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As the year draws to an end, I've been reflecting on the year that was, both professionally and personally. And this year, the biggest piece of wisdom that served me is : Don't put all your eggs in the same basket. It's an advice I have been giving a lot on Quora over the years when it comes to selling your art, especially on PoD because not doing so could cost a designer very dearly. This year I have gone through a few kinks that has made me very grateful to practice what I preach. The biggest one being with Society6! They have been going through several changes in the past 2 months that has left loads of designers like myself a bit stressed, not a good move before the Holidays season if you ask me, but a solid reminder that diversifying your presence is now a must more than ever. Because, flash news, you can't take your presence on ANY platform for granted. Here is what went down with Society6 that should be a lesson to all creatives out there : In October, they decided to migrate their whole platform to Shopify and while they were doing so, the artist studio (the place artists use to upload art) became out of commission for a week. Right before the Holidays shopping season when all of us wanted to upload as much of our new work as possible no less. That kink was thankfully short lived but came with a side effect of glitch that caused (and still does) all designs in artists shops to show at random, out of order if they show at all, not the kind of thing you really want happening just before people start to shop for Christmas. By then I think we all thought the worst had passed and oh boy were we all wrong! They decided to completely revamp the Artist Studio one week before Thanksgiving and the biggest sale of the year. This move has seen many artists throw the towel because for weeks, yes WEEKS it was impossible for a significant percentage of artists to upload anything using the new uploader. But that wasn't even the worst thing that went down with that move. In an effort to move all artist tools and features to the new platform, several credit card details didn't fully migrate over and when the time for the subscription plan renewal came, several artists, myself included found themselves unable to add a new credit card while the new platform couldn't use the old details to renew the plan. I brought it to their notice right away but it got lost in an ocean of complaint and a week after the first payment failure was issued my account was immediately downgraded to the free plan with just 10 designs to my name instead of 650! GASP!!!!!!! I managed to re-subscribe then, but couldn't re-upload anything because of the uploader's glitch, so I took to Instagram and sent them an angry comment that got their attention and thankfully they managed to restore all the designs they deleted in the downgrade. It fortunately ended well enough, I didn't loose too much skin in the game, but as I type this, their platform is still plagued by glitches and probably will be for a few more weeks and it's going to keep impacting artists until they sort it all out. This goes to show that you never really know when something is going to go kaput, and if you were an artist solely relying on that one platform, you would risk loosing it all, for good. Because PoD platforms tend to come and go, since I started selling on them back in 2017, I've seen Cupik, Paintcollar, Colorpur, Instanote and Neon Earth all either shut down completely or do away with the artist program. This year it's Symplico that has pulled that trick on me. They contacted me in May to start selling my patterns on fabric within India, and just a few days ago I got an email informing designers that they were suspending all operations. As an artist or pattern designer, you will always have to deal with these kinds of things, if it's not a platform shutting down completely, it could be a change in policies that could make selling with them less advantageous like with the shipping fees and paid plans from Society6 or the fees levied on entry tier accounts on Redbubble. Or, it could be a product being withdrawn entirely, like the pet bowls in the picture above that once were a Redbubble product but are no longer. Print on Demand platforms review their products offering at regular interval and this year a lot of them got completely removed from several platforms. If you were the kind of designer wanting to specialise in just one type of items this could be bad news. I've seen several questions on Quora where people really want to just specialise in t-shirts and stickers, which are probably the safest PoD products along with coffee mugs, but by doing so you narrow down your potential for sales to an insanely tiny margin and the day a platform decides to kill the item you were making the most sales on, you will find yourself in a serious pinch. This is yet another case of not putting all your eggs in one basket. This is a good reminder to all designers, new or old to never loose focus of what it is that you are really selling : your art. And to not pigeon hole yourself into one line of business, or one single stream of income. Keep on expanding, and keep on saying yes to all kind of opportunities. This year alone, I joined Spoonflower , got invited to join Symplico and Framer Art (formerly Shutter/speed). Spoonflower is doing fairly well for my first year, Symplico just shut down and Framer Art is yet to bring me a sale. The plan for 2025 is to start pitching my portfolio to manufacturers and get licensing deals and to keep on being open to collabs and new platforms to sell on. It's because I have been diversifying for years that the Society6 blow was just a minor kink in the system and didn't send me into full panic mode.

