Profile: Skinny Laminx

Heather Moore of Skinny Laminx has been screenprinting beautiful textiles in Cape Town for many years and has steadily grown her business to include her own retail showroom, licensed designs and more. Today Heather reveals that taking on a partner and carving out creative time keeps her sane and her business on-track.

How It Started

I tend to say that my business is really just a hobby that got out of control! It started in 2006 when I was trying to move away from a particular kind of illustration work I’d been doing for too long. I took a half-day job as a comics scriptwriter so that I had an income, and I would spend the rest of my day in my recently-acquired studio, teaching myself some basic printmaking, and having fun sewing.

My experiments were prolific, and I had to get rid of things, so I got some into local stores, and started blogging about what I was making too. Blogs were fairly new at the time, and I soon found an audience, to whom I started selling my hand-cut magnets and screenprinted cushions and tea towels through my Etsy shop. At a point, my first wholesale request came in, which was a bit of a shock, as I’d not planned for this at all. I handled as best I could, bought Meg Mateo Ilasco’s book Craft Inc to discover things like what a “line sheet” is, and it seemed that I had a fledgling business on my hands.
 

 
All along – and even now, to some extent – decisions have been made by the seat of my pants, responding to circumstances that arise. While it’s probably not the best way to go about starting a business, it’s worked for me. I’m not the kind of person with the courage to launch myself into a business, so this is the only way I could ended up with one.

More recently, however, I’ve taken the wheel in a more decisive way, and am happy to have done so. I’ve started working with a wonderfully strategically-minded partner who is great for making plans instead of just reacting to what’s happening today. Now Skinny laMinx is a well-run, well-planned business, and it’s good to feel as though I’m running the business rather than the business is running me.

Growing Pains

My wholesale selling grew fast, I started working with a Trade fabric showroom, and my online shop was doing well. I’d upped production, investing in a lot of basecloth, and had a lot of orders to fulfill. It was incredibly busy, and although I was coping, it was by the skin of my teeth, and when things went wrong, it was maddening. I was doing just about every aspect of the business myself, but it felt like I wasn’t doing any of them properly, and certainly, there was almost no time at all to do any design work.

After having to go to the dentist for a few consecutive appointments during this crazy period, it struck me that despite the fact that I had managed to find a series of 2-hour periods to devote to my teeth, I never seemed to have time to do the creative work upon which my business was based. For this reason, I began my ‘Making Friday’ habit, where I made the rule that on Fridays, I was to drop everything and spend the day in my studio, working on fun, experimental, non deadline-driven projects. It was hard to do, because sometimes it felt like I was wasting time, but it really helped me get back to finding what I enjoyed about my job.

Tips for Newcomers

On the whole, I wouldn’t really do anything differently. I didn’t study any of this, so all the mistakes I’ve made along the way (many of them costly) I’ve just written off as “school fees”.

Regarding advice for a new business, I’d strongly suggest putting together a website, and learning to design it yourself, so that you can change and adjust as your business changes over time. I find my blog, shop and website design really important for keeping an eye on what my business has been, what has changed, and what I want it to be.

Thanks for participating, Heather! Hey small business owners – if you are interested in being a part of this interview series, please let me know.