In this episode...
Melissa, the host is joined by her business bestie Gabby to give you tips on how to successfully brand your new or existing business. If you have questions about how to create a cohesive and compelling brand identity to get customers, this episode is for you!
We dive into the following topics:
Guest bio: My photography career started after I completed my yoga teacher training. I talk about that a bit in my Shoutout Denver Magazine interview. A few years later, I shifted to the boudoir because I wanted to bring my experience with posing, yoga & mindfulness principles, and meditation to more people. That’s why all my sessions start with a body-love meditation – my clients love how relaxed it helps them feel before their session! Nobody should have to wonder if they’re worthy of celebration. I’m here to show you that YOU are worthy of celebration!
WEBSITE:
Gabby Jockers’s Boudoir Photography: https://embodiedartboudoir.com/
Gabby’s Special ‘Fantasty’ Photoshoot Offer: https://embodiedartboudoir.com/alter-ego-sessions/
INSTAGRAM:
https://instagram.com/embodiedartboudoir?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Connect with High Vibe Mindset on Instagram and Facebook
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/highvibepod
Here’s how to subscribe + review
Want to be the first to know when new episodes are released? Click here to subscribe!
Leave a review here and tell us your favorite part of the episode. Get this message out to more people with a review. Thanks for your support of this show!
I've launched a new affirmation card deck designed with YOU, the listeners in mind! The Body Deck offers 77 beautiful cards that address the three high-vibe killers of disconnection, negative-self talk & lack of self-care/coping practices. Best of all, it's portable & affordable at $33. Benefit from the transformative practice of affirmations anywhere you go. Stop self-sabotage & start being the highest version of YOU: Visit soulea.co
In this episode...
Melissa, the host is joined by her business bestie Gabby to give you tips on how to successfully brand your new or existing business. If you have questions about how to create a cohesive and compelling brand identity to get customers, this episode is for you!
We dive into the following topics:
Guest bio: My photography career started after I completed my yoga teacher training. I talk about that a bit in my Shoutout Denver Magazine interview. A few years later, I shifted to the boudoir because I wanted to bring my experience with posing, yoga & mindfulness principles, and meditation to more people. That’s why all my sessions start with a body-love meditation – my clients love how relaxed it helps them feel before their session! Nobody should have to wonder if they’re worthy of celebration. I’m here to show you that YOU are worthy of celebration!
WEBSITE:
Gabby Jockers’s Boudoir Photography: https://embodiedartboudoir.com/
Gabby’s Special ‘Fantasty’ Photoshoot Offer: https://embodiedartboudoir.com/alter-ego-sessions/
INSTAGRAM:
https://instagram.com/embodiedartboudoir?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Connect with High Vibe Mindset on Instagram and Facebook
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/highvibepod
Here’s how to subscribe + review
Want to be the first to know when new episodes are released? Click here to subscribe!
Leave a review here and tell us your favorite part of the episode. Get this message out to more people with a review. Thanks for your support of this show!
I've launched a new affirmation card deck designed with YOU, the listeners in mind! The Body Deck offers 77 beautiful cards that address the three high-vibe killers of disconnection, negative-self talk & lack of self-care/coping practices. Best of all, it's portable & affordable at $33. Benefit from the transformative practice of affirmations anywhere you go. Stop self-sabotage & start being the highest version of YOU: Visit soulea.co
0:13 Melissa:
I'm so excited to kick off this behind the scenes series of the creation of my new brands Soulea and this episode is in collaboration with my best friend Gabby. We're here on the podcast today to talk about our first product that we launched the body deck, late 2022. And the body deck is an affirmation card deck was 77 individually designed affirmation cards featuring my designs and Gabby's boudoir, photography, and her drawings. So in this episode, we're going to share our insights on branding, including purposeful name selection, value aligned audience building and some color psychology, we'll dive into the creation story of Soulea and share how we came up with this idea to do this affirmation card deck. This project was super aligned for both of us in terms of values and creative expression. So we're super excited to share this process with you and take you behind the scenes. We're hoping this can help anyone who's trying to figure out how to start a values aligned creative business. So take it away, Gaby, what does that even mean? Value align creative business
1:23 Gabby:
right. So I love this topic so much. Because what we'll discover as we talk about this is of values align creative business requires you to actually do the work and get your hands dirty, and try things out and experiment and try and not always succeed. And I think just the process of figuring out what your values are is such a trial and error and experimental process and applying that to a business is even more, it's even more experimental, even bigger scale. So to back it up a little bit. First, you got to start with what are your own personal values, right? So what are the things that drive you that inspire you that encourage you the concepts that bring life to you and make you feel fired up and passionate? And the next is how do you bring that into a business? How do you build a business? Not just how do you bring it into your business? But how do you build a business that's so aligned with your values that even when you're doing grunt work, you're still fired up about it. So that is kind of what we're talking about when we mean a values aligned business. It's a business whose foundations are so lined up with how you want to show up in the world that they feed off of each other, and your business helps you express yourself even more fully in the world.
