like a thousand I think or maybe it's 10,000 I don't remember but but my point is that the likelihood that he would have had that kind of exponential growth had there not been the pandemic is not super high so a lot of it is stuff that you can't necessarily control You know you can't catch lightning in a bottle by formula well maybe you can but it's a lot more likely that it's more organic than that things go viral at certain times in certain contexts
It's my belief that in doing a lot of this stuff for my mother it will become clear to me how these things relate more to me as I'm figuring out how they relate to her and having to continually do workarounds of things that I think are interesting for me
I might be wrong about that but I really do believe it
Like by figuring it out for her I'm going to back into or reverse engineer or something The way to figure it out for me
