Penelope Wickman on making your first sales, hiring a creative team, and staying true to the creative you are.

Penelope Wickman is the founder of Clammy Heart, an art business where everything is embroidered in-house in their Portland studio, they have two multi-needle and two single-needle machines, and a team of four that works super hard to create apparel and package it with love and care.

The work they create focuses on the simple joys that make life a little happier. Animals, fruits and vegetables, flower and nature motifs, all with dollops of playful nostalgia. You can find them making apparel that's casual, colourful, and usually perfectly cottage core.

In this episode, you'll learn from Penelope how Clammy Heart made their first sales, why it's important to stay true to the creative that you are, what hiring a creative team is like, how and why Penelope has separated her branded passions and so much more.

Welcome to the show, Penelope. The people have heard a bit about you in the introduction and all about Clammy Heart and what you do, but I would love to know a little bit about where your creative journey started. So, have you always been a creative?

Yes, absolutely. I always knew that I wanted to be an artist since I was a kid.

I basically grew up thinking I wanted to be a comic artist or a children's book illustrator. I kind of bounced around to a billion different ideas all throughout middle school and high school. And then I decided, I knew I wanted to go to art school. I just always, always, always wanted to do something creative with my life. I literally could not imagine it any other way.

Yeah, I can relate to that completely and also relate to the idea of having a million and one ideas and lots of creative directions that you could go in. I always think “I wish I had nine lives like a cat so that I could try all these different things in those different lifetimes!”

So how did you decide on embroidery and doing what you do now?

Yeah, I started out sewing when I was maybe 12 years old. In middle school, my mom had a very, very limited amount of knowledge on sewing, and she was like, “I can teach you the very basic basics and then from there, you're on your own.” I picked up a pattern for a long sleeved t-shirt. That was the first thing I ever made. From there I basically just took off sewing a bunch of different stuff and making cosplay and other sorts of costumes.

Then when I ended up going to school for textiles, I learned a little tiny bit about machine embroidery. Not a whole ton, but once I left school, I decided on a whim to purchase a very small embroidery machine. And that's what basically started the whole thing and started Clammy Heart and got me to where I am now.

Incredible.

That's cool that even though you didn't fully dive into the embroidery at school, it was that small experience that sparked your interest and your love for that!

I read on your website that you started making patches with the embroidering machine. So what was it like starting to sell those things for the first time and getting your first sales, and where did they come from? Tell me all about the beginning stages.

Yeah, it was fun. I had no idea what I was going to do once I was done with school. I didn't have a job. I didn't have any real prospects. I wasn't interested in doing any gallery shows or anything like that, like a lot of my classmates were doing. And I just wanted do something fun and different and interesting.

I just wanted do something fun and different and interesting.

The embroidery machine was something that I had never done before and I hadn't seen anyone else do before. And I very much wanted to do something that no one else was doing and fill this little gap that I dug out for myself in the market and the online art community.

I very much wanted to do something that no one else was doing and fill this little gap that I dug out for myself in the market and the online art community.

Cause this was back in 2017 when there really wasn't a lot of people making handmade stuff in the art community online. It was just budding in a way that people were producing things that were actually tactile. So artists were starting to discover the possibilities of having things manufactured and making very small bits of apparel, maybe a baseball cap or a t-shirt here and there, nothing like how it is right now.

I basically wanted to make patches for my friends and I had some people that were doing cosplays that needed little embroidered elements, so I would do that for them. People were really into certain anime, so the first patch that I made was for my friend and it was a mob from Mob Psycho. That patch did really well. I didn't even watch the anime at the time but a lot of people were really into it. I made a few of that and then I put him on a little baseball cap and from there some of my friends started supporting me, which was really great. I put my designs on Store Envy, which nobody uses anymore, but that is what I used at first was Store Envy.

I had a patch of Punpun from Oyasumi Punpun, which is one of my favorite manga and yeah, I was just making little fan art patches at first.

That’s such a typical creative thing to just follow your passions, doing what's interesting to you and what would you want to wear.

And I think it’s impressive that even from the beginning you were thinking strategically, “I'm gonna stand out, this is not something anyone else is doing and I can fit that gap in the market.”

