I’m a rat, I adapt
Being autistic person living in a neurotypical world taught me how to survive. How to take the resources I have at the moment and make the best out of them, even if it means changing the path I am currently on. I changed my strategy, my priorities countless times over the last years. Like a rat who knows the ship is sinking and it’s time to move on the the next idea. I am a rat, I adapt.
My online shop was an answer to fast changing situation in the world. With taking safety time off tattooing in 2020, blocked at home during first and second lockdown, having plenty of time to start my website, develop products and fully dedicate to it.
After a while, my younger sister Zosia joined my team and started sewing awesome products for the shop and eventually in 2022 moved to France to take over managing my shop as I was slowly transferring back to tattooing. Things went a bit sideways then, with Zosia deciding after few months to drop this adventure all together and taking a different, not self employed, lifestyle. It left me juggling the online shop, tattoo stuff, preparing illustration portfolio, social media, and more.
At the beginning of December 2023 I couldn’t relate more to the words of Bilbo Baggins, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
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Looking back at 2023, I noticed a painful pattern.
Let’s check together what parts of my work were the most time consuming. We start at the bottom of the list…
4. The amount of time I spent drawing, either things for my illustration portfolio or tattoo flash book, was laughable. Come to the circus and laugh at her: Agata Zlotko, an artist, an illustrator who doesn’t draw. I was happy on the weeks where I found two days only for drawing.
3. Continuing the self audit, I spent a good chunk of my work time trying to develop new products to my shop, that would not require my sister sewing.
2. On the memorable second place we have all the administrative things like answering emails, taking care of orders from the shop, finishing some renovations at Chez Zlotko. Managing, maintaining.
And then the horrible conclusion:
1. This year, it seems that I spent majority of my time, mental energy and efforts trying to take care of my social media presence. This includes scheming how to get famous, scrolling TikTok in search for inspiration, filming myself “in case I can use it for TikTok or reel”, coming up with content ideas, putting together the videos of my work.
Funnily enough, I did achieve some effects. I focused my social media efforts between September and November and in that time I had two fairly viral reels, that helped to grow my audience significantly. For a short moment I almost did well on TikTok. But before things really took off, I needed to immediately slow down. The intensity, the amount of work and effort. It was too much. It was not sustainable. And it seems that all the gains I got from my efforts didn’t translate to anything else in my business than a subtle ego boost and the feeling of a task completed.
Most importantly, I didn’t have fun. I haven’t had real fun on instagram since August 2020 when reels got introduced. I’ve never had fun on TikTok. The best I got out of TikTok were the periods of not hating it but silently accepting my faith of becoming a silly video creator. In these 3 years of video format revolution, I haven’t manage to find a way to utilise it on my own terms. These 3 years were hard in so many years but I tried to act aloof on social media because that’s what people like. I tried getting inspired by others, I tried following advice. I’m still hoping that one day I will find my own way create short video content. But right now I feel like I received a friendly slap in my face, sobered up and decided to do Agata Zlotko’s special:
adapt.
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Decision 1: I closed the online shop. The only tough side of the decision was truly sentimental. The shop helped me to survive the pandemic, it was fun at times, it gave me lots of motivation to work (at times). It was, for a while, mine and my sister’s shared dream. But the numbers were cruel. In 2023 the amount of time and energy spent vs actual profits from it, made it clear that it’s time to say goodbye to it.
But this decision uncovered an interesting discovery. Without having to advertise my products on social media, what’s left over there for me?
After killing the shop, my core business practice is tattooing. (It has always been but the amount of work with the online shop overshadowed it.) My secondary activity, illustration, is a wish-to-up come-true and doesn’t bring any mentionable, reliable income.
From here, let’s forget about the online shop and move on. My main source of income is tattooing so let’s look at it via lens of social media.
The relatively high number of followers I have, never converted to higher engagement, better sales, or more tattoo requests. I’d even say all of these things are on decline since beginning of 2021.
Since my tattoo business is not based on guest spots, my international audience is just a nice addition to a community side of social media. But the follower-to-client conversion will be sporadical and cannot be a foundation of my business.
It seems that clients from Nancy that I had this year were mostly coming from instagram (were followers for years, didn’t randomly find me in the last two years since I’m here), then from recommendations of their friends, coworkers or family who already got tattooed by me. Few people discovered me thanks to the window of my shop. Two clients acquired thanks to early stages of silly marketing.
There is no way that I know of, to make a regular (non sponsored) post, reel or story on instagram that would be shown to people based on their location like Nancy or Grand Est.
Something I knew but didn’t think about it for a while: Instagram is not a search engine, so any content I post there has a life span of max 1 week and then falls into the abyss.
And lastly: I am not good at using instagram as a marketing tool. The best times I had on the app were the moments of community coming together. Like when you helped me to gather money for a plane ticket for a Ukrainian refugee family that was staying at my place! These moments were remarkable. But trying to market my products or services has been always painful.
Another sobering step towards the reshaping of my business:
Let’s assume that nothing changes and the French tattoo re-sharing profiles will not suddenly start sharing my work. Let’s assume that I won’t win the social media lottery, exactly like I haven’t won it in the last 2500 days of being on instagram (since 2016 babyyy). Let’s stop wasting creative energy on magical tale of going viral.
The truth is that every time I post is like first time posting there, I know nothing. I have no idea why some posts or reels take over and other don’t. It’s a gamble each time.
At the beginning of December few things happened. As discussed above, I decided to close my online shop. Just a few days later I discovered podcast Off The Grid that’s about having small business without social media presence. It all clicked so perfectly.
Decision 2: I’m taking my energy and efforts and relocating them from my social media to the real world. Off The Grid provides a super inspiring list of “100 ways you can market yourself off the social media”. I swear, that list and first few episodes of the show lit the fire in me. I immediately started working on my new strategy on how to actually get local tattoo clients from Nancy. And what can I say other than… You are going to love it. In two days I drafted marketing ideas that stretch as far as autumn 2024. Inspiring ideas on how to get new fans outside of social media. Funny ideas. Silly ideas. Let’s call it from now on:
Silly Marketing
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I’m a rat, I adapt. If the current way of conducting my business is not optimal for me, I adapt.
Part of the Silly Marketing strategy is sending out newsletter (sans marketing) and writing a blog, like in the good old times. I just know that there is so many other creatives, discouraged just like me. I want to share my ideas and doings, in case they can inspire to take action and readapt your business. I also want my blog to be a journal of this adventure and a tool to keep myself accountable. This project is a slow burn and I might not see any difference in the tattoo client flow probably up to a second half of 2024. But for once I just have to keep going!
At this point you might be asking: is she another artist leaving social media? The answer is: not at all. I love my followers, I love my little community, I love to share my work and my life with you there. I hope that taking off the pressure of selling things in my online shop, and part of pressure for getting a new, local tattoo audience will actually help me to once again have fun on social media.
Let’s wrap this up here. And see you in 2024, the year of Silly Marketing!
