Tag: creative business

From Self-Made Cosmetics to Brand Identity: What I Would Do Differently Now

A Small Business That Taught Me Everything

Over ten years ago I ran a small cosmetics company. I made self-made, natural products for skin and hair. The business does not exist anymore, yet it became a learning experience that I now treat as a case study. In the coming videos I want to show what I would do differently with the tools and resources sitting in my hands today. Let me get into it.

The Difference Between Labeling and Branding

I am a highly creative person, and for those who know me, I am also an artist. So I was hands-on with the labeling. What I did not understand back then is that labeling is not the same as building a brand. People speak a lot about brand, and the way I have come to understand it, branding is about identity, and whether a group of people speak, relate, and feel drawn to who you are. Not only who you are as a person, but the way things are done by you, the way the brand behaves. A brand has a name. It might have a logo. These are elements of a brand, not the brand itself, so the terms should not be used interchangeably.

Giving an identity to an object became the hard part. I went back and forth choosing jars, the way each one would present, the colors, the way the product needed to sit in front of a customer. How does it speak to that customer? That question led to production costs, inventory costs, and the creative costs poured into the work. The outcome was a business without a solid brand identity.[1]

When People Forget You, Your Product Stops Mattering

Here is what a weak identity leads to. People did not think my products were bad. I received compliments. The products held their quality. The problem sat somewhere else. People forgot me. They saw me once and forgot who I was. I was banking on the hope that customers would use the product and keep buying it on repeat.

Even when a product is top tier, triple A plus, a customer who forgets you will reach for a brand that is as good, or sometimes weaker, because that brand shows itself better and builds an identity worth connecting to. Quality alone does not hold attention. A brand identity is the way you speak, connect, and relate to the customer in front of you right now. Brands grow when they stay easy to remember and easy to find.[2]

The Tools Available to Me Now

If I looked at the resources available now, I would put language first. My website would be filled with words that relate to the audience I am speaking to. I would run the research, study the audience, and shape copy with chatGPT so that the message speaks to people and they recognize themselves as a customer of the product. They see themselves using it. They see it sitting in their bathroom or their bedroom. They would not want to leave the door without rubbing on a butter that I created.[3]

I would produce a range of mockups and test what people respond to. Put them in front of an audience through social media creation and watch what speaks. This is content creation working in service of identity, and it feeds directly into a clear social media management plan.

These resources do not take over the company. They supplement, support, and strengthen. A social media management tool, paired with steady workflow automation, would have helped me reach a better understanding of the brand, the identity, the colors, the logo. These are elements that come together into one full picture. A workspace such as Claude Cowork sits beside the creative work as a partner, the way a creative agency supports founders, artists, content creators, and influencers who run art galleries or product lines without a large team behind them.

It is even possible to scan your social media pages with a research tool. I have seen this across a number of videos, and I need to test whether it works here in the Netherlands. Scanning your pages lets you ask whether the brand speaks to the people who follow you, and how to build social media management around the brand itself. This would have helped me a thousand times.

Creativity Strengthened, Not Replaced

These tools do not push creativity away. They accentuate it. Used well, they help build better strategy and reveal the identity of a brand. Whether you run your own pages or you are outsourcing social media to a partner, the work stays rooted in who you are. The social media management tools sharpen the strategy. The vision stays yours.

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Footnotes

[1] Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap, New Riders Publishing, 2003, https://www.marty-neumeier.com. Neumeier defines a brand as the gut feeling a person holds about a product, separate from the name or logo, which supports the point that labeling and decorating jars is not the same as building a brand.

[2] Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, Oxford University Press, 2010, https://global.oup.com. Sharp shows that brands grow through mental and physical availability, meaning being remembered and easy to find, which supports the section on customers forgetting the business despite a quality product.

[3] Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, Marketing Management, Pearson, 2016, https://www.pearson.com. Kotler and Keller frame brand identity as the consistent way a company communicates with and relates to its target audience, which supports building identity through language, copy, and audience research tools.

