Red Tulip Design Studio

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My Shelby Loves Horses

For my daughter Shelby's 8th birthday in early 2016, she wanted a "Horse, Of Course!" birthday party. I'd seen images of homemade hobby horses floating around Pinterest, so I decided to try it out. I made 20 hobby horses for her party in one week! And guess what? I wanted MORE! I LOVED making these fun little ponies. So I designed up a fun little logo and opened up a shop on Etsy in late 2016 selling ponies (and a few unicorns but yeesh, those were a pain to make!).

Shelby named all of the ponies herself and she was present as each pony was "born" - when I turned them right-side out after sewing and before stuffing.

I didn't do anything to promote the Etsy business so I guess customers just found me by searching, although most of my sales came from word of mouth and didn't go through Etsy. Which didn't give me traffic or a high profile on Etsy. Which was a bit problematic because I really wasn't making a profit at all so I didn't want to pay for Etsy advertising or go to the hassle of starting social media accounts for the shop. Fortunately, I didn't have to deal with those problems because after about a year of making ponies and about 40-50 sales, plus the 20 I'd made for Shelby's birthday, I was hobby horsed-out (Yes, that's a real thing! Who knew?!?) and I closed up the shop.

Now the ponies live on only in my memory.

Well, actually, a few still literally live in my house. Shelby has three in her room, the last remaining items from her lovely horse room, and I think my mom ended up with 2 or 3?

Oh, but the three that Shelby has in her new wolf room? They were ONLY allowed to stay so the wolves had something to eat! Can you believe that?? Alas, there's a big difference between being 7 (cute and cuddly and adorable) and 11 (ornery tween with too many opinions). *sigh*

logo development

I threw together this cute little whimsical logo in a couple of hours.

When I'm doing a graphic design project, I usually sleep on it and come back to it a day or two later and make a million tweaks before finalizing or submitting it to a client, but I never changed anything on this one and still love it today, even though the Etsy shop is long since closed.

And did you catch the tulip in the horse's mouth? It's a nod to its "parent" company, Red Tulip Design Studio! :)

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