December is the time when all creatives working with colors await the biggest news of the color industry to drop : Pantone's color of the year announcement. Love it or loathe it, they have established themselves as the color authority, and what they say usually has an impact for the year to come, some years more than others. So get ready to meet Mocha Mousse, because it's what Pantone chose as their color of the year for 2025. The reception has been lukewarm at best, with most designers, myself including not have much love for what I pretty much called "chocolate on Vallium" but there is no denying that Mocha Mousse is really sparking a debate in the color world these days. Those who love it call it sophisticated and soothing and I suspect it's very popular with all the proponent of the "Sad Beige Aesthetic" trend (yup that's a thing!) Pantone themselves said that they see it as a warm and soothing color that evokes comfort and luxury. But let's not kid ourselves shall we? It's BROWN, not just brown, but the most boring, flat and sedated shade of brown they could possibly find. A lot of designer called it poop brown, mud brown, or "the color of the paint water after kid's art class" With the HEX code A47863 you have a brown with a terracotta orange/brown that sits right at the limit between color and gray. It's safe and non threatening, a neutral in every sense of the word. While I am not a fan of that particular shade of brown, or Pantone's call of picking a neutral as their color of the year I don't mind warm earth tones palettes. What I find a bit disturbing though is how the sad beige trend is gaining more and more traction, especially with influencers on social media. What's even more disturbing is that we are now in a world where the absence of colors is associated with calm, peace and a soothing feeling. I watched a reel pointing to that trend towards neutral everything that points out that colors evoke emotions and neutrals sedate people into a world of no emotion. This is very dangerous, having no emotion, no distinct personality is going against diversity. I get that the world is very uncertain right now with inflation being out of control in several areas of the globe, the US elections, the rise of extreme right in many places, the war in Ukraine and Palestine. But is Mocha Mousse really a soothing answer to all that? Or is it the symptom of an era where people are too tired to think, or feel anything positive at all? I'm firmly in the camp of those believing that sad beige is a lazy approach to everything. It's safe, it's boring and it's easy to mix and match neutrals. People are more and more affraid to stick out, be weird, or make a stance about anything these days, thanks to an overly divisive mindset where you might be flamed or cancelled for just about anything. If you are beige and blah, you don't stick out, if you don't stick out, you are safe and nobody will come after you for having an ounce of personality. Make no mistake, this is the "peace" that Mocha Mouse evokes, there is nothing warm about that tone of brown otherwise. As a designer, I of course have to at least look into that trend and I have created a few patterns (like the two wallpapers in the first picture) with Pantone's 2025 palettes because of a design challenge on Spoonflower, and because even though I hate this sad beige trend, as a commercial artist I can't ignore it. You won't see an awful lot of those tones in my work, but I am working on experimenting with neutrals a bit more, and infuse them with my usual bold colors as a happy medium. I can see all those mocha and chocolate hue working really well with autumn themed designs, so it's not all lost. Here's to hopping Pantone will give us a beautiful emerald or forest green for 2026

Here we go! It's the last month of the year! Are you ready to celebrate? Reflect on the year that was? Make plans for the new year? How about you first drop by the Freebies page and download the December 2024 printable calendar page? Now that I got that out, let me be honest here. Has this year gone by in a flash or what? And how is it that the second half of the year always plays in fast forward anyway? In terms of achievements I have done a lot more than I think I have, but to be positively sure I would need to time to sit down and write it all in my new journal . I planned the layout and all, but then a few stressful things happened that took my attention away. I plan to get to it this week (hopefully). I realise that this blog post is really a short one, I'm trying to slow down a bit to enjoy the season, plus everything I have to say would do well in another blog post or two. So for now, I'm going to remind everyone that on top of having the printable calendar page up for grab I also have 4 printable Christmas greeting cards sets for sale in my Patreon shop , no need to be a paid member to my page, all are a 1 time purchase.