Do you feel like you were thinking strategically at the beginning? What were you thinking about in terms of like actually building and growing a brand then?

Yeah, I think I definitely was thinking about that from the very beginning. I've always been like that and I still kind of am like that. I’m always thinking of what could be next, what’s something I could do that people aren't doing yet that would be exciting for consumers, what would people would actually want to wear, and what would I would want to wear. Cause I very much make things that are within my same fashion realm.

Even though I was just starting out, I remember designing my business cards, designing hang tags and coming up with my business name and making graphics and stuff right away. Cause I've always been very interested in graphic design and illustration as well. And colour palettes and packaging and all those sorts of things.

Right off the bat, I knew I wanted everything to be very aesthetically coherent and all fitting in together. And for the branding I just started with a bang on social media, going full force. Cause like I said, I didn't have any other work going on at the time. I didn't know what I was gonna be doing.

Right off the bat, I knew I wanted everything to be very aesthetically coherent and all fitting in together.

So I just went all in on it, kept my startup costs really low and taught myself a lot of information because at that time it was pretty much unheard of to use embroidery machines for the purpose that I was using them for. People would make patches of course, but it was mostly for industrial stuff or making patches for business polos, t-shirts for companies and stuff like that. It wasn't people making cutesy like patches of their own artwork or digitising their own stuff, and I had to learn a lot of skills in order to do that.

Yeah, I can imagine. As a creative business owner, there are skills in terms of what you're actually making and producing, and then also about marketing, accounting and having a team. So many things to learn along the way. So props to you for figuring it out at the beginning and going all in.

I had a lot of questions for you about your branding and how it's developed over time.

You mentioned that you chose your business name, so where did Clammy Heart come from and why did you decide to do that rather than using your own name, which some artists do?

That's a great question, and I wish that I had a better answer, but I actually have no idea how I came up with Clammy Heart in the first place.

Yeah, I honestly don't even know. I was basically preparing for one of my final shows that I had in college and I created all these pieces that I had sewn 'cause I had a fashion design, sewing focus in school. I had made all these pieces, it was a little capsule collection and I was like, “it's boring to just use my own name” and I wanted to have something new that I knew I could use later on for social media and for a shop name online. It just popped into my head out of complete nowhere. And to this day, I still don't really know what it means.

For me, what Clammy Heart encapsulates is, as an artist with a lot of anxiety and emotions and feelings all the time, it's like when your hands get all clammy, but instead of your hands being clammy, it's your heart that gets clammy and you're all clammed up. It's cute and fun and kind of nonsensical. And I think it's funny that nobody knows what it is or what it means.

Yeah. At least if you don't have a story, it's still a good conversation starter! And you're right that it does have the right vibe. It fits that cute, whimsical style that your whole brand feels like. So if it works, it works.

Yeah, exactly.

You said you started and did your business cards and hang tags and all of that sort of stuff. Right now you have a very light pastel brand, a fruity Illustrated logo and all of that stuff, how has your identity changed and developed over time?

At first my branding was very Barbie, with a poppy pink and purple colour scheme. I liked to use a lot of pastel pink with grid shaped backgrounds and sparkles and things like that.

And then over time, as I started illustrating more and more of my own work and not just focusing on fashion design and sewing, I started to include what my colour palettes were gravitating towards for my illustrations, which was very warm colours and a lot of yellow, coral tones. Just very warm palettes in general and gravitating away from the more sparkly, poppy stuff.

Over time, as I started illustrating more and more of my own work and not just focusing on fashion design and sewing, I started to include what my colour palettes were gravitating towards for my illustrations

Before I designed my fruity logo that I have now, my logo was very simple. It was just plain text essentially that just said Clammy Heart. And I've had the logo now with the different fruit icons for probably five years. So it's been a long time and I felt no inclination to change my logo. I think it's adorable, and every time that I even think about “oh, I should update my logo,” I'm like, “but why though?”

Yeah, it's super cute and if it works and you are happy then no point in changing it. Some people I think, feel like they have to change things for the sake of changing things or keeping things new, but if it works, it works. So there’s no point putting in that time and effort when you're happy with what it is.

