198: Inside Our Creative Spring: From Magazines to Memberships

Hello there. Welcome back to the Professional Creative. This is Bonnie and I'm so excited for this little episode because if you are a regular listener, you might have noticed that I took a little bit of a spring break. So happy spring. It was all for really good reason and so I wanted to do just a short kind of off the cuff episode for you today to let you know what we've been up to, what we have coming up, and what you can expect on the podcast coming up as well.

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life.

When I first set out to become

an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast

we've had as a team and a business. So many things in the works. Me and my leadership team, we met in January and this kind of stream of ideas that we had been thinking about and working on gently over the previous six months, six months, all kind of came to kind of like bubble to the top all at the same time. And so we decided to roll out this three to four month plan, create mini teams on our larger team to work on separate projects and kind of go head down to create some of the best work that we've done in our lives. And so one of the things that we had to put down for just a moment was the podcast, which has been really a gift to us. And so now we're coming back and we have so many things in store. Well, so I'm going to go over all of them. We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 things that are really major and I want to talk you through all of them. But also the Surface Design Immersion course, which is the biggest course I teach all year. It's coming into its last week at the time time that I'm recording this episode. So we are just wrapping up this big course and serving students. It's been one of my favorite years of teaching and Serving this body of students ever. And so that has been happening in the background. But I want to talk you through some of the things that are coming up. The first one is a magazine. Yes, you heard me, it's a magazine. This magazine has been on my five year vision goal list forever, probably more than five years. And we saw an opportunity to make it come to life and so we did. The magazine is called are you ready? It's called pattern magazine and we have just sent the first issue to publish to print. Oh my goodness. I'm so excited about this magazine. It is a celebration specifically for my industry of artists and designers. So surface pattern designers, graphic designers, illustrators, creativity and honestly just human made artistry and what we do to create beauty in the world. It is filled with inspiring stories and creative insights. It's also filled with a lot of strategy. Meaning my number one goal was how do I make a magazine that no one will ever throw away because it's filled with so much helpful information. So it's this really beautiful balance. If you read it from COVID to cover, it takes you through an experience from really getting inspired to getting nitty gritty and very strategic and then coming out with a plan. So like productivity. So the whole magazine is divided into four different sections. It starts with patterns of living and lifestyle. This is beautiful. You get to take a peek inside my garden and figure out what I carry to work with me every day. But also meet some really inspiring artists like Kara Cummings throughout this section of the magazine. Then we move into patterns of business and strategy. So this is where we get down to business. You're going to hear from some incredible artists. Karen Shipper, Awana Beffert, Melissa Johnson, Sarah Borne Rafferty. You're also going to learn about the world of licensing and how to attract your ideal clients. That moves us into patterns of productivity and creation. You're going to learn from Diane Hill, who teaches on Chinoiserie. You're going to learn how to savor the slowness of summer. You're going to learn how to craft a compelling brand and have tips for photo shoots. You are going to meet Helen Dieltree in this section. And then we move into the final section which is patterns in motion. So we're going to take you through really taking what you've learned, putting it into motion. You're going to get a mood board, trend report, color forecasts. And then at the end, so fun are some tear out pages of beautiful images that you can tear out to use for your mood boards. Okay, so we're so excited about this. It's going to be a quarterly print production. So this is Q3's issue that we just sent to print. So this is going to be available for purchase both digital and in person. Print Analog Gorgeousness in early June. Okay, so it's Pattern Magazine coming in early June. We're so incredibly excited to bring this thing to life. I have felt this huge pull to just coming back to Analog experiences and holding something beautiful and really just having that moment. And this magazine, I hope, is what it does for you. So that is number one. Okay. Number two is a brand new membership called Pattern Plus. So the membership is on the back end. An evolution of Flourish. So I've had flourish since 2012 and it has kind of evolved and grown and changed over the years. And so this has been an enormous growth all the way down to the very name. So Flourish members got to experience Pattern plus for the first time in April. We're opening it to alumni in mid May, and then I'm thrilled to announce that we're opening it to the public. This is the first time that I will have had a public membership offer in several years. And this is coming on May 27th. So mark your calendars. May 27th. You're gonna be invited to join us for Pattern plus membership. Now, what is it? The Pattern plus membership is specifically designed for busy creatives who want to excel and kind of fast track their success. So it's taking a step away from teaching and learning more and more and more and taking a step towards actually being really productive with what it is that you have. It is based on saving you time, streamlining your process and giving you opportunities. We're going to have all the details for you to view again at the end of May, but I'll run through what the inside of a single month in Pattern plus looks like. The first thing you get is something that we call the monthly Industry Kit. This is specific for Surface pattern designers. It is two beautiful soul filled mock ups that we hand curate, photograph and turn into mockups ourselves. This is for you to show off your work in a professional way. You get the Social Studio, which is a full month content planner with prompts, trends that you can follow on social media key dates every month so that your content planning is just made incredibly easy. And this also helps you increase your visibility and just get your head wrapped around what's coming up in the month of June that I can bring to my social platforms. You get a done for you business template. These are centered around simplifying your Life. So for instance, the one in April was a Surface pattern design collection planner. The one in May is a pitch tracker to help you keep track of all of your pitches and all the things that you need to in order to keep that super organized and structured. And so every month you get a done for you template that we are finding incredibly helpful. And then you get a designer focused AI prompt specifically built to save you time. So to be clear, these AI prompts, they're never there to replace your creativity or replace your design approach. They're there to quicken your work. And so I am so excited about the focus and it's a bit nuanced, is like take what you're doing and quicken it for you so that you have more time to do what matters most.