2:50 Melissa:
Yeah, I think it helps to give examples of what the complete opposite is, which is a total shit show, which is what you and I did for a while, a lot of tears and calling each other like, Ah, why is this so hard? Why isn't this working? So the opposite of a values based aligned business would be you really trying to force yourself right, you're a circle, and you're trying to force yourself into a square, or whatever the thing is, but for in my experience, it was just trying to come up with like, courses or different coaching programs, when I just want to create, and I want to educate, I really enjoy podcasting. I do, like working with people one on one. But I need work that's gonna be very creative and very freeform. And in a sense, you can do that with a course. But it was never something that lit me up or fired me up or anything. So even when we think about the product you're choosing, or what your message is, that was another thing too, like, starting off with my own course. And kind of the topics that I was choosing. It wasn't aligned, either. It wasn't truly like what fires me up and what I want to talk about. So that would be the opposite, right? It's like you're trying, you're just kind of going with what a coach told you or what you're seeing other people doing because you think, Oh, this is what will be popular make me money as an entrepreneur?
4:18 Gabby:
Yeah, I think to sum it up, what you're saying is the opposite of a values align business is a business where you're running it based on the outside world and what it's telling you what other quote unquote experts are telling you or the way that it's been done. You know, we live in a pretty incredible age where innovation can happen at any point at any time. Like there used to be a set program and a formula for business. And with the internet and the way that individuals are now empowered to start a business without a lot of capital. The definition of business is shifting and it's so flexible now. So we have this kind of sense of there's a right way to do it and a lot of educators and people out there who make money off of helping people with these kinds of things. They make the most money when they say my method is the best, or my method will get you there, or just follow these three steps or these 10 steps or my strategy or my system, and you will, you know, live the life of your dreams. But what we learned through our process was listening to somebody else, as far as trying to just follow a set of steps to find success is not nearly as effective as finding that strategy for ourselves. Yeah, which does entail testing out different strategies, testing out different programs. It's not that you can't use a strategy that has been used before. It's that you are trying it all out for yourself. And the actual decision, like the actual process, that becomes reality, the company that actually gets created is based on your truth, not what somebody else told you. You should do.
5:58 Melissa:
Yeah, 100% Intuition led, and for this strategy for like, what do we even want to offer? The offer is super important, right, like the work. So everything that goes into it, I think, a big thing that I learned is, there's a lot of ways to get to success and a lot of strategy and a lot of different platforms and all these things. But it's like, which one are you going to actually enjoy doing? Which one are you going to want to keep doing when it gets hard. And when people want to quit and you feel like you're working for free basically, in the beginning, right? A lot of businesses a lot of work before you actually start making income. And so it's like, Well, are you going to do work that you hate and add even more resistance and make it even harder for yourself? Are you going to be enjoying the process? So you want to think about that too, with the offers that you're making and the strategy you choose and the platform you're on? And like Gabby said, that could take some trial and error. So let yourself experiment and listen to your intuition. Like, Oh, I like this one. I don't like that one.
7:04 Gabby:
Yeah, and I think it's easy for people to confuse intuition with. Okay, so if I journal about it, the answer will come to me, right. And I think that's a mistake I personally made a lot in the beginning was thinking, my intuition would just come to me at any given moment, just I just made a wait and let it happen. What I personally learned through the past few years of, of starting of becoming an entrepreneur and wanting that to be a values led life for me, was that I didn't just come to me, I just had to get my hands dirty, I had to try it out. I had to try on different identities for myself and see how they felt and get that visceral sensation of Ooh, that strategy did not feel aligned with my values. Yeah. Or, oh, that strategy felt super fun. And like a perfect expression of who I am. I personally had to try it out. I couldn't just plan and strategize and think and journal and whatever, I had to actually do the work.
8:01 Melissa:
Oh, yeah, you you can't keep it in theory, like you can let yourself sit and reflect. And oh, that intuition thought comes to me. But like you said, you have to put it into action and practice, that's the only way you're really going to know is when you take the action on it. So we want to talk about some of the action that we took and our insights with branding. And I think we can start with how so layup even came about, and it really started with? Well, first it started with the idea of our product, but I think a big starting point to was the name itself, so layup and just kind of like, what's our vision for this brand. That was the first action step that we took.