Yeah.

You mentioned that you started with that Store Envy shop and you had a hundred sales and then you decided to move to Etsy. What made you make that shift and what difference has that made in your business now?

I wanted to switch to Etsy mostly because it was what my peers were using, and it seemed to be a little bit more sensical for the types of things I was selling since a lot of the things I was making were made-to-order and had a longer turnaround time sometimes, or pre-orders and things like that. I just felt like Etsy was a little bit more customisable.

And also Store Envy wasn't the most popular platform. I don't even remember why I decided to use it in the first place, honestly. I think I just liked how you could customise your little storefront. Because that's something that I don't like about Etsy to this day, is the lack of customisability for the actual storefront and graphics and such.

But Etsy was a good platform for us for the few years that we used it, and now we use Shopify, which I like a lot. But yeah, Etsy definitely having the sort of marketplace-esque features I think during that time really helped.

Etsy has obviously changed a lot in the past couple of years with the search function and the discrepancies in what types of products are allowed on Etsy and things like that, which is unfortunate, but I think that when we were using it, it was a really great time to be on Etsy and we did get quite a bit of traffic through there.

I also really appreciate Etsy for having the messaging system that they do where you can chat with people more easily and they can message you about their order, which Shopify does not really have. And I kind of wish that they did sometimes cause managing our email inbox does get a little tricky.

It it sounds like Shopify though has made a difference. I assume you've been on that for quite a while now, and you said while Etsy didn't have that customisation, Shopify does, right? So has that kind of been the best shift or impact for you now using Shopify?

Yeah, I think Shopify is the best fit for us mostly because we have just a lot of products.

And within those products, we have an incredible amount of customisation that can go into our items. Being able to use Shopify plugins to manage our essentially infinite amount of options for our custom products has been a real lifesaver.

I really enjoy using Shopify. We actually just recently updated the theme of our website and I get really into the, the theme customisation. So I love how aesthetic everything is, being able to update all of our colours, use our branding kit, and stuff corresponding on all the websites that we use.

I also use Squarespace for my portfolio site and our about and FAQ pages, so I like being able to make them match and all that stuff. It's very fun.

Yeah, that obviously makes the whole brand experience very consistent and cohesive and makes people know when they click through from your website to your shop, they're in the right place. It all feels like the same place, they know that they're still on Clammy Heart, which is great.

You started with those initial patches, made a hundred sales and then you evolved and everything. Now you've shipped over 13,000 orders to 43 countries, which is incredible.

What do you think has had the biggest impact on growing those sales?

I think that the biggest impact for us has been social media. Especially seeing so much growth during the pandemic where we weren't able to do any in-person events. We really relied on Twitter and Instagram for all of our growth.

And strangely enough, as a brand, we do see the most success on Twitter.

A lot of startups and newer companies, I think can find it difficult to get an edge in on Twitter, but we actually have really great luck with it and have our largest following on Twitter.

I think that what people like the most about our brand in terms of our social media presence is the casualness. The approach that I take to social media is very much a relaxed one where I don't really feel a pressure to keep everything quote unquote professional.

Not in a bad way, but just like, “here's what I'm up to right now, the books that I'm reading, what my pets are doing, and what my house looks like.”

The approach that I take to social media is very much a relaxed one where I don't really feel a pressure to keep everything quote unquote professional.

People are very interested in my interior design, clothes, hair and makeup, and all that other stuff. I have made the brand so me that it's like, “well, duh, of course people are gonna be interested in everything that makes the brand the brand because it's just me.” Basically Clammy Heart is just an extension of everything that I love about the world and the things that I want to wear and the things that I want to create. And it just so happens that there are a lot of other people that would like to indulge in those same things.

So it's about community for me, being able to talk with people on social media and grow our brand in a very organic way. I've never done any advertising. I don't pay for any analytics or any SEO tools or anything like that.

Our brand is very much organic and just like a “hey, do you like our stuff? Here's what we make, we make it all in house and we think that's cool, and we hope you do too.”

