ImagesMagUK_January_2022

Working it out Boost your embroidery skills with a tailored new year’s ‘workout’ routine from Erich Campbell that will see you flexing your digitising muscles and building up your stitching stamina E very January, your local gym fills with hopeful souls attempting to realise their latest new year’s resolutions. Though it may not make you look better in your apparel, taking the same initiative with your embroidery and digitising skills will make your product offerings look better on your customers, and all without requiring you to cut out a single carb! With competition as stiff as ever, keeping an edge in your embroidery is more and more important. Whether you are looking to bulk up your abilities and offerings, or focus on your fundamentals, now is the time to take the first step toward self- and shop-improvement. With smart goal- setting, considerate action plans, and the willingness to practise your craft, you can press on and persevere. Setting SMART goals As much as we all recognise the beginning of the year as a time to turn over a new leaf, that row of treadmills is never as full in February as it is just after the first of January. The goal of getting fit, diving into digitising, or learning a new decoration method may seem self- explanatory, but having such large and seemingly difficult tasks ahead of you can sometimes be disheartening. If you leave your goals too vaguely defined, you can also end up feeling directionless or even paralysed by the many potential avenues open to you. No matter the specific part of your business you are looking to improve or expand, setting SMART goals and parsing them correctly can help you stay the course and strengthen your skills. As the uppercase letters may have given away, SMART is an acronym to help you evaluate your goals. Your stated goals for improvement should be: Specific Rather than ‘I want to learn patches’ try a goal like ‘I will be able to create small-run patches in-house with a professional result, understand how to price them, and add them to my website as an option, including offering in-house patch attachment and iron-on patches as products’. Measurable Make sure your goal has something measurable that can let you know you are on the right track. Some goals, like ‘make better embroidery’ are hard to quantify, but ‘increase sales of hats’ or even ‘get 20 positive reviews from my embroidery customers’ are easy to measure as you work towards them. Attainable Although I am big on sky- high goals being part of defining your overall drive, the truth is that setting unreasonable goals or expecting unreasonable amounts of effort from yourself can lead to disappointment and dropping out of the process. Set goals you can attain with the resources you can reliably access. Consistent, incremental improvement that you can sustain will result in long-term gains whereas a Herculean effort paired with the let-down of missing your mark is likely to lead to burnout. Relevant As with all expansion in your business, you have to make sure it makes sense to your market, or at least that you have a market in mind for what you are trying to achieve, or that it gets you closer to a long-term goal or aligns with your overall purpose. I’m guilty on this score: early in my career and serving a largely B2B space, I found myself getting overly interested in counted cross-stitch and bohemian folk embroidery; although it was interesting KB BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT www.images-magazine.com 86 images JANUARY 2022