I know. It’s been a long time since I last posted… rest assured I feel suitably embarrassed, but I’m going to try and do a bit of a catch up for anyone still lurking… (Gawd bless ya!)
While I have been beavering away on random Kookizu-esque experiments when I’ve had time (I’ll upload some stuff in other posts, this one might be pretty long!) and making sure any shop orders that were coming though still went out on time, last year I basically realised I really needed to buckle down again with the day job so that I could make sure I could do some quite important things, like pay bills and eat food!
Sadly, although I was more than chuffed with how my little venture went, I never quite managed to grow it to a point where I could hire some Oompah Loompah’s to do all the hard work so I could spend my days just designing cute stuff in between sipping champagne from a Loubitin shoe… or whatever it is that mega successful & wealthy entrepreneurs do!) Focusing on the day job turned out pretty well though, because last year saw some really fun and varied ‘proper work’ projects for me to work on, including doing the illustrations for a couple of music videos!
I was reluctant to make some kind of formal announcement about this and the future of my little shop, mainly because I wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen myself, but also because I was still hoping at some point I might be able to do what I’d done for the previous few years – which was to try and schedule time off between work projects or use the evenings/weekends to make big batches of new stuff and keep everything stocked and updated in the shop, but I’ve also been pretty unwell which means for the last part of the year any time I wasn’t working I was trying to rest up a bit… sometimes voluntarily, sometimes because I was passing out – not so good!
So, I think what I’ve decided now is to say that it’s unlikely I’ll be making any new acrylic jewellery for the time being (I’m still very reluctant to say that I’ll NEVER do it again though… it is a brilliant, if slightly limited in colour palette, material to work with – and if I have some cute ideas that I really want to make I’ll get the lasers fired up again!)
I do plan to continue developing ideas, products and characters in any spare moments I get because I’ve always done it and I just can’t give up the creepy/cute obsession that easily, but I think it might be good for me to try and take another approach and do stuff where other people would eventually be responsible for producing the end products. I’m hoping this might allow me to carry on doing something I enjoy, but fit around the way I need to work a bit better.
It also means I wouldn’t need to limit any ideas to things I would be able to self produce, which I was finding completely frustrating if I’m honest.
There’s nothing worse than having a bunch of ideas you’d love to make a reality and being held back because they need to be manufactured properly somewhere – and in order to be able to sell things at a price you find reasonable you’d need to order around 10,000 of those things…and you just don’t have the funds available to order 10,000 things… and you only really wanted a few hundred things at most anyway!
Who knows if I’m making the right decision or not – I know it’s notoriously hard and competitive to try and get into the licensing of original characters and designs – but it feels right and worth a proper try anyway!
I do still have a few things left in my Kookizu shop (for some designs literally 1 or 2 items) so I’ve decided that I’m going to keep it open until around April to see if anybody out there wants to give them good homes, and then decide what I should do next… If there’s anything there that you ever really fancied having, use the code KOOK40 for 40% off your order.
I’ll try and post things here a bit more now I’ve finally gotten over my shame of not posting for ages – I’ve actually found I put stuff up on Flickr the most (is that considered old skool now? I think I’m supposed to be Tumbling and Instagramming…) I still really like Flickr… probably because you don’t have to try and think of things to say, you just put up and look at the nice pictures 
To end this mammoth post, I just want to share this. I saw a talk by the brilliant illustrator Rilla Alexander the other day that really got my brain ticking over and made me finally make a few decisions – the lovely Lady in Red, she speaks a lot of sense! It’s really worth a watch if you tend to be a terrible procrastinator!
Without the Doing, Dreaming is Useless.
such an inspiring post, thank you and i hope that you will find time in the future to re start your venture. Never give up on a good idea.
good luck
Aww thanks Jo, that’s really nice of you! Yeah definitely not giving up, just changing the way things are done a bit to allow me to hopefully do it better