Be gracious and show your gratitude: In a virtual world, manners are just as important as when you are face to face with someone. Always say thank you. Sometimes an email is appropriate, but other times a handwritten note is in order.In social media, be yourself. Let your personality shine through. You ARE your brand. However, always remember-  everything you write is out there forever. Don’t say something you will regret, or something that may tarnish the brand you have worked so hard to create. Share bits and pieces of your real life, and engage in conversation with others; but just like you wouldn’t air your dirty laundry openly in a coffee shop, don’t do it on Twitter, either.

• July 20th on how to effectively use Twitter for business.
• July 13th on how to effectively read and use blog analytics.

IP Law for Startups has a great free E-book by Jill Hubbard Bowman.

“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Andy Warhol

Tell us a bit about your business.
I consider myself a freelance illustrator, and I specialize in lettering and maps. I also design wedding and personal stationery using all of my own illustrative and lettering styles. My work reflects my love and passion for travel, design, handwriting and beautiful paper. What makes my product unique is that all of my stationery is custom made for each client.

How did Couture Maps get its start?
A long time ago in my little Greenwich Village studio, I began working as an illustrator and started designing all sorts of strange and unusual stationery products, including hand drawn wedding maps and stationery.  Art school taught me the importance of breaking rules and making mistakes, so I set out to redefine the standard wedding invitation.

Many years later my map work became more widely accepted, and I decided to give them a name and their own website.

After doing extensive research, I was surprised and excited to find that there were no online sites that featured personalized illustrated maps. So I trademarked my business name, and began creating all sorts of maps and map products in addition to my stationery line.

How long have you been working in the industry?
I started my illustration career 20 years ago in New York City when I was at Parsons School of Design, and I began working in the wedding industry as a stationery designer soon after.

How has your process changed over the years, with the introduction of email and social networking?
The process in which I create my work has not changed over the years–all of my illustrations are created by hand in ink and watercolor without any digital design.

I started my career just before the popularity of the internet so I actually took the subway around the city to drop off my portfolios and met my clients in person. I definitely miss that aspect of my job!

When email began taking the place of face to face meetings, I had the luxury of moving my studio to wherever I wanted. Without the requirement of working near the publishing industry in New York, I decided to move to San Francisco, mostly because I wanted a new adventure.

Unfortunately I’ve been slow to embrace social networking into my business, but I do acknowledge that it can be a useful tool. Even though I know this is the direction the world is going in, I still love to write a personal note, purchase the postage stamp, walk to the post office and pop it into the mail.

Has your style always been as accepted by the wedding industry as it is now?
It was punk rock anti stationery when I first started, so it was not very accepted, and I was told that it was too unusual for the wedding market. However many art directors and editors loved it so I was lucky to get a lot of press.  At that time, I was working for mostly people in the industry.

After my first trip to Paris, my work changed course, and I began including a French flair that more clients could relate to.

When you did receive resistance to your personal style, how did you adapt?
Even though my offbeat styles and products were not originally embraced by the wedding industry, I worked as a freelance illustrator for the publishing, advertising and fashion industry so I was always busy.

It probably doesn’t make much business sense, but I always create things that I love and not necessarily what is popular.

All photos courtesy of Stephannie Barba

(from It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be, image via)

• Leah Dieterich’s thxthxthx is her daily exercise in gratitude, including the gem above.
• Grace from design*sponge shares how she deals with negativity in blog comments
• The Good to Know Project is an online magazine full of advice and inspiration from artists/illustrators/designers on creativity and business. Issues cover topics like personal style, time management and plagiarism.
• When more is decidedly less
• 34 entrepreneurs, celebrities, athletes and politicians share the greatest risks they ever took

Our last meetup was a round table style discussion time. It was the first time we’d done anything like this. Since our group has so many new faces we wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to speak up and share. When you’re young and running or starting a business there are tons of questions that you have and sometimes it’s hard to track down the answers. We wanted this meet up to be a place where attendees could get their questions answered without having to be worried about what others would think if they asked them. So…  everyone was able to submit questions anonymously for discussion after dinner. While everyone snacked on tapas from mi Tomatina in Winter Park, we pulled questions out of a jar one by one and opened up the floor for discussion. Some great topics were discussed from “what is success?” to “how do you balance customer satisfaction with your own artistic vision?” to “is it normal to get only 4 hours of sleep a night?”.

