Hello and welcome to my first blog post over here at Rymermade! I’ve been absolutely loving my shop recently - as I talked about in a recent TikTok video - and it only feels natural to sit down and actually document what life is like behind the scenes. Who knows, maybe I’ll look back on this one day from my very own storefront and realise how far I’ve come?!
Creating Community
Rymermade has always had one purpose: to make people smile. From my very first doodle that I drew and turned into a greetings card, I have wanted to bring joy into my customers’ lives, which is why I think that creating community is so important. There are a couple of reasons I want to feel the community spirit behind me.
1) It just feels nice to be part of a group that is full of like-minded people! Who isn’t going to want that?!
2) I feel so strongly that the more small businesses succeed, the more they will continue to succeed. A win for one of us is a win for all of us. So I am all about driving people to small businesses and creating a buzz around how it feels to be part of that movement.
3) The closer I am to the people who use my shop, the more specific I can be when it comes to creating products. I love my notepads for example - they are totally my ADHD hacks - and knowing what people need means that I can tweak my ideas to suit the masses.
Small Business Recommendations
With this in mind, one of the things I’ve started doing is adding Small Business Recommendation cards to my orders, where I recommend three other shops that I think my customer will love.
I started sharing ‘pack an order with me’ videos on TikTok and the reception genuinely blew me away - the support I felt was overwhelming, and so many people said they’d never seen the idea and would love to do it too. In response to this I decided to set up a listing where people could order their own cards, that I would amend to match their branding. I’ve already done three or four projects from this and it has been really great not just for expanding the small business reach in the world but for challenging myself creatively.
What do you think of the Small Business Recommendations cards? Do you like to recommend other small businesses too? I’d love to hear what you think!