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Welcome to this week’s blog post. If you’re in my Children’s Wear Design Academy program, you’ll know that “organizing” is one of my favorite subjects. It is an essential daily practice and tool that I use to:
- Personally organize my thoughts and dreams
- Create and prioritize goals, events and tasks
- Stay focused, streamline processes and save tons of time
- Keep sane in a busy world
Without organizing your thoughts, the Idea to Design process would be in a state of overwhelm and confusion. It’s also important to get those ideas out of your head and onto paper as soon as possible. “Seeing” your vision on different formats can be very helpful. This action step will help you translate your ideas into viable tangible products.
I have found that ideas come to us in various forms;
- some receive an entire blueprint for a product idea
- some receive portions of an idea that need refinement
- some receive a glimmer of an idea that requires time and energy to develop
Over time, as you become more familiar with the process, you may be able to envision the product from start to finish and just fill in the blanks.
- My favorite method for product design is to take the process and break it down into smaller steps. In the apparel industry we have a similar process using a “merchandising calendar” which is a 52 week spreadsheet list of essential tasks and actionable steps. You can also place this within a monthly calendar for similar reference.
Personally, I follow a 5-step process that helps me translate my vision for the year into tangible pieces. I then take those pieces and break them down into tactical steps on a wall calendar. For those of you like me, who are very visual, the process involves office supplies which makes it fun and helps me quickly identify the different parts of my business across the entire year.
I’ve made the mistake in the past of trying to cram an entire process like this into one blog post. But this time, I’m going to cover the process over the next 5 weeks. Like a mini-series.
Let me start with the end in mind so you really get a sense of where we’re going and how valuable this is. Here’s a photo of my 2020 wall calendar.
I took the photo from a bit far away on purpose. I don’t want you to focus on the specifics yet. I want you to tell me what you see.
Right away, at a glance, what do you notice? Here’s what I see:
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It’s not fancy – I tape it to the back of a door in our house
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It’s a 2020 year at a glance calendar that I got at the office supply store
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There are 4 colors of post-its – you can’t see the detail but here’s the key to the colors:
- Blue is for my free Design-Build-Launch™ mini-course
- Pink is for my “Create Your Sewn Product” Workshop
- Yellow is for my “Children’s Wear Design Academy™ 12-week signature course
- Orange is affiliate activity (when I’m helping someone else sell their courses)
Okay. Now that you have a picture, let me walk you through an overview of the entire process so you know exactly where we’re going. By the way, here’s the post-it pack I like the best. More colors and more sizes!
Step one: Your Vision
The work starts with your vision and determining the 1-3 things that you want to accomplish. Sit down and write out a vision statement. Don’t get hung up about the fact that we’re in July. This process works at any time of the year. You can focus on the rest of the year instead of on a full year. Or take a shorter time segment like the next three months. I’ll dive into this in more detail next week but for now, start thinking about what your vision is for your creative business. Write down 1-3 tangible goals that you’d like to achieve.
Step two: The Parts & Pieces
Once you’ve established your vision, start to map out how you’ll get there. Remember that this is an iterative process and things change! Right now, working with a good draft is just fine. Using apparel design as an example, if your vision is to start selling your designs, how specifically do you plan to do that? What are all the different ways you can earn money as a children’s wear designer and which ones are reasonable and achievable for you right now.
Step three: The Key Assumptions
Let’s dive deeper and identify the key assumptions you need to make about how long each step in the process will take. This part of the process makes the goal you set become real. There’s meat around the bones. To give you an example of the level of detail here, go read my blog about how to Monetize Your Talents It’s important to understand that details matter and breaking your goals down into small bite sized assumptions helps you achieve them.
Step four: The Tactical Plan
At this stage in the process, I move to that year at a glance wall calendar so that I can map out each major goal. I need something visual at this point. I keep it as simple as possible, using 3-4 colors to identify key activities. I step back, and “zoom out”, and quickly see how the parts and pieces work with each other. Is the timing of each major activity reasonable? Am I missing anything important? Have I included personal and family activities? Using post-its comes in really handy because you can move them around.
Step five: The Daily Execution
This is when I move into my Full Focus Planner by Michael Hyatt. I love this planner and it’s the tool that I use for step five. Michael says: “To accomplish our goals, we must distill our dreams into daily actions.” I follow his recommendation about “The daily big 3” which are your three most important tasks for the day. Keeping your task list short ensures that you focus on the right things. It also helps build your self-confidence as day after day you check them off the list and see the progress you are making.
Okay, how was that for an overview of the entire process? Does it make sense and can you see how each step builds on the one before it?
Next week we’ll dive into a real-life example to demonstrate how this process works, starting with Step one: Your Vision. I’ll see you then.
Remember,
You CAN Transform Your Sewn Product Ideas into Profits!
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