When I went to the Urban Craft Uprising event at Seattle Center on Saturday, I was in a sea of people who were exactly someone’s ideal customer.
If you’re a small business owner trying to come up with a brand identity, one of the first things we’ll ask you at Design Kompany is to picture your ideal customer. In marketing lingo, listing out the characteristics of your potential buyers is called “customer profiling.”
And according to the Washington Small Business Development Centers, outlining a customer profile is “crucial” to the success of a business.
On its web site, WSBDC encourages small business owners to really zero in on whom they’re trying to reach. Demographics and what’s called “psychographics” — the needs, values and interests of customers — together define a target market.
What I’m saying here is, you really want to be able to identify your customer so you can start from there to build your brand.
That’s why the event at the Seattle Center was so intriguing. You had about a thousand people coming specifically to look at handmade goods. They wanted to buy locally. They wanted something that would be the opposite of catalog or big box shopping. They appreciated arts and crafts, and probably did their own.
“I was expecting a crowd like this,” said Colin Johnson, who books shows for Chop Suey. Mostly women, half with glasses, half with beaded jewelry. People you’d find here would use the library, not a cafe, for WiFi access, he said. They’d look at sites like KnittaPlease.com. And when they surf the Net, they are thorough about checking links.
Now that’s the kind of detailing that really frames whom the vendors appeal to.
Just for fun, here are some photos from the Urban Craft Uprising event….
Cherry jewelry by Cheryl Stevens of Stitchpixie.
This woman is checking out skirts made by Amy Burrell of DarBeka, who lived in Okinawa for four years when she was young. A lot of her material has patterns inspired by kimonos and anime.
These are dolls Alisa Timmerman makes through her company, Zelda Loo Studios.
Fuzzy orange pillows.
More about the event can be found at UrbanCraftUprising.com.
THAT CHEERY CHAIN IS SO CUTE