8:44 Gabby:
Yeah, that was a fun one. And also a hard one too, because at that point, we had already started working on the body deck. But we were kind of finding ourselves needing some foundation like needing some foundational direction, a values based direction on where we want to take this product and where we want to take the future of everything else we create. And so when you came out to visit me in Colorado, this has spring, we sat down, we were already creating our affirmations and everything. But we needed that foundation, like I said, So we sat down trying to figure out a name. And it was it took a long time, it took a lot longer than I thought because there's just a lot of things that going into that go into a name like from as basic as when you Google it, what comes up, you know, I don't want to pick a name that when you rule it, there's a million other companies out there with the same name or it's cliche or, or even stuff that's really long and hard to remember that kind of stuff. There's a lot of practical considerations, which was difficult to manage also with the process of putting deep meaning into the name itself. So we did a lot of word meanings and different names from different languages and cultures and whatnot. And I don't even remember exactly We were where we found so layup but I just loved it so much from the second I saw it, it was like our 500th.
10:09 Melissa:
prospect, but it worked. And that's why we chose it. I love that you pointed out all the intentions behind it. We don't want it to be too long. We don't want it to be cliche. We want it to have meaning, and part of our values and different things that kind of characterize us and what's important to us and our audience and customer and everything. That word soul came up like soulful entrepreneur, right spirituality, things like that. So we liked the name, soul. And then so les is is kind of like a made up word. But when you Google it, it already had a meaning, which was pretty cool. So it's defined out there as seeker of truth and wisdom, right?
10:57 Gabby:
Yeah. And that was so perfect for us, because both of us has have growth as a value as a personal value. And I've always considered myself, somebody who's like seeking more. And I've always been notoriously known in classrooms and educational settings as the person who asked maybe too many questions. Because I'm just so thirsty, to deepen my understanding. And, yeah, it's just so rich. Yeah. And the sole part of it, like you said, all my work, from photography to this product, all of it is with the intention of helping individuals get closer to their own selves, their own souls get past the thinking, and the preoccupation and the worrying, and the anxiety to just become closer and more connected with who they are at heart and soul. So it just ended up when we, when we saw So lay, it had the word sell in it, and it meant seekers of truth and wisdom. And it was just such a perfect fit for our intentions for how we want to show up in the world and what role we want this company to have in that
definitely.
11:59 Melissa:
And it's one of the pieces of the puzzle because you know, Mind Body Soul connection, and we cover that with the body deck, like all three are important. Whenever going to neglect one or the other. We try to incorporate all of them somewhere. So I feel like that
12:13 Gabby:
has I personally I am I am a four tiered person. I actually don't just call it Mind Body Soul. For me. It's mind body, heart and soul. Oh heart, right. Yeah. Yeah, the heart to me. And when I say heart, I mean, and I heart is not often included. It's usually Mind, Body Soul. But I always add heart in there. And to me, it's part of it because heart refers to feelings and emotions, and they're such part of our physical experience that are part of our spiritual experience. They're a part of our everything experience. So I can't I can't leave it out of the whole human consideration. No, I
12:47 Melissa:
love that. Because it's like one of the chakras is one of the centers, if you know, if we follow human design, it's one of those like organs of intelligence, basically, it is it's very crucial. It's very important and integral to life and to this work, too. So I love that you add that I want to add that too. But yeah, the hearts important. And even thinking about that heart piece of it, too, makes me think about the color psychology. So we came up with the name, the name had a purpose. That's what we meant by purposeful name selection. So we shared with you our process and kind of like what we look for what we think helps with selecting a name, and how that's going to actually serve your business and your audience and make sense to your audience that makes sense to your vision of your business. Another important thing is color psychology. And that was something that we were very intentional with choosing our brand colors and choosing our product colors as well, because those colors are going to they're gonna signify a certain vibe, a certain feel a certain they're going to bring different emotions, like Abby said, and they're going to be connected to different parts of life. So we can talk about that a little bit as well. I think really like zooming in to our product, and then zooming out to like all of our colors, but zooming in, you know, our main color of our product and even we've been doing some affirmation posters and other mental health posters recently, but we're using a lot of green. So green is special. It's special to us and it's been very interesting for me, because I've just been so drawn to green over and over and I have my green meals right now but like green is the vibe and green you know makes me think of nature walks and growth you know growth mindedness and grass growing right your brain growing. It's related with the heart chakra There's a lot of crystals that will be green that are going to be related to working with the heart. And then when we look at case studies of companies who use the color green, that's usually the same type of emotion or trust building that they're trying to evoke with their audience to it's usually we're gonna see that with companies in the wellness space, Whole Foods, right nutrition, or health or wellness better help with mental health and in therapy. So we were really intentional to to think about what our values are, and what kind of products we want to put out there, what kind of education we want to put out there. And with our color selection, too, it's like, how is that connecting to those values and what we're trying to put out there?
