Anna Seager, Little Crab Designs www.littlecrab.co.uk
Make and sell nursery wall art and pictures for children’s bedrooms.
How I started in business:
I started Little Crab Designs, creating and producing art for little people, just over three years ago. My dad had been very ill and this difficult time led me to re-evaluate my life and realise the work I was doing was not fitting in round the kids as I wanted it to. Whilst staying with friend and artist, Sarah Howell, one weekend in the summer of 2006, the two of us decided that, with my marketing and sales experience and her creative talent, we could work together to sell her artwork more commercially. She painted some watercolour pictures which I digitalised and got printed onto canvas. I took a stand at my children’s school Christmas fair and had a huge amount of interest in them, several orders and a sense of excitement that I had hit on something viable!
The first year was a huge amount of product design, testing different sales channels and making LOTS of mistakes! I learnt many lessons such as fairs were a lot of works with very little reward even a loss sometimes! Wholesaling to retailers meant that I did all the work they made all the money!! So after evaluating that first year and wondering where to go from there I decided that to concentrate on the website was the way to go â“ and would also be the best way of achieving what I had set out to do, which was to work from home around the kids. Since then, the website has gone from strength to strength, growing month on month. Today, Sarah supplies me with some of the artwork for which she gets paid a commission on every sale and I do some of the designs myself which I really enjoy.
Where you looked for information and where you found it:
I used Business Link a lot, they are fantastic, and I have had two free business reviews, a free website review and lots of free training. These days I use sites like mums club which are brilliant for support and information.
How long have you been going and what stage are you at now:
I have just gone past the three year mark and the sales are growing month on month. I am now making a regular monthly income that allows me to pay for treats, holidays, kids activities etc, so I feel like I am making a real contribution to the family income.