We hope everyone had an amazing time, we know we did. We can’t wait to see you all again over the summer! Stay tuned to the blog and twitter for upcoming meet ups and get togethers! And if you’d like to use this image for your own blog post about the meet up, you can download it here courtesy of Studio222 Photography and It’s Better Together. Please make sure you link back to us if you use it.

8x10 poster: It Always Seems Impossible by The Love Shop

]]> http://www.itsbettertogether.net/2010/04/1000-words-for-the-weekend-anything-is-possible/feed/ 0 http://www.itsbettertogether.net/2010/04/guest-post-emersonmade/ http://www.itsbettertogether.net/2010/04/guest-post-emersonmade/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:00:42 +0000 Ashley Brooke Quintana http://www.itsbettertogether.net/?p=636 {Today’s post is written by Ryan 1/2 of the EmersonMade team.  EmersonMade specializes in hand dyed and hand stitched blooms and accessories with an apparel line coming out in 2010.  EmersonMade started as a one woman operation in NYC where Emerson would sell her flowers, sometimes right off her lapel to flower girls and fella’s on the street, and just like that another flower would go trotting off into the world!  EmersonMade has bloomed into a full scale Operation where she and her partner BigR man the ship and where Emerson and the ArtistFlowerMakers build the blooms each season!}

Here was the question I asked Ryan:

There are several husband and wife teams in It’s Better Together who have just started or are fairly new into their businesses and I thought you could provide us with some insight on working together. How did the two of you start working together, how did you transition from a couple to a professional relationship and how does that dynamic play out–when you go home is it strictly no more talk of business or is it more fluid than that?

Emerson and I have always wanted to work together in a way that combined traveling and new experiences.  So to some extent it was inevitable. When Emerson first started the business she was manning the van all alone. As she began to hire people I began helping here and there, everything from packing boxes, dealing with contracts, hiring, etc so Emerson could stay focused on design, content, and the stylistic aspects. It was really a very natural transition. From our perspective it was more of an evolution than a transition. Frankly its hard to picture it any other way at this point. But I believe a key aspect is that we share interests and taste but generally speaking have different skill sets and backgrounds. So our skill sets are very complimentary which I think is an important factor in making it work.

EmersonMade has been growing so rapidly that along with it being a full time job we spend most of our free time talking and working on the future. Much of the time is exactly that, i.e. work, but the benefit of working with your best friend is you view time differently. Fortunately for us a fair amount of our work takes us on field trips all over the country and world for sourcing, content, and photos. Ultimately you get a reflection of what you put in.  Our lifestyle has changed to deal with that attribute.  I would not say we have an on/off switch, but it seems natural is working well that way.

Image Credit: EmersonMade

We hope you can join us THIS Thursday, April 29 for our next meet up, a chance to get to know other It’s Better Together members better over drinks and tapas at mi Tomatina in Winter Park. We’ll be hosting a “round table panel” where everyone is the panelist and the everyone can ask the questions, opening up the conversation to whatever you’d like to talk about.

Everyone has questions about starting and running their own businesses and sometimes we just don’t know where we can get the answers. It has always been the goal of our group to support and help each other so we’re excited to open up the conversation and talk about the ins and outs of life and business here in Central Florida for young, creative pros. Attendees will be able to write questions on cards anonymously for discussion during dinner. We’ll pull cards at random and open up the conversation to discuss the answers. This will be the perfect place to ask that question about business or life or art that you’ve been afraid to ask. Come hungry, with a few questions and with an open mind.

Click here for more details and to RSVP (reservations are mandatory)

Hope to see you on Thursday!