Clammy Heart is just an extension of everything that I love about the world and the things that I want to wear and the things that I want to create. And it just so happens that there are a lot of other people that would like to indulge in those same things.

It obviously has worked because I noticed you have nearly 70,000 followers on Twitter, almost 50,000 on Instagram, and you're growing TikTok as well now which is amazing!

And so interesting that Twitter has been the place because I feel like everybody defaults to Instagram when they are creating something. But a lot of artists and illustrators and makers are on Twitter and there's a huge creative audience there. So it makes a lot of sense that it's worked.

Having that social media audience and that growth, is that where most of your sales come from?

Yeah, definitely. I think that we actually do see an even split in terms of social media sales coming from both Twitter and Instagram. Even though we do have a lower audience on Instagram, I think that the audience there can tend to be more engaged sometimes just because it's such a visual platform.

On Twitter, I think people will see all of your stuff that you're posting, but not really engage with it. Whereas on Instagram, people tend to like and comment on stuff a little bit more, and also share stuff more frequently to their friends in the Instagram DMs. So we see a lot of our sales come from there.

And then other than that, I think we do get a lot of sales from going to conventions. We do vend at anime conventions whenever we can, and usually that's really fun for us because we do have a style that is adjacent to an anime aesthetic, but not exactly. So the people that go to cons are usually really into the type of clothes that we make and they wouldn't expect to see us at an anime convention.

So it's really great and people will take our business cards. We do tend to make a lot of sales after cons as well, in those same areas that we're vending at. Just ‘cause I think people are excited to see us and were not expecting us and they're like, “oh my God. Well I don't have the money for that right now, but I'm definitely gonna buy from you when I get home!”

I'm super grateful for all of the sales that we get through social media. I would say that's basically where 90% of our sales come from right now. And I am trying to build up on TikTok, but it's hard. I just don't know enough about TikTok yet. I'm trying though.

It's still a very relatively new platform. So while there are people who have gone all out on TikTok and they seem to figured it out, most people haven't yet, so I think it's normal to be still figuring it out.

Obviously you have quite a large audience now, so I'm sure you get a lot of feedback about what people like, what they don't like, what they want more of, et cetera. So how do you balance creating stuff that your audience want or that you know they're going to love versus your own creative inspiration and instincts? What's your approach to that?

I think that the main thing that we take into account from our audience is not necessarily the designs that we make, but definitely the types of things that we make. So if people are seeing a gap in their market for, let's say a side bag, which is something that we make a lot of, then we'll make more of those just because people are often wanting very specific things that are very unique to their own lives and their own needs that they need to have met.

But for a lot of people, those needs do tend to be at least a little bit similar to the point that we can make a product that fits that need.

The main thing that we take into account from our audience is not necessarily the designs that we make, but definitely the types of things that we make.

And I've seen a lot of other artists make things that are similar to us, but not exactly. So that's where we hone in on making something that is very custom. We try not to use anything that is ready made if it's not necessary.

All of our fanny packs and side bags and things like that are completely custom made to our measurements and the size and shape that we think that people will like the best. I've seen a lot of people make backpacks and things like that but as far as silhouette goes we try to do something a little bit different with everything that we make.

And for the design, that's where I tend to be a little bit more concrete on doing what I think is cute for the pattern, and sometimes it does really well and sometimes it doesn't and that's fine. But I think no matter what we make, as long as we make it with our own design in mind, we're always gonna end up being happy with the result, whether it sells well or not.

Sometimes it takes even a couple of years to move all of the inventory that we have and it just is what it is. Obviously going to events in person also makes that a little bit easier, cause I think some of our designs do translate a little bit better in person. Especially being able to see all of our embroidered elements in person and being able to try things on and things like that.

I think no matter what we make, as long as we make it with our own design in mind, we're always gonna end up being happy with the result, whether it sells well or not.

You mentioned you're making all of this stuff yourself, it's custom made, you're making it in house. So why has it been so important to you to still create and embroider everything in house when you are creating so many more different things and higher quantities of things?

I think for me it's the most important because I started out as a textile artist. And at the core of everything that I make and do, I want to be a textile artist and not just a business.