15:51 Gabby:
Absolutely. And just on a personal basis, Green has always been one of my favorite colors. And green is one of those colors where I think green has the most variety, the most available shades, as any color or more than any color in nature. So naturally occurring in nature, green can be very grounding, you said green is associated with the heart chakra, which is associated with those emotions and feelings, sense of safety, not a physical safety, but a more emotional type safety. And that's a big part of what we wanted with this deck. Again, that mind body heart, soul connection, heart is such a big part of that and that green association. So yes, there's color psychology behind it. But there was also other factors into that choice. When we went to stores to look at card decks and affirmation cards. When we went on Etsy, when we went on Amazon, you know, a color, we did not see representative green. So just from a business perspective, green aligned with our values, and it also helps us stand out. So this is a big any big decision I make in my business number one has to come from within. But number two, I always Google it or look it up. I just like search the words or the concepts playing with just to see what's out there just to do a little bit of market research, because market research can be really helpful when it comes to helping us choose between different options. So while I'm not going to make all my decisions in my business based on what other competitors are doing, no, that's a that's a way I want to avoid. But knowing what other competitors are doing can help me choose between a few different options. But we were playing around with a couple of different cover box options and a couple different main color options for the deck. And green one, not just because of that values, alignment and the psychological element of it, but also because we think it will help us stand out in a maybe somewhat saturated market.
18:01 Melissa:
Yes, definitely. And you know, the other colors that we have in our brand in general, and that shows up in our product and the affirmation card deck are blues and pinks. And pink to me is just one of my favorite colors, too. And something that I always like to include. And to me, it just makes me think of compassion. It makes me think of my feminine side, it makes me think of fun. Like I really think of like fun and creativity when I see pink, or when I'm in that aesthetic and dreamy and pretty mood. Pink is also a go to, but it really is associated as well with those themes of self love and compassion, right? It has that purpose. We also really like just different vibes, like having our card deck be fun and useful and different for me, especially I really liked like, it's on trend, I know, but like the spacey vibe, a you know, a ethereal vibe. And so that was a little bit of that element too. And when we looked up different card decks, and when we did our competitor research there was a ton of pink and blues. It was like all pink. Dal, yeah. Why? So you know, we have that in there. But we definitely stand out because it's kind of like the accents are the pink and blue and we mainly have a lot of the green, which i i just love. I mean, I think it's so perfect. The more I see it and think about it. It is calming. It's growth minded. It represents wisdom and health and all these different things to me. So yeah, that was the color selection. That's a big part of our branding and to end on the last thing we want to touch on here. We've already talked about it a little bit, but we'll just share a little bit deeper is selecting our values like those actual words, those values and how that helps us with audience building and why that's important and how we want a value aligned. Audience, right? We want people to be drawn to us who share some of those similar values, because that makes sense. So my values, my main core values are creativity, authenticity, growth and intuition. What are your Values?
