The Launch Sprint · Four of five · 4 min read
The selling happens before launch day
That is the whole idea, and it is one sentence. You do the selling in the six weeks before the launch, with the people who already care, rather than in a search box on the day.
A listing waits to be found. A launch is something people turn up for on purpose, because you spent the weeks beforehand making them want it. By the time the product exists, the wanting already does.
I went looking through a month of the biggest Etsy sellers' group for anybody talking about building interest in something before it goes live. Not one person. Plenty about tags and photos and fees and the algorithm, and nothing at all about launching. There is no word for it in that room.
So this is not a belief anybody weighed up and turned down. It has genuinely never been in the room.
You have almost certainly watched it happen to somebody else, mind. The maker who posts a photo of an empty shelf with three words under it, and by the time you have finished your coffee the whole lot has gone. You know big brands do a spring one and an autumn one and a Christmas one, and you have quietly filed that under things proper businesses do with proper marketing departments.
It works on a very small number of people
40 people who have already paid you beats 400 who have just found you.
There is a maker I am working with at the moment, and I am keeping her out of it beyond this, because it is her collection and not my case study. What I can tell you is that she has built an autumn collection around a thing her customers genuinely need once the nights start closing in, which is a far better reason for a collection than most businesses ever manage to come up with.
Her list is 40 people. Not shop customers, people she met at craft fairs and markets who bought from her face to face and said yes when she asked whether they would like to hear when she made something new.
She had never launched a collection before, and when I say never, I mean it had honestly never crossed her mind as something she was allowed to do. She has a date now, and she has counted the whole run backwards from it, and those 40 people who have handed her money once are a far better room to launch into than 400 strangers who wandered past a thumbnail.
What a launch is actually made of
Six phases, in this order. This is the shape of it, what each one is for and what it costs you to skip it.
- 01Shape the collectionA group of pieces that belong together for a reason you can say in one sentence. Skip it and you have five new listings and a date, with nothing for anybody to get excited about six weeks early.
- 02Add the digital layerA digital counterpart made once, alongside the physical pieces, that carries on earning after the stock has gone. Skip it and the business stays capped at the speed of your hands forever.
- 03Set the launch dateA real date, everything counted backwards from it. Skip it and the collection launches when it happens to be finished, which is a Tuesday nobody was expecting.
- 04Price everythingPriced at what it is worth rather than cheap enough to feel safe. Skip it and you work six weeks to make less than the thing was worth.
- 05Build the anticipationThe six weeks where the sell-out is actually made, and where all the real work is. Skip it and launch day is the first anybody has heard of it, which is the cold start again on a date you picked.
- 06Emails and launch weekPress send, then debrief it while it is fresh. Skip the debrief and every launch starts from scratch, which is what we were trying to get away from.
That is the map, and most makers have never seen it laid out, which is why it is sat here for free.
What it is not is the doing. What goes out in which of the six weeks, what the emails say, how you talk about a thing for a month and a half without feeling like a nuisance, none of that is on this page, because it is the part I teach properly rather than in a paragraph.
Part 5 of 5. Two ways, and one of them does not involve me.