Because to me scaling up our production and moving things out of house into a production facility or whatever it may be would make me, not necessarily a textile artist, but more of just a designer – which is fine, and I do consider myself also to be a designer – but the main joy that I get out of creating all of our stuff in house is the joy of working with fiber, working with textiles, working with embroidery, having my own machines, things like that. I just find it to be very fulfilling and also unique and interesting.

At the core of everything that I make and do, I want to be a textile artist and not just a business.

And I think that it greatly helps out our business and the intrigue that people have with our business, because it is something that you very, very rarely see at least at the scale that we are currently operating at.

I've had a lot of people, don't get me wrong, tell me “why the hell are you doing this? You need to asap get this stuff done elsewhere. Manufacture it, get it sent here, just ship it out.” But I just simply don't want to. It just does not sound as fun to me as making it all in-house and being the one to not only design the item and obviously all the creative direction, but also to illustrate the item’s design, digitise it for embroidery, be the one to embroider it, take it off the hoop, trim it, iron it.

I'm doing everything, and you just don't get that anywhere else. I think that's what makes Clammy Heart so special.

Yeah, definitely. It's incredible for you and your audience to know that everything that goes into the hands of your audience has been Clammy Heart from beginning to end, from idea to that real product being in that person's hand.

And you know that the quality is there, how you want it to be and feel and look is all you. So that's a pretty special thing like you say. It is such a big part of your story and when people read on your website that you make everything in house and I've seen you share pictures of your studio and everything, it is so interesting to see how you make everything and all your products are there and it is such a cool part of your story.

And obviously as part of that, you have grown your team, right? Now you are a team four. So what made you decide to make that first hire, and how has it gone since then?

Yeah, so essentially I started my business when I was living in Kansas City, Missouri after art school and after that I decided to move back to my hometown, which is actually in Iowa. My partner and I at the time decided that we wanted to change and wanted to move to Portland, Oregon, which is where the business is currently operating at.

After we lived in Portland for about a year or so it became quickly apparent to me that the business was going to keep growing and become something that I was not gonna be able to manage on my own because I was also working almost full-time at another job in the art field, I was working at the Portland Art Museum.

So I was like, “I think I need help.” And my partner at the time was like, “yeah, you probably do ‘cause I don't know how to do any of this and I can't really help you ‘cause I also work full-time.” So I was like “okay. I guess I have to hire someone”

Okay. I guess I have to hire someone.

I was very scared and nervous as anyone would be. Also for the fact that my studio is at my house, I'm not the most professional person in the world, I'm kind of silly and I have a lot of pets. Someone needs to be very comfortable with all of those things, so I was looking for a very specific type of person.

In this art community, it wasn't super hard to find someone who was familiar with art and design and conventions and all those things, but you can't really find anyone that actually already knows how to use an embroider machine. All of those skills, just like for me, needed to be taught from scratch, basically. So I was also apprehensive about that and I wasn't sure how I could train someone to use this machine that cost me $10,000. I don't want them to like break it and that was very scary.

But I found my assistant Ame who still works for me now. It's been almost four years in September, which is crazy. They started working for me part-time at first, and things just kept growing and growing and growing. And I was like, “I think I think that if you wanna work full-time, we can have enough work for you to do full-time, actually.” So they started working for me full-time and it was just the two of us for quite a while.

And right when the pandemic started, we had this absolutely bonkers month, where we did, I wanna say, $75,000 in sales in one month.

And I was like, “this is too much for me to handle.” I could not even believe it at all. I still can't believe it. I mean, we're not doing numbers like that right now to be clear. But we did these pre-orders – this was when Animal Crossing New Horizons came out – we had done an Animal Crossing themed fanny pack and everyone just was obsessed with it and I was not expecting it.

And as I think a lot of creatives can relate to, you are usually least expecting it when it happens where a certain product does big numbers and things like that. I was just totally taken off guard.

This is too much for me to handle.

So Ame and I decided to hire four other people at that time to work for us, and we moved into a studio that was actually outside of my house for the first time.

