Last week, our company, Lion Brand Yarn Company, hosted a number of craft bloggers who were in town to attend the BlogHer conference. It was quite an impressive group of women. Juggling family and entrepreneurial ventures while staying fit and doing charitable work — I get tired just thinking about their lives!
But great accomplishment comes by a path that is has rough patches and is at times chaotic and unpredictable.
Our marketing and design teams were so excited to have these people visit that we prepared for months, trying to create the perfect experience. Part of the schedule for their visit included a meeting and tour through the design department led by our creative director. She showed some of the highlights of an impressive body of work that includes both practical and off-the-charts artistic yarn creations.
Now on a typical day, the design department is cluttered with boxes of garments and yarn on their way to a photo shoot, partially knit sweaters, and test swatches of different color combinations strewn over tables. There would be strands of yarn on the floor, and books and magazines with inspirational images piled on every horizontal surface.
But the day our guests arrived we had spent a good bit of time cleaning up to present a pristine and organized space in which to display our work. About an hour before the bloggers arrived, I stopped by to chat with our creative director and see how the preparations were going.
“I’m so happy to be sharing our designs with other creative people,” she said. “But I’m also eager to get my space back to the way it was. We really can’t do our work in such a cleaned up space.”
Later, when we all went out to dinner together I asked one of the bloggers her impression of the visit. It seemed they had all been enjoying themselves as they tweeted scores of images from our branding store and garment collection, as well as a private hand-dying workshop we offered them in our education center.
“We really loved what we saw,” said Carrie, whose blog is called This Mama Makes Stuff, “But I was a little disappointed that it didn’t look like a real workspace. I know how messy my place gets when I’m crafting and I was hoping to see more of your behind the scenes creative process.”
Now considering everything I know about authenticity and transparency in social media, I’ve never really thought about the fact that those words meant going much farther than I imagined.
It made me think about Julia Child, and how she seamlessly moved from dropped food, knife cuts and other mishaps to finishing her recipes and creating delicious food. In those days of live television, there was no choice. Yet that is one of the reasons we found Julia Child so endearing. She was comfortable with the mistakes and the messiness, knowing that they were a real part of her craft.
It’s not so much that your readers want you to suffer or to be challenged, but they do want to know that you’re like them. Human. Imperfect. Otherwise, how could they ever hope to accomplish what you’re trying to share with them?
It was a great lesson. Lives are messy. Work is messy. People are inspired when they see something beautiful or when they read about a successful business. But the real lesson is in the ups and downs that got you there. Not only is the messiness nothing to be ashamed of, it’s what makes you believable, interesting, and like Julia Child, even loveable.
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