If you've been following me on Instagram (and you should) you probably got glimpse and hints about my launching "The Maharani's summer garden" collection for over a month. The collection has been live on Spoonflower for a while now, and all that was left to do was to give it it's own collection page on my website, which I FINALLY did over the weekend after taking a much needed time out to recover from all the Diwali madness before we jump in the Christmas madness. This whole collection started from the July illustration I offered to all of my Patreon and had those big pink chintz flowers. When I turned them into a pattern to match the Octopus silhouette wallpaper I knew I had a collection budding. The stylised pink flowers immediately mad me think of the type of flowers you find on Indian block printed fabrics and so the idea for an Indian inspired collection started coming to life. I isolated the pink flower to make a simpler filler pattern to support my hero pattern and then added an Art Deco inspired scalloped pattern of pink and green arches with stylised palm leaf. Just around that time, Spoonflower announced its Tea Towel calendar challenge and the idea for a peacock design came to me. I repurposed some VERY old paisley motif assets into a pattern and drew an Indian style peacock for it. I then repurposed all those assets again to create a matching peacock pattern, and a matching plain pink on pink paisley pattern. The collection was starting to take life and quite frankly it could have been good enough as it was at that point, I had 5 cohesive pattern and a stand alone peacock calendar. I didn't stop there though, because a little voice inside kept telling me I could do with another 2-3 filler patterns. I repurposed the stylised palm leaf motif and created a filler pattern in 3 of the main colors : saffron yellow, powder pink and dark forest green. My Maharani's summer garden collection was in need of simpler, less busy patterns to bring it all together and these just hit the spot. At this point I knew I had a winning collection, that too right on time for Diwali! I uploaded all my patterns to Spoonflower and several of them on Society6 and Redbubble so that they can be made available on finished home decor items like rugs and comforters as well as throw pillows. I ended up liking the collection so much that I decided to enlist the help of a local printing service to have several of my collection patterns printed on throw pillow for my own sofa ahead of Diwali. As I type these words, they are still all on said sofa, inviting anyone to sink into a colorful plush cocoon to spend the weekend binge watching Netflix shows. They will be replaced soon by Christmas themed designs but until then, I'm all about the colorful vibe these bring to my colorful home. If I have to pick a favourite out of the whole collection, it's going to be the peacock and paisley one, though the pink and green scalloped arches is my close second favourite. When I worked with the cottage style bedroom mockup from Creasty and showed it to my husband, he asked me if that was what I was planning for our bedroom the day we buy our one home : I mean it could be! Those are my kind of colors and the idea of a colorful bedroom with lots of plush pillows is very appealing, so is the doing away with boring rental white walls.

One of the thing that I heard the most from people around me is "Buying from Society is not possible if you live in India" Rest assured that it is VERY possible to do so. I live in India, and I bought a number of things from Society6 over the years and the process even got easier in the past few years alone. Don't let the fact that Society6 is based in the US stop you, sure the prices are mentioned in dollars and you need to factor in the shipping, but I'm here to let you in on the process once and for all and give you a few tips to do so. The first time I ordered anything was in 2018, a few months shy of completing 1 year as an artist selling with them. I bought the carry-all pouch in the picture above because there was a free shipping offer going on and I really wanted to see how my artwork looked in person. At the time they were shipping only from the US and they weren't accepting Indian cards, so I had to pay via PayPal. Both those things have changed now! indian cards are accepted This past weekend a friend of mine who had a crush on my phone case decided to order one for herself and reported having no issues paying with her Indian card. It's a pleasant change from 2018 I couldn't confirm until now since I got into the habit of paying via PayPal as my default method. Things no longer ship from the us as a default Society6 worked toward having production hubs around the world and the Apple watch band in the picture above along with the water bottle I both ordered last year, were shipped from Korea, and the phone cases I ordered last November shipped from Australia. Since both those countries have some trade agreements with India, there were no custom duty fees to pay. Something that is now a bit of an issue with anything shipping from the US it