20:28 Gabby:
Mine our growth, freedom and fun
20:32 Melissa:
Yeah. So that was really fun for us to just, we've done so much work like that, to just kind of sit and think about, you know, what are what are our priorities, what are our top values and on our own and coming up with our own values like that, and really live,
20:48 Gabby:
it took me a solid like two to three years to get that list? Yeah, a lot of it took a lot of self discovery to, to summarize my values into three words. So if anyone's listening, and they haven't ever done this work before, give yourself a lot of grace, it takes x exploration is exploration, it's not just teleporting from point A to final destination, it takes time to get there, you got to explore the seas, and explore the mountains and get all the way over there and discover what resonates for you and what actually feels true to you. It's not an overnight process, and it takes more than five minutes. But when you do nail it, everything else becomes way easier when you can identify your values. Everything else just becomes more obvious when it comes to making decisions, or understanding how to respond to something you know, as a boudoir photographer, I also, I deal with a lot of customer service. In the photography side, in my photography, business, there's a lot of customer service, there's a lot of different requests and issues and successes and different things that come up. And rather than, since I know my values, and since I know how my values express themselves in my business, rather than coming up against maybe a difficult situation or a new situation that I haven't encountered before, and having to run to somebody else for help. Or asking Facebook message boards like oh, what would you guys say in response to this email from a client? I, I look towards my values, and it guides me I don't need to look outside myself. In terms of figuring out how to respond to novel or difficult situations, I look within myself at my values. And I say, how do these values guide my response in this situation. And that applies to you know, the creation of the card deck and everything else, the psychology of the colors, and the picking of the name and the creation of the product itself that applies to everything that went into the branding and the creation of
22:59 Melissa
Soulea? Yeah, I love that example, even just answering an email, but in one of our affirmation cards, talks about how values are your lighthouse? And it really is because when you know your values, and like Abby said, It's okay, it takes time we went through I mean, we just kind of percolated on this thought of like values, what are our values for years, right and testing it out? And like, is that really my value? Is that really important to me. But that's part of what you got to figure out. And that is, I think, ultimately, what's going to lead to not only success, like we have seen with the card deck, I mean, that has been night and day a difference between the reception with the card deck, and we're so excited with the sales we're getting on Etsy, and the growth and outside of Etsy, versus like in the past where we were just kind of throwing stuff against the wall, and not in touch with our own values and like what our actual dream business would be like, and our ideal life, right and living in alignment to our values. So it's like a night and day difference by you know, what we've tried in the past versus so layup and how awesome. It's been to build a layup. But yeah, when you think about your values, I would just say, look at a values list, Google a values list, kind of sit with those words. And really like you can ask her intuition, but again, it's not just that you also have to take action, like Gabby said, like for me, I could read the words like professionalism. It's a big value for society. But is that one of my top values? Do I want my business to be like, super buttoned up 24/7 Or do I want to be more fun you know, like, yeah, absolutely, really show up in a in the way that I want. it. So there's a lot of values out there like that there's a whole list of values. And sometimes we look at them and we think about, like, what should my value be, or what are my parents values or my business coaches values or whatever. But we need to silence that. And we need to really figure out what our personal values are. And that's, I think, a huge part of branding. So those are our tips for brand, I actually have
25:24 Gabby:
another tip for vote, share it. What and it's kind of because you know, it's easy to say, explore and figure out your values. But I definitely have plenty of resources that helped me do that. So two of my favorite resources that I used. One is, so there's this book called start with y, which talks about why your Y is so important. And I kind of use y similarly to values as in, it's that foundational driving force, that will guide your light post guiding how you show up in the world, in your career, in your family, in your, in your social life, all of it. So start with Y is a little bit more high level and theoretical and more setting the stage for like, why why your why is important, it's a lot of why's, and it actually has a companion workbook called Find your Y and that's what I actually recommend, because find your Y has in the workbook, it has some kind of really high level recap of the content of start with y. So it talks about Y values and why your Y is important. And it also created gives you the structure for a process that you can follow to help you discover your why and your values. So that's one resource. The other resource that really helped me that finally helped me kind of get to my three words after a long period of exploration was Brene Brown's book Daring Greatly or dare to lead actually,
26:58 Melissa:
I don't remember wait. There are there's definitely a book out there called Daring Greatly to, though.
27:04 Gabby:
Yeah, she actually has both of those I'm pretty sure Daring Greatly and dare to lead are both Brene Brown book. And I think it was dare to lead that I was listening to the audiobook, and she actually has a chapter on values and value selection. And some really, really helpful examples for her own process on how she discovered her values. And kind of the way that she put it in there made something clicked for me that made it so much easier for me to pick my three words, because I was always like I have 10 values, I have 12 values, there's so many words that are important to me. And the way that she explained it as your core values are the ones that set the foundation for everything else. So if you look at each one, if you can trace one of these words that you like to a different word, if you can trace them back to a different word, that kind of root word is your actual core value. So those are two resources I like to share for people who are on this journey of discovering their values. And to start with why find your why combo also specifically relates to entrepreneurship and starting a business and career. So both pretty helpful. Awesome. Thanks for those resources. Those
28:14 Melissa:
are great. Yeah, so that's our episode on behind the scenes. We're gonna do some more episodes or talked about a little bit of our branding behind the scenes. And, you know, we'll talk about some other fun topics like marketing and how do you design a product and future episodes. And if you're curious about our the body deck that we've been talking about and our new Etsy store, you can find us on Etsy. We are so Laya affirmations and our affirmation card deck is called the body deck. But yeah, thanks Gabby for being on here. That was fun.
28:51 Gabby:
Absolutely. This is so much fun. I can't wait for the next one.