That was very scary and I ended up not really liking it that much. I actually found out that I prefer to work from a home studio. Just to be the most comfortable and be around my pets and things like that. So that only lasted about a year. But yeah, the whole like hiring a team thing has been very, very, very wild and had a lot of ups and downs and things that I would probably do differently. I'm just not cut out to be a boss or a manager in any way, and I think I kind of fooled myself into thinking that I could do that, but I can't really.

I have a home studio again now here in Portland and my partner and Ame and one other person work on Clammy Heart. So there's four of us all together and between the four of us, we work quite a bit.

Yeah, I can imagine that even with four of you, there's still a lot of stuff to do.

Are they all doing production, are they just producing your products or are they helping with marketing or anything else? How does that work?

Yeah. I am the only person in Clammy Heart that does any of our marketing. So I do all of our marketing, all of our social media, all of our design, all of the illustration, basically all of the creative direction, in every sense of the word.

And my other assistants are basically all production. Running the embroidery machines is a huge part of our day-to-day. Just getting through items that people are ordering, especially when we have more popular pre-orders and such.

Sometimes it can take us a few months to actually just embroider all the items. Because depending on what it is, the design can take up to an hour or even longer just to physically stitch out onto the item that we're embroidering. So it is very time consuming and having someone to be there to prepare the item, hoop it up, put it on the machine, observe it while it's embroidering, making sure the machine is okay.

From that to actually finishing the items, so all of the trimming and the pressing and the tagging and the packaging and things like that, it is very time consuming. That's basically what all of my assistants do is the production or the backup production, finishing stages.

And then my partner helps me out a lot with scheduling and goals and Asana. That is the most overwhelming part for me, probably is just that while I'm focusing on all the other aspects of running a business and also the finances and things like that, I have a really hard time keeping track of my schedule that I wanna keep for releasing new products.

Because like before I know it, it'll be, you know, for example, June already. And we've actually not really released very many new products this whole year, like at all. The last big pre-order launch that we did was back in December. And now it's already June. And I'm like, “oh my God.” So keeping on top of new designs that I wanna make, new illustrations, and sourcing blank items that we can embroider onto, those are all really big things that I need to carve out more time for.

While I'm focusing on all the other aspects of running a business and also the finances and things like that, I have a really hard time keeping track of my schedule that I wanna keep for releasing new products.

Fair enough. I'm sure that having these other people to assist you in the production has helped at least a little to be able to free you up to do some of those different things.

And I saw that you've also started doing hand punch rugs now, right? So where did that come from and tell me about adding a new aspect to what you create.

Yeah, yeah. So basically during the beginning of the pandemic, I saw one or two other people that I followed on Twitter and Instagram doing this rug punching and I thought it was so cool. Being a textile and fiber art nerd. I was like, “I obviously have to try that. There's no other option.”

I obviously have to try that. There's no other option.

So I ran out to the fabric store and got a few things to yarn. I had bought a kit on Etsy to try out and just made something really small at first and I was like, “okay, like I need to make a rug because that's what I keep seeing everyone do and I really wanna try it.”

I printed out the design and tiled it together with tape. I made my own rug punching frame, which I actually still use. And it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

So I made my first like, 20 by 20 inch rug punching frame and I just was obsessed with it. Like ever since then, it was just so great and I made a couple more rugs after that, like just for myself and for a friend.

And basically I decided to start doing commissions for rugs just ‘cause I needed a little bit of extra income outside of Clammy Heart and then I just kind of never stopped. And I've had like this super packed like commission schedule probably ‘cause I don't charge enough. (But that's for another episode, talking about pricing your, your handmade artwork!)

So basically I've just never stopped doing it and even today, I started a new rug. I just really enjoy it and it's such a traditional process.

Very similar to me deciding to embroider all of our other stuff in house, I've had a million people tell me “I cannot believe you are sitting here making like a three foot by three foot rug with a hand punch needle. What are you doing? Go buy a tufting gun right now.”

I don't wanna use a tufting gun. I just wanna sit here and punch all the little loops by hand, the same way that I do everything else in my life, which is make it very difficult and handmade for no real reason. But to me there's a reason – it's just satisfying and traditional and fulfilling.