seems. Back in 2018 it wasn't an issue to have things ship from the US though and I never paid duty fees back then either, but it could be now, and it's nice to see that Society6 has found a way around it. shipping is quite fast and done via registered post Each and every time I bought something on Society6 it took between 10-15 days to reach me in Mumbai. The fastest being the phone cases who were in my hands 10 days after ordering them. Those shipped via Australia post and I got updated along the way, I know they spent 2 days at the custom office before being dispatched to my home. A lot depends on the production time, the phone cases were quick to print and ship, I think the package was shipped less than 24 hours after I place the order, it took 2-3 days for the other items to be printed, packed and shipped. Society6 put an estimate of around 20 - 30 days to ship to India to cover themselves against disgruntled customers. So if you are buying something as a gift, I would say give yourself 30-35 days and don't cut it too tight, you never know. don't let the prices in dollars stop you Sure the prices are in dollars, and some items have a higher price tag, even for the US market. BUT!!!!! Society6 runs promotions very regularly and there is always items that are discounted between 40% and 20% with 30% being the most common discount. These promotions change every week, so if you have a specific item in mind, and don't mind waiting a bit, check the website every week so see what's going on with the prices. On small items, the discount could recoup the shipping cost and still give you a tiny bit of a discount. On bigger items, it will alleviate the shipping costs a bit. And of course if you wait for the Cyber Week / Black Friday sale that comes every November around Thanksgiving, you get the biggest discounts of all. Not to mention that the quality of the products Society6 sell is really worth the price, especially when it comes to phone cases , you won't find that kind of quality in India...period. Plus, you pay an artist, each and every time you buy something from Society6. if you are an artist, you get more of a discount in your own shop Society6 will deduct your royalty markup from the final price at checkout if you are buying from your own artist shop, so for me, it's 20% off extra since I put my markup at that percentage. If you didn't change the default markup it's 10% off the retail price that you get deducted. This is a good incentive to order products with your own designs as you can use them in your own original social media pictures and show your audience how the actual printed product looks like. I'll go as far as saying that you are better off buying your products and use them in your pictures over spending money on an expensive ad campaign on Instagram and Facebook, these campaigns won't get you anywhere, showing and using your products will give you more authenticity and will look good for several years.

It's been a little over a year since Society6 announced the introduction of paid subscription plans for artists. Following up on the success of my blog post titled " Is getting started with Society6 still worth it ", I'm going to be reflecting on the past year and my Society6 paid subscription experience. Having been selling on Society6 since 2017, I had accumulated well over the 100 designs that would put me in the Basic plan and had to go straight up for the Pro plan, the one that cost 12.99$ a month. Since several of my designs are also available to wholesale partners via S6's sister site Deny Design, I found myself in a position where the investment made sense to begin with even if there was a bit of doubts about how sound an investment that was going to be. Before the move toward a paid subscription model, I was making over those 12.99$ pretty much every months but it was always riding in the same 2-3 designs that kept selling on repeat, with a wide percentage of my portfolio not even showing up in organic search on the platform, at least not in the 5-6 first pages which are the ones that matter the most. All thanks to a super saturated platform full of spam, low quality artwork and AI art. Society6's move towards a paid subscription model last year was first and foremost to flush out all the bogus accounts belonging to people only in it to make a quick buck. The question a year later is : did it work? From my experience, it did pay out, but it was a bit sluggish, especially in the first few months after the introduction of those paid plans. Right after the move was fully enforced at the end of November 2023 I saw a slump in sales. November and December are usually high sales months for me on all platforms, but suddenly I saw only one sale in December that totalled about 1.70$ followed by ZERO sales in January and February. In March, the sales were back and started trending upwards not with more numbers of items sold, but all of them were bigger items like comforters, bigger art prints and curtains, basically items that all bring about 10-15$ a sale on average. The biggest change however wasn't in the sales, it was in the