How Organic Growth Effects Design

I started this business with an idea, a pencil and every free version of software you can imagine, from google docs to the first free-website blog.

I haven’t spent anything on ads, sponsorship or traffic. Yet.

It’s been 8 months since I launched the shop and over a year of solid build from websites to caps. I had to do it this way.

Organic cotton, emblematic of our organic growth journey

Socials are not the only strategy

Organic growth on social media, is like swimming upstream.

You are playing for free, in a pay to play environment.

Platforms that are designed to feed you sponsored content, are not going to prioritise unpaid content, that’s the simple version. Never mind algorithms.

It’s also unavoidable if you’re trying to sell something whether that is a t-shirt, a service or your personality. When you have a zero spend strategy, it’s a brutal combination. Unless you happen to have a large…personality.

It means slow growth, minimal distribution and many nights spent looking at every single little thing to make sure that I have done everything I can to move any kind of lever because that is all I can do.

Which also got me thinking…

What if all socials vanished tomorrow?

How would you promote your business?

No Instagram, no TikTok, no Reddit, imagine absolutely everything was gone or this list will get stupid.

What would you do to get the word out?

It’s made me look at what we offer in a different way.
On platforms made to entertain, how do I entertain? And how do I reach people offline?
I started looking for growth opportunity elsewhere, for story, for development, at strategy and landed on something interesting.

Recognise The Canis

This is fragment one. This is the start of what has been a seemingly endless development journey which has led me to characters, tokens and worlds. It’s unfolding and to be discovered.  And the reason why I’ve been scribbling down notes at 1am again.

Cryptic I know

And for good reason. Find The Canis. This is an example of what zero spend can do to design, when you’re forced to design your way out of constraints. It’s conceptual and being slowly released but, on paper, almost brilliant.

Organic design is the outcome

I’m not going to lie, although it’s a constant constraint, zero spend is fundamental for another few months, whether that is fortunate, or unfortunate remains to be seen.

What it does to your design strategy, however, is worth experiencing.
What do you do when you can’t buy attention?

It’s an exercise I’d recommend to any founder. If you can handle it. I have started from zero. I have fully formed business architecture, a designer range in development, a sustainable, circular core system that has just morphed into The Canis, and it all started with a blog called The Pavement Special. I don’t mean to blow smoke up my ass, but no one else is so…

I’m painfully aware of how many businesses fail and how many challenges there are ahead. I just can’t seem to stop. Sometimes I think I should…but then I end up starting another design, or mapping out worlds or fretting over dye, or sitting down to write, or making tiktoks (shakes her fists at the sky), or working on strategy, or tweaking the website, or…

P.S  Or that’s how you know this wasn’t written by AI. K’ Bye.