Back in 2015, been a graphic designer and e-commence owner is something I never imagined I would ever be. In 2016 I was getting by as a fitness instructor. Before that as a warehouse operative and before that as a general operative in a factory.
Over the span of 15 or 16 years, one thing I noticed about these jobs was their minimum wage pay and after a decade and a half of working minimum wage jobs, I knew I had to take the initiative if I ever wanted better but I still didn't know what that should be.
But sometime during mid-2016 I and a work college were standing in the reception area of the local gym that we were working watching a slideshow that I had put together that promoted all the classes that were been run in the facility.
When it was over, she said “You should be charging for this”.
And that is the point when it clicked. Designing digitally is something I had been doing all my life that I thoroughly enjoyed but just took for granted.
I designed things simply for the love of it and I had certainly never thought of making a living out of it. I had designed my own marketing materials when I was doing freelance personal training and group classes in order to make some extra money. I was always fidgeting with design software back as far as I could remember like Microsoft Publisher or Paint and I had great fun designing my Bebo profile (for all you young ones out there, Bebo along with MySpace were the original social networking sites).
I designed 90% of the advertising material in the gym that I was working, from their class posters to their timetables but again, I never thought of making a career out of it until she ushered that sentence. " You should be charging for your designs". That is the power of words.
So, at the beginning of 2017 that is what I started doing. I created a Facebook page called Sean's Designs and asked all my friends to follow me which most of them did.
Now it was a slow year. Not a lot of people knew about me and work was few and far between. I advertised myself on Done Deal and Adverts (buy and sell websites in Ireland) and got little bits of work from this.
I put all my work on my Facebook page and waited for the work to come but in the beginning, I was averaging 1 or 2 jobs per month. I remember the first job I did for a lady in the UK for free, I’m not sure how I came across her but she had a post on Facebook looking for someone who could design a poster for a charity event she was running so I volunteered to do it free of charge just to get the work and get noticed.
In 2018 things started to pick up a bit. It was like somebody just turned hit the light switch, I was getting a lot more, still not enough to make a living out of it but it was a noticeable increase from the first year.
Instead of averaging one job per month, it was more like one or two jobs per week. I was designing leaflets, business cards, posters, wedding invitations, and the likes but I knew later on that year that this was never going to be enough to pay the bills.
I was still working full time as a fitness instructor and would put in 5-6 hours a day on the computer trying to improve and trying to perfect jobs I was working on but I knew I was going to need more.
I purchased a vinyl cutter so I could also supply wall vinyl and apparel which got me a little more business but after a while of this, I realized I was getting away from what I loved doing.
The Birth of Design Gaff
In the beginning, I was operating under the name Sean’s Designs. This was just a generic name I quickly picked to get myself up and running at the start but the thought had been playing on my mind to get a website and e-commerce store up and running for the start of 2019.
I was thinking Sean’s Designs wasn’t going to cut it in the online world besides seansdesigns.com was already taking.
So, for 2 days I typed into a domain finder all sorts of names but all the dotcoms were taking. Then I really thought about it, what do I do? I design from my