Your Mouth Is a Container and Your Words Are the Tenants

Your mouth is a container. The words you speak reside inside it before they ever reach the world. When the mind drops words into that container without intention, when you say things mindlessly, when you are unaware of what it is that you are saying, the effect reaches further than you. It lands on you. It shapes how others interact with you, or whether they want to interact with you at all. A lot of what happens to us sits inside what we say, and it tricks us. It tricks you.

The Sentence That Sounds Humble but Works Against You

Here is one of the trickiest things a person says: I do not believe anybody is better than anyone else. I am not better than anybody else. It sounds gracious. It sounds safe. I know this is going to feel controversial, but we are getting into it anyway.

I started thinking about this after hearing it in a piece of content from a creator I follow. I love his content. He is such a straight shooter that you either take it or you leave it. He was speaking on a particular topic, and someone responded by telling him that nobody is better than anybody else, suggesting he had placed himself above another person.

His answer was direct. He said he knows he is better than someone else, and that is exactly why he makes the choices he makes and has the life he has. He explained it plainly. He wants to be better than the people he does not want to share space with. He does not want to sit in the company of those who are doing bad, thinking bad, and acting on bad things. So he has to believe and know that he stands apart from that. That belief produces his results.

The Part That Sounds Harsh Until It Lands

Then he nipped it in the bud, the way he usually does. Do not come asking me who the creator is, because I am not going to say it. It is his content, and I am using it only as an example.

What he said to the responder went like this. Of course you believe you are not better than anybody else. That is why you have the results that you have. I do not have that problem.

It sounds harsh.

Let it sink in, though.

He was dissecting another person by pointing at the belief itself. Because you hold that belief, you used your mouth as the container for the words that came out of it. That does not place the two of you on the same level. It cannot, and it will not. You are right about yourself, he said, for not believing you are better. And I am right to know that I am. The results follow accordingly. He closed the door. We will not be discussing this any further.

When I saw that exchange, I sat with it.

Why This Matters for Anyone Building Something

For a lot of people, this is going to sting. How dare someone say they are better than another person. I am not going to over explain it here, because I need people to think for themselves. If you do not want to think about it, you scroll on.

The magnitude of understanding what happens inside that container changes how you use it. Once you grasp it, you start being mindful of what goes in. You become aware of what the container begins to attract back to you. This is not a soft idea reserved for personal life. It sits at the center of how founders speak about their work, how content creators frame their value, and how influencers describe what they stand for. Research on self efficacy shows that the beliefs people hold about their own capability shape the goals they set and the outcomes they reach.[^1]

Watch any creative agency that has lasted. The people running it do not water down their language. They speak with precision about who they serve and who they do not. The same holds for anyone in social media management. When you describe what you do with conviction, you attract the right clients and repel the wrong ones, and that selection is the work. Words are commitments, and the words we accept as true become the boundaries of the action we take.[^2]

Speak With Intention, Attract With Precision

The lesson sits in front of us. Treat your mouth as the container it is. Decide what you allow inside it. A content creator who keeps saying the market is too crowded will live inside a crowded market. A founder who repeats that nobody is better positioned to solve a problem will move with the certainty that produces results. The words shape the standard. The standard shapes the choices. The choices shape the life.

Language carries this weight because it frames how we interpret everything around us. The words we use are not neutral labels placed on a fixed reality. They set the terms by which we perceive and act.[^3]

So be mindful of what you put in the container. Then watch what the container starts to bring toward you. Very cutesy, very nice.

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[^1]: Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, W. H. Freeman, 1997. Bandura demonstrates that the beliefs people hold about their own capability directly govern the goals they pursue and the results they achieve, which supports the claim that the words spoken about oneself shape outcomes. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-08589-000

[^2]: J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford University Press, 1962. Austin shows that speech is a form of action and that statements function as commitments rather than passive descriptions, supporting the point that words spoken become boundaries for behavior. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-do-things-with-words-9780198245537

[^3]: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, 1980. The authors argue that the language we use structures how we perceive and act in the world, which supports the article’s central idea that the contents of the mouth shape the reality a person attracts. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992.html