exposure on the platform. Society6 featured 2-3 of my artworks in their curator's pick and newsletter this past year and featured one of my pattern on their Instagram handle a few weeks after I published said design : Autumn Chintz Flowers . What's more, my other designs are now showing up a lot more frequently in searches on the platform, and usually always within the first 2-3 pages and several have been included in curated collections they run every couple of weeks. My sales reflect this sudden increase in exposure too with several designs that haven't been selling for years suddenly catching people's attention, probably because for the first time since I started selling on Society6 they are no longer buried deep in search results including a million stock photos and generic designs. Then there are some perks for paid members too... No idea if Society6 favors the visibility of those who pay a subscription as such, but one of the most helpful perk is having webinar sessions on upcoming trends. So far Society6 has organised two such webinars, one for the Summer and Fall of this year and one for the Spring and Summer trends of 2025. Along with pointers on design trends and color palettes, they share special tags that paid members can include in their artwork's tag list when they upload new work. Those tags will then be used by the Society6 curators' team to look for content they can include in their promotion and curated picks on the website. With this move, it's clear that they want their artists to show up and produce quality work they can use. The more on trend and quality content you tag, the more likely it is they will remember your name and the more likely it will be for you to show up in searches it seems. My take for the future All in all, the decision to move toward the Pro plan has been worth it for me, and I think it will continue paying off in the years to come. It was a very bold move from Society6 to introduce such steep fees, and I will stick to what I said last year. The good old advice of producing quantity over quality no longer applies, and while the free plan is very restrictive when you are just starting, I think the Basic plan at 4.99$ a month would be a sound business investment for all artists that are SERIOUS about building a business in the industry. yes it might take a while to recover that cost in the beginning, but in the long run it is clear that if you are a genuine artist that produce quality work that isn't just stock photos and free vectors that you slap on a mug there is a future with Society6. If you are still just testing the waters and approach art and design as a hobby, that platform might not be the best place to start and you are probably better off starting with Teepublic and Threadless which are both without any fees. Though Teepublic has an artist account tier system and different pay structures for each.

After miserably dropping the ball on making a blog post for the October calendar page. I made sure to mark it clearly in my planner for this month, so now not only is the November 2024 printable calendar page up in the freebie zone . I am writing this blog post first thing in the morning not to forget it. We just celebrated Diwali last night, and I am now ready to embrace that period of calm before the Christmas season starts. With the first advent Sunday being on December 1st, my tree will not go up until then and my teenage daughter has decided she is too old for an advent calendar, so I won't have to rake my brain trying to figure out what to put in it. This will give me time to plan which of my Christmas designs I want to get printed as cushion cover to cozy up my sofa. This year I did print several of my Maharani's Summer garden designs (yet to put together a collection page up to prettify my sofa for Diwali : These will stay put all this month before being put away which is fitting considering we aren't going to see any sign winter is on the way until the end of this month. November is always a "slow down month" for me. By that time I have pretty much drawn my fair share of Holidays designs and fall everything patterns, and I can focus on non season specific artwork again. I usually draw geometric Art Deco inspired pattern elements and start looking in future trends, with maybe a few more Christmas designs if I'm in the mood. That's also the month I usually start reflecting on the the year that was and what I plan to achieve the next. And of course the time of the year I assemble the 2025 printable calendar so I can upload it on Patreon the first week of December. Speaking of Patreon, did you know that all the illustrations of this year's calendar were rewards last year and are still available as stickers, art prints and phone wallpapers to anyone joining at any of the paid tiers. Just as all the illustration for the 2025 editions have been released all through this year. If you want to know what I have been up to on that front, Patreon is the place to go . On these wise words, I will go back to soothing my frazzled nerves, the fireworks were super loud last night and I didn't get much sleep.

