Poppy Barley Co-founder on "Designing Your Creative Business"

As you may remember, we spent a full day at the PARK Edmonton Artist + Designer forum on August 16th, 2014, talking business, fashion and creativity with six other presenters and 60+ attendees. And ICYMI, we asked Daelan, our tech lead, to sneak in and record our co-founder Justine Barber's presentation on Designing Your Creative Business so that we could share it with all of you (still to come: my presentation on pitching to media). We write about startup culture on our Community Page often, because we regularly receive e-mails with business-related questions from both men and women looking to start their own companies. It's exciting for us to be able to share our experiences so far and feel that we might be offering you some golden nuggets of information that might help you in reaching your business goals. We're still learning, but using Poppy Barley as a case study, here's what we know so far, and what you can take away from this video:

• The realities of a creative business (it's not all fashion + glamour!)
• Enthusiasm versus commitment
• Steps to launching your business (determining market opportunity, early strategic considerations, and launching with your MVP)
• When to quit your day job
• Establishing work-life balance
• How to grow quickly
• Fighting the dragon and riding a lion - metaphors you'll soon understand
• Being an entrepreneur

And one last thing before you begin, here's your "course" summary:

Designing Your Creative Business There’s a clear distinction between creating fashion, art, and creative content, and running a business. This session will introduce you to the necessary ingredients to design a business, including building a team, establishing a distribution strategy, finding manufacturers/partnerships and funding options. Justine Barber is the co-founder of Poppy Barley. Combining the art of traditional shoemaking with advanced pattern technology and e-commerce, Poppy Barley is creating a new standard in the footwear industry, offering limited edition, custom-fit boots and shoes manufactured ethically and transparently. In less than 2-years, Justine and her co-founder and sister, Kendall, built Poppy Barley from scratch. Their direct-to-consumer sales model sells to customers worldwide. The company designs its own product, works directly with all suppliers, and has a manufacturing partnership with a factory in Mexico. In Canada, the company has a team of talented employees; and has successfully financed the company.