The Analog Renaissance, Episode 6: The Box On Your Doorstep

Here is something I have learned after teaching online for more than a decade. Man, a login URL will never compete with something that you can hold. We've been sending workbooks to our students for years, probably going on four or five years. But this year we completely reinvented what arrives at our students doorstep and it is full of magic. This is episode 6 of 9 of the Analog Renaissance, a series where I'm sharing the eight different ways that we've stepped fully into the analog moment as creatives and as entrepreneurs. Each episode focuses on one shift what we've done, how it has worked for us in over the last 18 months, and how we've applied it to our business. How you can apply it to yours too. If you want all the context I would recommend listening to. Episode number one of this series called the Wake Up Call. Today is about one of the most impactful changes that we've ever made to any of our online education Analog Advantage Way Number 6 Physical course deliverables now the data that has changed everything in our approach are that students who read on paper, they score higher in comprehension tests. Learning by hand increases retention and commitment and follow through. Print comprehension is six to eight times higher than digital and tangible objects create emotional investment in completion. So when your course shows up as a tangible thing, it becomes real in a way that a URL just never can. It sits on their desk. It serves as a reminder. It's way more top of mind than a bookmark in their browser. For Surface Design Immersion, our number one goal has never been to get them to enroll. Our number one goal is to get them to their success story. It's to get them to completion and to accomplish the thing that they set out to do in the first place to help them fully step into their role as creative directors of their patterns, of their careers and of their lives. So we asked the new question, what if a course doesn't just deliver on screen? What if it arrived at their doorsteps? So when students join the Surface Design Immersion Course 2026, the brand new box experience arrives on their doorstep. Now this goes back for me many years to a course that I took in 2019. It was called the Membership Experience by Stu McLaren and I got a box on my door and inside was an envelope for every module that we got to open along the way. And it completed a puzzle. And at the end of the course the puzzle gave me access, I think, to ordering a T shirt. This course, the Membership Experience, is hands down my favorite course. I've retaken it many, many times and have since become dear friends with Stu McLaren and have been in his mastermind since 2019 as well. But that tangible experience alongside the online course was the first time that I had ever experienced it and it stuck with me. It made a huge difference in my ability to participate in this course. In fact, this is so fun to remember. It is the first course that I ever finished. Did it have to do with that tangible aspect? I think it did. So our workbook has evolved many times over the years. The first year was envelopes that we assembled by hand and shipped out from my studio and then it went into a higher production workbook. This year it is covered in flowers and gold lettering. It's a total experience and students are going to open it up and find tucked inside a linen, linen bound workbook. The linen is oatmeal colored. It's got a gold foil press logo on the front. It's over 330 pages of beautiful pages that are all tabbed for students. I shared all about this in a previous episode where the workbook really is working to pull the students deeper. It expands, it invites, it becomes the place where growth actually takes place. Now this new workbook is where inspiration gets taped in and collections get mapped mapped out and patterns get planned and rearranged and ideas get sketched out and dreams get written down. Students are actually being called to document their creative process, progress and growth. So where the course teaches, the workbook holds. Inside. There are dot grids for mapping out collections and open space for taping in inspiration alongside the workbook they get our Weeds and Seeds mindset cards. This is cards that replace limiting beliefs, that trip us all up with empowering ones that replace that. A scratch off card to mark their progress as they move throughout the modules. A daily habit tracker, a graduation certificate that's gold foil pressed and gorgeous keyboard shortcut stickers to help them learn Adobe Illustrator more quickly. But here's the newest thing. The Inspiration Collection part includes a mood board kit. So inside the box is something we've never done before. This is the first year ever that we've created a mood board kit for the course. This year it became necessary. We created the Inspiration Collection Mood Board kit as a direct response to the rise of analog to what we're all feeling right now. Overwhelmed and overstimulated and starting creative work from a glowing screen feels backwards. So this year we change the starting line before the software, before looking at vectors and perfection, before productivity. We give students a pre digital playground, a tactile space designed to help them gather and arrange and see their ideas before they ever open a computer. It comes with cork boards and tracing paper and color palettes and mark making tools and ephemera from my own collection. This kit teaches something no video ever could how to notice, how to curate, how to build a visual story with your own two hands. Students add pressed flowers from their garden, or postcards from their trips, or textures from the antique mall, or something from their everyday life, and slowly, something powerful happens. By the time they sit down at their computer, they're no longer staring at a blank screen, they're translating something that actually already exists, something that they have touched and lived with and curated and arranged. That's why we added it this year, because the future of creative education is not more digital. It is digital. Supported by analog. Pattern is having a moment. From bold wallpaper to checkered mugs to stripy pajamas and floral notebooks, the world is embracing color and texture and personality again. We are officially living in the era of pattern drenching. And honestly, I'm so here for it. If you've been noticing it too and thinking, I wonder if I could make patterns, you absolutely can. And the best way to do it is by using Adobe Illustrator. It's where I created my very first repeating pattern over a decade ago, and it's still the tool that I use and teach today. Because it's designed for this kind of creative work and it's trusted across the entire industry on a global basis, Illustrator makes designing seamless repeating patterns feel intuitive. You can easily tweak colors, scale your artwork, and move things around without starting over. Everything stays crisp because it's all vector based. And when you're ready to put your pattern onto a real product, well, Illustrator works beautifully with printers, manufacturers and licensing partners. So whether you're creating patterns for your notebooks, your living room walls, or dreaming of turning your creativity into a career, Illustrator helps your ideas. Go from sketch to look at what I made, head on over to our show Notes, Open Adobe Illustrator and have some fun. Pattern is having a moment and Illustrator is how you join it. We also do an alumni launch. You have likely heard me talk about this before. If you come experience the Immersion course, you become an alumni and alumni are invited back to retake the new version of the course at 75 off. So if you're an alumni listening to this, don't forget you always have this discount and we want you to come back and join the new version of the course and the community and participate as much as you can. So of course alumni Also get the new student box experience. There's a sticker on the front that says, hold up, before you open this, go grab your phone, document this and tag me. What that does is encourage everyone to show this box. And it's one of my favorite parts of, of this whole period is seeing your face when you open this box and experience everything that we have in store for you for the first time. Now here's the takeaway. Tangible objects create emotional investment that digital content just cannot replicate. So for every educator, creator, and creative entrepreneur, this is the question I want you to ask. If you mailed your students one thing that would support their learning, what would it be? Some ideas could be an implementation workbook, a welcome box that arrives before the program begins, a celebratory gift at the end of the program that they get to claim a printable companion for each module. That even if they have to print it out themselves. Right? It becomes this physical notion of progress, a physical upgrade option at checkout. So maybe they're buying a digital course, but at the moment of checkout, they can add some physical element that deepens their experience. It could be a journal or a habit tracker, some kind of kit of supplies, maybe a letter and a stamp for them to write to their future self. Right? When learning becomes something that you can touch and flip through and mark up, people linger. They're more likely to finish. They believe in themselves faster and they're more likely to be successful. But here's the thing about sending something beautiful to someone's doorstep. It doesn't matter if they never open it. Well, it matters. But you know what matters more? Whether they actually finish. Self paced courses have a 3 to 15% completion rate. That's the industry average, which is why we remembered that alongside Analog, it's a rise for genuine connection. In the next episode, I'll tell you about the $97 order bump that creates friends for life and a coaching experiment that has surprised us. And the two word credential that's keeping people going for 11 months straight. My friends create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you.