Wife, mom, business owner, friend, the list goes on and on for how many roles we can play. When you become an entrepreneur, you take on a whole new brand identity. It is fun to create your brand identity, but where the heck do you start? On today’s episode, we talk with Jessica Cruz-Abalos, founder of J.Cruz Designs, about the importance of visual branding and navigating life as a solo-entrepreneur. Jess is a web and graphic designer that specializes in visual branding. Her work and life philosophy is to create purposeful design for purpose driven people and small businesses. For 5 years she was a co-owner of a boutique branding company with her friend, who loved working with small businesses and women entrepreneurs. They decided to part ways (no hard feelings!) and to pursue bigger projects on their own.
Being an entrepreneur does have its challenges, especially when you have a family: Jess experienced postpartum depression while she was discovering that she wanted to become a solo-entrepreneur. She was able to bounce back by finding new love for fitness that gave her self-confidence and awareness of the importance of self-care.
Takeaways:
1. Don't just create a generalized persona for your target audience. Create 3 detailed personas! Include their name, age, education, lifestyle, occupation and hobbies. The more descriptive you are, the more you are able to understand their needs and pain points.
2. Establishing your brand personality is crucial. Not only will it drive what your visuals will look like, it will create authenticity and relatability among your target audience. What are the feelings or experiences you want your client to feel and how do you want to be perceived?
3. A huge tip when working with your web designer and graphic designer: Content Drives Design. It is like when you make a movie, but you don't have the script. The content is the foundation on which the design rests on. You can create a design with filler text, but you are only going to add more work onto yourself because things will still need to be rearranged and reorganized. It will be a disaster. So, you need to create the content FIRST.
Jessica is one of the speakers for this year’s Fab Fempreneur Fest 2020. Her round table talk will teach you how to discover your brand personality in more detail. To connect with her further, visit her website: http://jcruz.design/. To register for Fab Fempreneur Fest and more info, please visit our website: https://fabfempreneurs.com/fest.