Today marks the first day of Diwali (there are 5 days), it's called Dhanteras and it's the day that is marked as auspicious for buying gold and silver jewellery or coins as well as metal good for your home such as pots and pans. For the occasion, I uploaded a free Diwali phone wallpaper set in the freebie zone today. This year there is a bit of a division over when Diwali's main day is (the 3rd day), the one that is all about the Lakshmi puja. The government has marked it as a public Holiday on November 1st, but according to the lunar calendar it starts on the 31st and end at around 6.15pm on the 1st which for those living on the west coast means the puja can't take place on the 1st because the sun would set after the end time for the auspicious moon. Lakshmi Puja always take place after sunset and the sun set much later in Mumbai than it does in central India, leave alone the east coast. Some people refer to this as a "split Diwali" with some communities celebrating it on one day and the others on the second date. All in all that will mean more fireworks and crackers being burst in Mumbai as people tend to follow the tradition from their community and regions regardless of the sunset and auspicious moon dates and times. For me, it marks the culmination of the first wave of the festive season since I am in an intercultural marriage with my husband being Indian and Hindu, and me being Swiss. I'm not religious at all but Christmas holds a special, secular and cultural spot in my heart and December will mark the start of all things festive from my culture. I usually take November as a kind of breather between the two festive seasons and to wrap things us before we ring in the new year. Right now, that means finishing the 2025 calendar design which will go for sale on Patreon in a few weeks and reflecting on my 2024 achievements in order to plan the next year's worth of goals. Wishing you all a Happy Diwali

Today I present to you a new Halloween collection that is more a mini collection than anything and a very accidental one at that. But! This is the spooky season and I wouldn't miss a chance to share some seasonal content given the opportunity. As I said, this mini Halloween collection came to be by sheer accident, I hadn't planned it at all. It just happened because the best mockup creators on the market : Creatsy , released a bunch of Halloween freebies, including this lovely fireplace decor mockup. I just HAD to play with this one and use my Spoonflower challenge cottagecore ghosts as a wallpaper. It seems ghosts wearing cottagecore floral sheets is a trend this Halloween and I had no idea when I drew that pattern for a challenge that took place in June. Spoonflower has made promos for the season featuring people wearing ghost costumes in retro floral fabric prints and I have seen floral ghosts art featured on Society6 as well. Heck, a few days ago I sold a bathmat with those ghost on it . I would have been fine with just a simple wallpaper mockup to be honest, but as usual, Creatsy doesn't disappoint with their mockups and this one had options to add designs to several of the pumpkins, and the armchair as well, so I went digging in my pattern archives for a cool matching armchair fabric which you can also get on Spoonflower . I would have been happy with those two patterns, but I needed something for the throw pillow as well, and instead of making it one solid color, I saw an opportunity to use the Art Deco diamond pattern I featured in the Tiger Safari collection as well. And just like that, I had 3 patterns to use on the pumpkins that required a design, and a mini Halloween collection featuring one hero cottagecore ghost pattern and two retro geometric patterns that matched without my having planned it in the first place. You can find all those patterns on Society6, Redbubble and Spoonflower. To know more, head to the SHOP tab.

Of all the Print on Demand shops I have, Threadless is the one I more often than not forget to mention. It's also one of the big one that I never ordered from until recently, but now that I have, I can give you all my Threadless shopping review. From ordering to shipping to reviewing the print quality. I placed my initial order late April using one of the vouchers they give to artists from time to time to buy samples. That particular one was a 30$ voucher and I decided to put it toward getting myself a t-shirt since it's their most popular item. I went with my retro surfboard design on an extra soft t-shirt and went with a 2XL size so I could have a loose fit. The t-shirt at retail price is 24.95$ but because I was buying from my own shop from my artist account, they deducted my royalty from that price which comes at about 4$ and then 11$ were added for International shipping. Having me pay 1$ out of pocket. I usually take advantage of promotions and discounts to buy my products from PoD sites because shipping to India costs a bomb, and then there is always the threat of having to pay custom duty hanging in the balance. Once my order was placed I got told that it would take 3-4 weeks for my t-shirt to be delivered, so the long wait began. In general all the orders I placed with international partners in the past took 10-15 days so I did expect it to reach during that time frame. Threadless uses DHL to send their orders to the last border point within the US and then the regular postal network takes over. Nothing unusual there, most PoD tend to do it and I was fully expecting India Post to do the last leg of the delivery. Things unfortunately did take a different turn when at the 3 weeks mark the parcel tracking said "reached destination country" but didn't specify where in India. I waited an additional week with still no update, at which point I contacted Threadless for help. They were very quick to reply and asked me to wait for the 5 weeks mark before letting them know if it had been delivered. With that deadline passed and still no t-shirt, I contacted them again and they immediately initiated a replacement, which is their standard policy for lost or damaged orders (free of cost might I add). And the new t-shirt went into production to be shipped on June 4th. The weeks passed, and a few days before I was set to take a vacation with my family around June 20th, the tracking placed my order in Indonesia which seemed odd because I never got a country update with the first parcel, but in the face of me about to take off for a holiday I didn't get into it further and made a mental note to check upon my return. It's by July 6th that my order finally reached me with a stamp saying "wrongly delivered to Indonesia" or something along those lines. The big bonus is I didn't have to pay any custom duty. Normally parcels originating from the US do but this one didn't. No idea if it was because it came in via Indonesia or not. They didn't even open the parcel to check what was in it. At this point it's entirely possible that the international mail dispatch center tossed it into an Indonesia bound bag rather than an India bound one. Probably a case of human error at this point, most likely from the US postal services who took over by that point. It was a bit uncanny to have a delivery mishap twice for the same order though. The t-shirt was exactly what I was expecting in term of quality, the fabric is soft, the cut is good and it is indeed the loose fit I was expecting. The print is good and the color matching perfect, what I get on my t-shirt is what I also see on my screen, down to the tiny details. The reason I didn't write this Threadless shopping review sooner was that I wanted to see how the t-shirt fared after a few washes. I'm proud to announce that said t-shirt has been through multiple washes and hasn't faded or lost shape, the print is still as good as new on it which is a huge plus point in terms of quality. All in all and in spite of the rather funky delivery, it's one place I would be willing to order t-shirt again from in the future.

