It's been a while... but new branding!

I'm not sure where to start to be honest! A lot has happened since I last posted on here. But, the main big news that I want to post about it, is...

I've rebranded!

It was a very close call between that and completely closing up for good 😅

So, I'm not going to lie, the last year or two has been particularly difficult as a small business owner, especially doing it as my full time job and it being my only income. It was great for a couple of years, but I naively didn't think it'd get this bad (and by this bad, in April for example, I received 3 orders on Etsy - compare that to my best year back in '22 when I was averaging 190 orders a month.... and that's just Etsy)

Last October, I started a part time job, which I'm still doing now. It's nothing fancy, but it's enough to cover the bills I need to pay and it's (for the most part - I got a scare last month when they said they were cutting hours back and spoke of possible redundancies, thankfully I only lost 3/4 of an hour!) guaranteed income, something my business has not been for a while.

So since then, I've been very back and forth with myself as to what to do with the business. Do I still carry on and make it work, even if it is only ever a part time/side job? Or do I just give it up completely, because at the end of the day, especially right now, it's a lot of work for nothing.

One day in March, I decided to play around with rebranding. Spent a day on it, and then actually really loved what I'd done that I decided to go full steam ahead with the idea. The idea being that I was to solely focus on my cat designs and illustrations, because looking at my market stats in particular for last year, 80% of sales were cat related products.

So, here is my brand new logo and colours, what do you think?!

I recently debuted the branding at my latest markets, so I'll include a couple of photos to show the colours and branding in action. My website, socials and everything else will be fully updated to the new look by the 19th May - the business' 7th birthday - and well, we'll see from there where things go!

I did have a brief think about changing the name, but thought that would be even more of a faff (trading names, social media handles etc.) so it's still Hayley Jade (kind of dropped the Design Studio a few years ago).

I'm hoping to be posting more on here again, but again, we'll see!