And that's part of the beauty of a lot of art that sometimes social media and hustle culture and whatever you wanna call it, encourages doing things quickly and getting things out into the world and all of that stuff. But one of the most beautiful things about art is slowing down and creating something with your hands and slowly bringing something into the world too is just as beautiful, if not more.

And I saw that you have a separate Twitter or social medias for your rug making. What was the decision behind that instead of just putting it all on to Clammy Heart?

Yeah, I went back and forth with that for quite a while before I decided to separate it.

I found that I was actually posting like more rug content than I was Clammy Heart content for a while, and I was like, “you know, maybe people don't actually want to see this.” But I wasn't a hundred percent sure. Which is why even now I have everything tagged on each profile that says “sister brand of Clammy Heart, go check that out.” Because I think that a lot of people do follow both of my accounts, which is very, very sweet and I'm very thankful for that.

But yeah, being able to have them separate has also allowed for me to do a lot of different events and things like that where I wouldn't necessarily be a good fit for Clammy Heart.

For example, we just did this really huge handmade art market in Portland where I had applied to do the market as Clammy Heart the year before and I actually got rejected because Clammy Heart has too much stuff going on, essentially. We do too much stuff. We have too many options. There's too many types of products. They just weren't into it. And I was like, “well, I do have this other business where basically the only thing I do is make these beautiful hand punched rugs and wall hangings.” And they said that'll do.

So being able to have it separate I think has just allowed for a really lovely, separate portfolio of only rug making and only this lovely fiber work that is so different from what I do for Clammy Heart.

And I really enjoy being able to see them separately. Maybe that'll change at some point, but I wanted to also not make my audience feel like I was making them claustrophobic with all the stuff that I try to do, which is way too many things.

When I first started Clammy Heart I actually did screen printing as well. And I used to do ceramics and fabric dying and so many, so many, so many things. I've always been like that.

Yeah. Again, the curse of the multi-passionate, multihyphenate creative, for sure.

So we are just about out of time, so I would love to ask you my final question, which is, what do you think has been the biggest lesson or the biggest piece of advice that you would give about branding your passion?

I think for me, the biggest piece of advice that I would have for creating a brand is just really, really being as authentic as humanly possible.

Because there will be people out there that will resonate with you and see what you're doing and feel that authenticity and that genuineness. And I think that in this increasingly capitalist world, that there are a lot of consumers that can instantly tell when a brand is not being genuine. I personally would never, ever want to make people think that they're purchasing things from a brand that is not showing their true selves or anything like that.

I want everything that I do to be just as colourful and full of feelings as I am, as the owner of the brand. I want my social media presence to reflect that and for people to see who I am as a human being and connect with other people in the way that not a lot of companies and brands get to really do with their consumers.

I want everything that I do to be just as colourful and full of feelings as I am.

And I think regardless of how many followers I have or how many sales we make, or countries that we ship to, to be as authentic as possible is the number one thing. And I think that's why Clammy Heart has been such a success.

I think regardless of how many followers I have or how many sales we make, or countries that we ship to, to be as authentic as possible is the number one thing

Yeah, I would agree. Definitely. It's one of the reasons that I love to follow you and see your work and see what you're up to. It's definitely has that authentic and cozy and friendly.

Like you're just talking to a friend or seeing what your friend is up to is yeah, definitely how it comes across. So it's obviously working and is great advice for everyone else who's trying to build their own brand.

So thank you so much for sharing that, and thank you so much for sharing your whole story and talking to me about what you're doing and where you're going and all of that stuff.

Obviously I will link all of your links in the description and everything, but is there anything in particular you wanna share or anywhere you want people to go to support you or follow your work?

Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me. This was really fun.

Thank you so much to Penelope for joining me on this episode of Brand Your Passion - I LOVED this conversation and I hope you did too. Her work, creativity, and authentic approach to marketing has me totally blown away and I cannot wait to keep learning more from her.

For even more inspo, make sure to support Penelope’s work through the Clammy Heart website, and hang out with her on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, Facebook, Patreon and Ko-fi!

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