Okay, picture this. Have you ever spent hours scouring through your video or maybe your podcast content trying to find that one place that you said that one thing? Or if you've forgotten or never found it and you had to re record everything? I've been there and it's so frustrating and honestly a huge waste of time. But it hasn't happened to me ever since I started using Searchy. Searchie is the software that I use for all of my videos and all of my podcast content because it not only transcribes it, but it makes it searchable by key word. And so for you to see this in action, I have an example set up for you over on bonniecristine.comresources again, that's bonniechristine.com forward/resources. And you can actually play with Searchy

and see how it looks on one

of our videos, because once you understand what it does, it's a game changer. I also host all of my workshop and my class, my membership and course material through Searchie as well. So students can search for any question that they have and go to the exact time in place where I talked

about that one thing.

And just imagine this.

If I ever do a Q and

A and they want to know if I answered their question, all they have to do is search for their name and see if I did or not. It's literally like having your very own personal search engine for your content. So no more wasting time scrubbing through your video or audio to find that one golden nugget. With Searchie, you can easily find what you're looking for in seconds. Just type in a keyword or phrase and Searchie will pull up all the relevant content. It's a game changer for anyone who create audio or video content.

But honestly, that's not all.

Searchie's new AI powered transcription and captioning tool makes it easy to create accessible content that everyone can get access to. And with their customizable player, you can embed your videos and your podcasts on your website or social media channels in a way that looks and feels so professional. So if you are ready to take your video or your podcast content to the next level, head on over to BonnieCristine.com resources and just give Searchie a try. It's incredible. I think you're going to love it and I can't wait to see how it revolutionizes the way you create content.

