10 Crafty Questions With Katie Hellmuth (Katie-James)

10 Crafty Questions With Katie Hellmuth of Katie-James

1. What kind of art or crafts do you make? I make things from fabric and pixels. Wow, if I could ever physically combine the two that would be cool! Hmmm…For now I suppose I’ll stick with glitter as the pixel part. But I make accessories that are useful and pretty. I call it fengtual – the merging of function and beauty. This includes cat toys made of good fabric they already destroy such as velvet and sequence.

2. When did you get started – and when did you realize this could be a business? It all ignited after I took a fashion design course at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) here in New York. I was a closet drawer, and sketching out outfits inspired by non-clothing, like lipstick bottles, was really fun for me. Pattern making, however, is not part of my brain, so it became too expensive to think I could launch a clothing line. I’ve always liked making things that work, so I started designing accessories. To make the patterns, I worked with a friend’s sister-in-law who was a seamstress/designer at the time for a store in Brooklyn, and is now a rock star on Etsy.

3. Where do you get inspiration for your projects? From my needs, and the needs of others. I wish I could think more abstractly, but I’m purpose driven, so I get to unleash in creativity with unusual fabric and color combinations, and uses for something very simple that no one thought of before.

4. What do you like best about selling through more traditional venues (craft fairs)? I get to see the personal reaction to my items. It helps me realize if I’ve got a winner or (sadly!) a dud. For my dog treat pouch, an accessory I designed at the request of a dog trainer, I had always thought it would make a nice pocket-purse to just drop in credit cards and a phone and go to the grocery store. So when someone bought it as a binoculars case for her bird watching, and then another woman bought it to hang from her baby stroller for her own little items, that confirmed for me that it could have dual purposes.

5. Now, what do you like best about selling online? I love selling online. I love the freedom it has. I love the challenge of trying to reach people. I love the little email I get when something sells. i love packaging the order! I loved designing my site, and I love the ability to expand on my site whenever I want to. It helps that I designed it myself, so I have a little more freedom there, but…

6. How do you price your work? Well, I look at the price of the materials and labor, first and formost. Currently, a woman in Alabama makes my accessories for me because she’s better at it than I am – plain and simple. But, if I made them myself, I’d still factor my rate in there to pay myself for the time it took to make it. I use high quality fabric that is closeout, meaning, there is no more left of it, and sometimes it is designer fabric. Then I look at the beauty factor, and if it’s unique enough to have higher price. I imagine what I would pay for it in a boutique. My jewelry bag for travel, for instance, gets a lot of nose turns from people online because they want one for $10 that an Amish woman made. This isn’t an Amish jewelry bag. It’s a carefully thought out one with square pockets and secured ring loops for easy access, funky color and fabric combinations with beautiful fabric that you’ll never see anywhere else.

7. What has been your biggest struggle with your business? How did you overcome it? Pattern making, I’d say. I am dependent on someone else to help me make prototypes. I did take a class at FIT to help me in this department, but fitting pieces together that didn’t look like they went together just gave me stomach aches. I am still overcoming it, because I need to find someone I have good synergy with to crank out new inventions. I don’t actively look for this person, however, so it takes a while. So far, I have left it to fate.

8. What has been the most rewarding part of your business? Producing the design, and someone buying it. I love matching all of the trimmings (and by matching, I mean unusual matching), sending them to who will make them, and getting them back in a box full of color. I also love growing my business in different directions. When I launched the website division of my business, Katie James Pixelated, I put up free desktop art and Twitter paper on my site, and the possibilities for where that can go is like a new frontier.

9. What is something you wish you knew when you were fist starting your business? You know what I wish I had? www.Collective-E.com. This is my second business I co-founded with two other hands-on partners, and it’s such an expansive outlet and learning center for business owners of all kinds – indieprepreneurs, craftypreneurs, etc. I’m so function happy, so we built with lots of ways to answer all kinds of needs from getting your own PR to building out your website for SEO, to business development in other areas, so many things. It’s also an online and offline group connector that has proved invaluable to growing my little Katie James in all sorts of directions.

10. Do you mind sharing a business goal that you hope to accomplish with your business? Boy oh boy, where to start! And what secrets to entice you with? I want to really launch Friends of Katie James on my site. I have my first designer on the site – Perry M Tote Bags. She hand draws super detailed designs on canvas totes. Hours of work. I want to transform my blog, www.FashionMista.com into a…blog with more dimension, let’s just say. It’s had many makeovers in my mind, and it’s time to put thought to pixel!