Downizing with New Skills and Product Launches | Diving Deeper Online into Digital Crafts

Lately I've been feeling overwhelmed with projects and products in front of me. Sue and I love selling on Whatnot. We have established a fun little audience that continues to surprise me with how wonderful they all are. Its like having friends, but ones you aren't obligated to call or hang out with. Being a hard core introvert, that is a nice thing. All of that aside, I'm tired of living life like a hoarder. The STUFF has to come out of my house. 

Downsizing Our Real World Footprint

Some of you know, others don't I'm sure, that we currently have not one, but TWO 15' x 55' storage units. They are packed too. You can move around in them, but only if you watch yourself very carefully. The combined cost, for the two units is about $2000/mo. That's just a lot of money to give up for the purpose of storing crap! This summer Sue and I will be having a LOT of additional Whatnot sales to work on moving to a single storage unit. My goal is to have that done by the end of August (and it's July 4th as I'm writing this. 

Additionally, I want all of the work stuff out of my house. I will keep the sunroom as a space to pack everything, but otherwise, the only craft supplies here should be my personal collection. 

Creating a Product Launch to build the business with new trends

I was watching a YouTube Video recently, you can pretty much count on the fact that there will always be one running in the background with me. This video was discussing Ai and digital creation. My head has always been full of ideas, but I'm just not a good enough artist and haven't ever developed digital graphic skills. And while Sue and I argue about the evils of Ai on a nearly daily basis now,  it is allowing me to take my creative brain to the next level, developing art that I was simply not capable of doing on my own. 

I took the online course and started watching more videos about learning Claude, Anthropic's version of an online assistant. It's far more than just making photos. Actually I use a different program (Kittl) for actually rendering the images from prompts. Then I bring those renderings back to Claude and he/she/it helps me create a package that I can then sell on Etsy. Literally I asked Claude, "Can we create a system where using the folder of images that I create, that you AUTOMATICALLY create a "What You Get" sales sheet and a "Thank You" letter with a link to the images for the buyer?" Claude wrote the automated program for me. 

Then we took it one step further. I asked Claude if they could also write SEO rich Etsy Title, Description, and tags for my Etsy listing. He, I've decided Claude sounds like a nice English Gentleman, so "he," it is! Claude added that to the work flow. 

Then, while working on my next set of images, I asked Claude if he could help me come up with creating other elements ideas, and prompts for them, of whatever I was creating. Ex: I wanted "a sleek black cat, sitting tall on a stack of books, wearing an oversize witches hat, with a buckle, with a dripping candle and potion bottles all around". I advised that my Collection was Called Watercolor Witch, Dark Academia. Then, he gave me some of the following prompts: 

• A tiny mouse scholar standing atop a giant leather book, writing with an oversized quill, ink-stained paws
• A stately stag in a deep-green academic robe, antlers wound with ivy and tiny candles, holding an unfurled scroll, 
• A plump green frog witch in a charcoal pointed hat and scholar's robe, reading a leather tome by candlelight, big amber eyes, 

He actually gave me 24 additional prompts for my Collection generation, along with prompts to make the art cool or warm toned. The results are spectacular. 

 

How Claude Code is helping me upsize my small business