As your crochet business grows and you change it to suit you and your needs better, you may find that you start feeling alone in your crochet business. The network of other crafters that you built, all selling the things that they created, no longer seems to be your space. But why and how do you change that and feel like you’ve found your people again?
If you prefer to listen, you can find the podcast here
When The Community You Built No Longer Feels Like Yours
When you first started selling your crochet, you probably were on social media a lot trying to promote your products. Maybe you were in certain Facebook groups a lot or following particular hashtags, but you ended up seeing the same names over and over again. You started commenting more on those people’s posts and chatting in the comments. They would comment in kind on your posts — and so your network got created. Perhaps there was even a group chat where many of you could support each other in a more private space.
But you had your people, you had a group of others who understood the challenges, and had the same goal as you did. A recognisable group of crafters in an ocean full of strangers who you could connect with and have a safe and supportive group.
Until that group no longer felt like your space anymore.
It’s a sad part of your crochet business growing and changing to suit you and your lifestyle better. When you no longer rely on the crochet that you make and instead turn to recurring income and digital products and services, your challenges change too. Your business no longer runs the same way — the gripes that you once had about lost packages, customers who keep changing their minds about what they want and trying to haggle your prices down. Those problems disappear. Instead they are replaced with problems with internet speeds and tech not working as needed. That support group doesn’t have those new issues. They are still experiencing your old issues, and that is where the connection gap starts to rise.
It’s Not Rejection, It’s A Shift
That gap is where the feeling of loneliness starts to creep in, that feeling that you’re out in the cold a little bit. Let’s be clear, no one in your network has rejected you. In fact they will probably be your biggest supporters, encouraging you to do what you need to do, being excited for you when your profits start to increase and you start making the serious money that you need.
The feeling that you don’t belong anymore comes from you.
Your network got built from being able to share the journey, the struggles, the need to learn a lot very fast. You supported each other through all that and the bond was built on the shared experience. But now your experience is different. Your network will be supportive, but they no longer have the shared experience. They can be sympathetic and empathetic with your new struggles, but they don’t have any shared experience to offer that makes you feel completely understood. That’s where the shift happens.
The lack of shared experience goes both ways — you are no longer sharing their experience anymore either. So more and more you start to pull away. You don’t join in the chat as much, you don’t comment on posts or in groups as much and that gap gets wider and wider and that feeling that you’re doing this alone now increases.
It Happened To Me Too
This was my experience too. I used to be part of a chat group filled with other sellers, and we all started grouping together early on in our selling journeys. There were wax melt makers, artists, stationers, dream catcher makers, all people who were trying to make it by selling things they were creating themselves.
Over time the group started to change. Some people couldn’t make it work for them and threw in the towel, some simply drifted away, one lady sadly passed away. In the end I drifted away too and that was at the time where I stopped selling the crochet that I made and switched to writing crochet patterns. No one threw me out, no one told me to leave, I just drifted away.
It was a lonely place for a while. I needed to find my new people.
Finding Your New People
Time passes and it makes us forget how we did things to begin with, especially when things happened gradually and without us really trying. We don’t really set out to build these groups, these support networks that we end up relying on, they just gradually build up as we go about building our businesses. So when it comes to creating a new network for ourselves, we think it’s a really difficult task because we don’t remember how we did it the first time around.
The good news is that it’s easier than you think and just like the first time around it will happen all by itself.
This is also one thing that the social media algorithms will actually help you for. As you start to make posts about the new direction your crochet business is taking, the algorithms will start to show posts from others doing the same thing in your feed. This makes it so much easier for you to find new people to start networking with. After that it’s up to you. Start commenting on posts by those people, start joining groups that they are in and start making yourself known. Check out the hashtags that others are using to expand your network through those too.
It doesn’t have to take long to start building a new network, but it’s not going to happen automatically — it does take effort from you. But that feeling of going it alone doesn’t need to last for long. You just need to get stuck into building new connections.
What You Can Do About It Today
You can get started today. I know commenting on strangers’ posts can be intimidating, so start small. Find 3 posts that you can leave a quick comment on — asking a question is best because that automatically invites a response and increases the chances of getting a chat going and that will help you get to know the person. If you like what’s being said, then follow their account. Then repeat this on another day. If you can do it every day then great, but if you don’t have the social bandwidth for that, then once a week will do, it just means that it will take a little longer to build your new network.
Give it a try today and banish that lonely feeling to the past.
I’m Kelly Thomas, crochet business owner, pattern writer, blogger and coach. I started my crochet business selling what I make and made all the mistakes along the way. Let me show you what I learned so you don’t make the same errors.
You can listen to the podcast episode that goes with this article here. It is a bit different to what you’ve just read, but the message is the same.
You can check out the rest of my podcast here to discover more about how to turn your crochet into a successful business.
I also have this free guide that you can download which walks you through 12 ways that you can make money from your crochet.
