Chair Time With Eric Trine, Vol. 2
An advice column for creatives. This month: Balancing your personal and professional brand, plus the role of POV.
Issue 08: “Out to Pasture” is presented by East Fork.
Each month, we’re inviting our community to submit their conundrums—big, small, petty, logistical, professional—for a second opinion. Need to know when to call it quits on a project? Or how to scale your crafty hobby into a career? Or what to do when your product gets knocked off? Over the course of two decades in creative business, Los Angeles–based industrial designer, curator, and Opinionated Man on the Internet Eric Trine has seen it all—and isn’t afraid to tell you what you need to know. Have a question for Eric? Drop us a line. (Submissions will remain anonymous.)
I run a small studio. I find that I’m having to dilute my point of view quite a bit in order to please my clients or win new work. An ideal scenario, of course, is that I find clients that are better aligned with my taste and perspective—but I’m just not there yet, business-wise. What’s your advice for building a business without losing POV?
I hear that! I run a small studio, too. I think this stuff is tough and it doesn’t stop being tough.
The best way to start is to speak plainly about the realities of doing creative work in a market economy that must grow at or above the pace of inflation. That’s the challenge. And it may sound bleak, but stay with me.
Let’s say I’m a salsa maker, and I’ve got a booth at the local market. I’ve got my favorite recipes, my unique contribution to the world of salsa. In fact, I have a degree in it! I have customers. People love my salsa. But how much of my salsa do I actually sell? Can I build a business around just my recipes? And what does it take to do that? Businesses need to generate profit, and the way I do that is by utilizing my particular skill set, training, and experience, to make salsa for other people. I can make salsa in so many ways! I can tweak any recipe. Same ingredients, just a different combination. More spice, less spice, sometimes it’s bland AF. But those customers love “my salsa” too. It doesn’t feel like “my salsa” to me, but it is to them. Because it is for them. That’s the business model—to make things that other people like, and deliver it to them. Sometimes we can do that with all our own recipes, sometimes we need to make recipes for others.
I find that’s the hardest thing to remember with the creative work we do. We’re in the kitchen—that is, the studio, or wherever we do our work—so that, on the other side, when we deliver, they feel like we’ve done magic. We taste it all, so we can create things that others enjoy. Any salsa recipe can be the best salsa someone’s ever had—we just need to bring it to the right marketplace, to the right customer.
Dear Eric, I’m torn on how centrally to locate myself in my brand’s image, particularly on social media and in marketing. Should you anchor your brand to yourself and be the personality, or keep the brand more impersonal, with the work or service as the anchor?
I think it’s really important to separate your business from your identity. No one needs to run a business. A business is something you do if you really want to participate in a specific economy where you can make money. Other than that, it is so important to remember that there are no rules.
None. You can really, truly, actually do whatever you want.
Think of your business as a lit candle flame. That little fire needs fuel and air. So what lights you up? The goal is to keep the fire going at a rate that you don’t feel burnt out, snuffed out, or lacking the fuel you need to continue.
I’m 43 now. I’ve been dancing around the artist/brand/corporation/identity on the internet my whole adult life. In 2009, I was called a “California artist blogger.” In 2014, I was called an “industrial designer,” though I don’t have a degree in the field. (I’ve never even taken an industrial design class.) For years, my Instagram handle was @etrine, and folks would say to me, “Are you the guy who runs ‘Ehtreen’?” As if it was sophisticated and ambiguously European.
In 2018, I changed my business name to Amigo Modern with the direct intent of separating my work from my name. It totally worked. I was at a recent consulting meeting where the client asked me if I knew the “Amigo Modern guy.” My experiment of separating myself from my business name was so effective that many folks love my work without knowing it is my work. (One catch here, though: I generally do not advise changing your business name. Pick it and stick with it for at least 10 years.)
Your work is going to change. Your jobs are going to change. You will likely take on many different titles in your career. And you can count on other folks talking about your work in a way that makes sense to them, too. ⌂