Another month bit the dust and we are now 4 months away from kissing 2024 goodbye. Scary huh? This means that the September 2024 calendar page is up for download in the the freebie zone . September marks the first month of autumn for many and the return of pumpkin spice lattes. Kids are usually back to school or about to get back to school and parents get a breather. In India, it's usually the start of the festive season. This year Ganesh Chaturthi falls on September 7th, then it's a spiral of festivities with Navratri, Durga Puja and Dusshera before celebrating Diwali and finally Christmas and New Year. This means that if you are a designer, you need to get your Christmas designs out now! Ideally for fabric designs you should have started uploading them on Spoonflower and other fabric PoD all through August because people are buying seasonal fabric for their crafts and sewing project now. But the time to upload to other PoD has also come if you want them to be indexed and showing up in searches by October/November. Plus people shop for the holiday season quite early. I usually get most of my Christmas designs sales in September/October. If you have been working on designing Holidays designs in July and August, now is the time to assemble them into collection and focus on other things like starting to assemble winter non-holidays collections and start thinking about spring designs. I for myself am working on a collection around a floral pattern I created in July and has a lot of potential, Stay tuned!

Unless your are a casual user, you might have noticed that things went completely crazy on Instagram these past few months. People's reach went down the toilet, and it became impossible to grow on that platform. Big or small, content creators all reported a massive dip in impressions, reach, and engagement that started in May 2024 and reached ridiculous proportions by July. Many of us who also have an account on Threads were all complaining about it. A bit of reflection on it all, and I think that while there is definitely something wrong and broken with Instagram, it's not all a bad thing. It's a wake up call for many to not rely on social media alone for marketing and become a bit more creative about how we connect with our audience. So what works and what doesn't with Instagram in 2024? All hail the mighty algorithm! Instagram changes its algorithm all the time and sometimes so much that it causes the kind of craziness we see happening right now. People all try to crack it, and beat it? If you ask me though, it's a lost battle and if your sole goal is to beat the algorithm, you are going to fail, and burn yourself out in the process. I attended a webinar at the beginning of the year where we learned that AI pretty much controls the Instagram algorithm and even the people at Insta aren't entirely sure how the monster they created really works. The only thing that people know is that the algorithm will randomly push content that they think will perform well. And as of 2024, contrary to what people still believe, it doesn't need to be a reel anymore. That was very 2022 and by early 23 they had corrected their stance on reels. If I remember well, even the Kardashians were fed up and that ended up motivating the Instagram team to try to fix it. But instead of trying to figure what to post and when, only to have to rethink your whole strategy 6 months later, focus on the audience you already have. Seeing posts in chronological order again People keep begging for it to happen, but guess what? That option DOES exist. It's just that Instagram isn't really eager for people to know about it because they have less to gain from it. How do you set your feed into chronological order your may ask? It's deceptively easy really. Simply tap on the Instagram logo in the top left corner on your app and it will bring down a menu where you can opt to see "following" and "Favourites". You need to select "Following" and it will take you to a feed where all the posts of ALL the people you follow will appear in chronological order. The reason Instagram isn't very open about telling people about it is simple : There is NO ADS on that feed. It's just the content, all the content of the people you chose to follow in one place, just like it was in the good old days. If you want to increase your reach among your followers, you'll have to tell them this option exist, I guarantee you that more than 90% of them have no idea it exist stop relying on the regular feed as much Here is what will happen after about a week of you making a point of liking all the posts on your "Following" feed : The regular feed will start showing you content from people you follow you might have missed, up to a week old Once you run out of old content