The second one is probably the thing that we're most excited about and it's a real life licensing opportunity. So every month you get a professional design brief to work work towards and an invitation along with that is to actually submit your finished work to a company that we've curated for you. So it's basically a monthly challenge where somebody earns the licensing opportunity for that month. So we are so incredibly excited about this for our members. One thing to note here that I think is important is that if you've been in my world for a while, I teach Adobe Illustrator and so many of our programs are Illustrator specific, not Pattern Plus. So Pattern plus is open to any type of artist, whether they use Illustrator or Photoshop or Affinity or Procreate, because every company will outline in their brief what kind of file submissions they're looking for. And so this is also an exciting kind of opportunity for us to present. The other thing that I think is so exciting is that besides the actual opportunity to earn the licensing deal, you get hands on experience with professional design briefs month after month. So you can really grasp what companies are asking for and get used to working to these briefs in this way. And you'll end each month with a portfolio ready piece, which is so incredibly exciting. Next every month you'll get live coaching with me, which is one of my favorite things that I do. I did it for the professional business coaching program that we ended up sunsetting last year, but we had a year of coaching with students. This is where I can really go deep on singular topics with students. And so it is so much more than like a traditional Q and A. It is where we really get work done. Of course, members also get the digital version of the Pattern magazine with the option of kind of adding on the print version and quarterly industry trend reports. So these trend reports are robust, they are research based and they're about 35 plus pages. And so they cover both micro and macro trends in patterns, motifs, typography and colors. So this is really there to fuel pattern designers to spark their inspiration and to also help align their work with what is trending. Now though, we're really excited about this. Again, it's opening to the public on May 27, so if you're interested to learn more, just come join our email list over@bonniecristine.com is the best place to stay in the loop about all of these things. The next one is our Shop Flowery Permanent opening. So Shop Flowery is our product shop and we launched a beta version in the fall right before the holidays, and then we closed down to prep for spring and summer. So we are officially opening our online shop June 17. This will include the opportunity for wholesale, if anyone is interested in having a wholesale account with us. And we are bringing to life just some of the most beautiful products I've ever had the privilege of working on. And this will be the moment that our shop opens for good. So we won't be closing down after this. We'll be releasing new collections each season. Again, that's happening June 17th. The next one is the Licensing Expo. So this is a huge undertaking that has been so incredibly exciting. We are exhibiting at one of the world's largest trade shows for licensing, called the Licensing Expo. It's happening in Las Vegas May 20th through the 22nd. I've been trying to share as much as I can on Instagram about our booth build and the kind of the behind the scenes. And so we have rented a sizable booth. It's 20 by 30ft, which is 600 square feet, which requires a full booth build out. And this has had me just touching every piece of work I've ever done. In the last few weeks, I have ordered 235 fabric samples, over 200 wallpaper samples, over 200 paper samples. And this expo has really been the driving factor behind a new collection for me, a new portfolio for me. We're working on a new portfolio site and I'm thrilled to just bring what it is that we do to life in this way. We are hoping to meet with new partnerships, new brands while we're there, specifically for licensing, but also for connecting on all of the different things that we have going on in our ethos, like potential licensing partners for Pattern plus members and potential features in Pattern magazine. So it's a real kind of moment in time for us to kind of surface and bring what we've been doing to life in a way that. That I think is going to be really exciting. So me and about, I can't count five or six of my team members flying out to Vegas to do this show. So we'll be there. If you're in the area, I'd love to meet you. And then I guess the last thing that is very much worth talking about is our team strategy session. So our team, there's 13 of us, and we work virtually, so we hear each other's voices all day on Slack and we see each other on Zoom. But it's a rare occasion that we get to be in person together. In fact, everyone in person only happens once a year. And so we just wrapped this. We were in Atlanta last week and we went to Atlanta, really, just because everyone could get a direct flight and two of us could drive, including me, which makes it easy because I have so much stuff to take to something like a team strategy event. And so we spent three or four days together. We kicked off with a fun event. We did custom painted leather journals and custom bag making at Glad and Young's studio in Atlanta. And then we had a rooftop dinner at Ponce City Market. So fun. And then the next two days, we were in team strategy from nine to five together. And so this is where we really get to do a deep dive on every single program, product, initiative that we have with one thing in mind, which is student results. We want to look at everything we do with the filter of is it meaningful? Is it impactful? Is it making people, helping them live the life that they want to live? And so we're just walking away from this strategy session, so full of inspiration, so full of just momentum. And it was a wonderful time. We ended that in my room with a taco bar and a big old game of fishbowl. If you've never played fishbowl, you have to. You have to give it a quick Google. It's super fun, and it's something that you can do anywhere with a group of people. So that's what we've been up to. Let me cover some things that are coming up here on the podcast and what you can expect. We are resuming Thursday episodes. So this Thursday, you're going to meet my personal mentor, Stu McLaren. We're going to be talking about memberships and recurring revenue. So if this is something that you're interested in, I adore Stu. You are, too. I hope that you enjoy this episode. In the next several episodes, we're also going to be covering the role of surveys and how we use surveys to shape our business strategies, especially when we do something like transition the membership flourish to pattern. Plus, you'll also learn about how we organize our weekly newsletter and how this has been so incredibly impactful for us. And you're also going to learn how we celebrate workiversaries on Team Bonnie. I think this is so fun. It's something that really contributes to our to our culture on Team Bonnie. And we do a bunch of fun things, so we are going to be sharing them all with you. That's what's on the horizon. I can't wait to meet you there. Thank you so much for listening. I'm glad to be back in your ear and I'll see you. No, I will meet you back here on Thursday. Until then, friends, create the beauty that you want to see. Come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you.