from people you follow it will show you highlights from hashtags you follow or have used recently Once you went through the weekly hashtag content highlights it will start showing you suggested posts from accounts you don't follow The key is to keep checking what's new on Instagram using the "Following" tab and then spend a few minutes here and there scrolling through the suggested content on the main feed. The instant I started doing that and regularly was met with the "You are all caught up" on the main feed, my posts' reach started improving and I started seeing more engagement. Heck I even gained a few new followers in the past week. In the end, remember, Instagram is only interested in keeping people scrolling, and if you do that, they seem to reward you by showing your content to more people because they know you'll be back for more scrolling. hashtags or no hashtags... The jury is still out as to wether hashtags are still useful in 2024. I did run a little experiment and found out that they aren't as useful as they once were to grow your audience, but they aren't entirely dead either. Especially if you make sure to be all caught up with your feed to the point of IG showing you hashtag feed content. That said, keep it to 3-4 hashtags maximum, and from my experience keep using the same ones all the time. It was once upon a time raising red flags but these days using new tags all the time will ensure your content will never be seen. The tags you use the more often are the tags that will highlight your content the most. social media fatigue is real People are over solicited 24/7 with content and hooks to buy, buy, buy. We all have had ENOUGH. What once felt authentic is now a drag, for consumer and content creator alike. So my advice is to not stretch yourself too thin trying to have a presence everywhere, focus on one or two social media handle and then grow your email list or blog audience. I'm a firm believer blogs will be making a comeback. Right now my focus is on Instagram for image content and Threads for fun discussions and random tid bits. Gone are the days a huge follower count mattered In fact, scratch that, it NEVER mattered! The high follower count was something that was only relevant to brands wishing to partner with influencers. For small businesses it was never that important because a large audience doesn't necessarily means all of them will buy your products. It's better to cultivate a smaller audience that will stay loyal and engage with your content. When I started selling on Society6 back in 2017 I made my first sale after a little under 2 months on the platform and I think I barely had 400 followers. What I had was a blog that was doing well, and a lot of friends offline and online ready to spread the word about what I do. And guess what? This is all you need to get started. Sure, keeping a presence on a social media platform is important, but don't make it your whole life. If it reaches a point at which you put more energy into taming the algorithm and chasing likes and impressions than you are creating art, you are doing something wrong. People are done with phoney posts I said it for a a number of years on Quora : DON'T turn your Instagram feed into a Redbubble / Society6 product catalogue, people never found that kind of content fun or inspiring, and they like it even less in 2024. In our era of mass consumerism, Instagram has become the place where content creators keep on pushing products after products on people. So stand out and post unique content without making people feel like you are pushing something onto them all the time. The rarest commodity on social media is authenticity. People want to be able to relate to what other post. Death to the curated grid! Remember back in 2015 or so when having an editorial grid that looked perfect with all your posts being matchy-matchy and having the same aesthetic? That's gone...thank god for that! There used to be a time when if your account was all about your art it had to display nothing but your art and the odd picture of you enjoying a Sunday brunch was going to be terribly out of place and "ruin it". Nowadays posting a few more personal content will add to your authenticity factor and nobody will care what your grid looks like unless it's really all over the place and they can't figure out what you are really about. So post that occasional pictures of your nails or selfie with your pet, that makes you more human and more relatable. All in all, treat Instagram as just one of many of the marketing strategies you should have in your arsenal and not put all your energy into making it work. What the algorithm wants today is going to be completely different in 6 months, and then what? Save your energy for better things.