234. From Hobby to Profit: Turning Creative Passions into a Multi-Million Dollar Business With Carina Gardner

Welcome to another inspiring episode of The Lucy Liu Show, the ultimate fueling station for your mind, business, and life. In this episode, host Lucy Liu sits down with the incredibly talented Carina Gardner, a surface pattern and craft designer turned CEO, who has successfully turned her creative hobbies into a thriving multi-million dollar business.

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Carina Gardner, who has built a successful brand in just two years, shares her journey from being an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota to becoming a successful entrepreneur. She reveals how she started her digital scrapbooking business while juggling her academic career and family life. Karina’s story is a testament to the power of decision-making and the potential to turn creative passions into profitable ventures.

Throughout the episode, Carina offers valuable insights on:

• Transitioning from a hobbyist to a business mindset.
• Overcoming limiting beliefs and embracing new opportunities.
• The importance of distribution and how to find the right channels for your products.
• Managing risks and knowing when to quit your day job.
• The benefits of joining a mastermind group for business growth.
• Practical tips for running successful Facebook ads.

Tune in to this episode for an inspiring conversation filled with practical tips and heartfelt advice. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to take your business to the next level, Carina Gardner’s insights will empower you to believe that you are enough, just as you are right now, to achieve your dreams.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello, hello, beautiful souls. This episode is for you if you want to turn one of your creative hobbies into a profitable business. And for that, I’m really excited to welcome my guest today, Karina Gartner. She is a surface pattern and craft designer turned CEO who teaches hobbyists to make money as designers. As a former university professor and creative director of her company, her expertise led her to build a multi-million dollar brand in just two years. She is also the amazing author of two books on Amazon and host of the Make and Design podcast. Isn’t that amazing? Welcome to the show, Carina.

Oh, I’m so excited to be here.

Oh, lovely. Okay, so I’m all about decision making. So let’s start there. At what point in your life did you make the decision to actually create a business from your creative hobby?

So for me, it was directly after I finished my doctorate. So at the time I was an associate or not associate, I was like an adjunct faculty professor at the University of Minnesota because I just finished my doctorate. I had two really small children and I decided to start a digital scrapbooking business where I was designing 12 by 12 papers and accessories. And this was for the crafting industry. And while I was brand new to the market, it was pretty hot. And as I’ve kind of built my career over the years, I have dug even more into things that I really like to do and figured out ways in order to make money in particular design because that’s what I knew the best about. So fabric, I love the fabric market. And so I managed to get into that market. I like stickers. I like die cutting machines. And so all of these things ended up being things that became part of my business in one way, shape or form. And it became really obvious to me that if you had a great hobby, very often if you knew what you were buying, how you were buying it, you could probably figure out a way to make money in that particular area.

And I’ve myself helped clients turn their hobby into businesses. And I know it’s all about mindset. How did you turn your mindset from it’s just a hobby into a full-blown business mindset?

Yeah, this is hard. This is a hard question for me because I know a lot of people go into like their hobbies, like their quilting. I work with a lot of quilters. They love quilting and they’re like trying to figure out how to make money from quilting. Of course, there’s like a gazillion ways you could make money from it. You could actually sell the quilts you make, right? You could sell like, I have a friend who sells like packs where it’s like everything’s precut. And so then you sell that there’s, you know, the physical part of it. You could sell classes on quilting, right? You could sell the fabric. Like if you designed the fabric, which is what I do, design the fabric and sell that to manufacturers. So there’s like all these different ways you can make, you could sell sewing patterns, like in quilting, right? So there’s all these different ways you can make money. I think that the best thing you can do as you’re kind of just trying to figure out like, how do you make that transition from hobbyist to profitability is to like really brainstorm all the different ways you could make money in that hobby and decide which one you are best suited for. What do you have the most expertise in, in order to get it done? You know, maybe you are a phenomenal cutter, you know, like there’s not very many people who are really great cutters actually in the quilting world. And if you’re really great at cutting and organizing, then you could organize a whole bunch of people who could cut and sell, you know, sell pre cuts of this fabric, right? If you’re a great designer and I was a designer, it made a lot of sense for me to make money selling the design work to fabric manufacturers.

And I think it really starts with the belief that it’s possible, like just how you talked about, you know, what is possible? Because if you’re just sitting at home alone and overthinking, you’re going to think, well, is that possible? Right? Is this is just a hobby. Whereas if you listen to Carina and her experiences with working with different types of creatives, then you will know anything you’re thinking of someone out there is probably already doing it.

Yeah. And have you bought it? That’s the other thing. If you’ve bought it from someone, then if you have a limiting belief that no one’s going to buy it from you, why is that? Why do you feel like nobody will buy it from you? You know, a lot of times expertise comes from just beginning, right? Just getting started. And so, you know, if you like have a limiting belief that no one’s going to buy your sewing pattern or your creative, amazing craft or your jam that you can or whatever it is, you have to really go back to a couple of thoughts, which is why do you feel limited by it? And then second of all, are you feeling limited just because you don’t have the education around it? Because education can be purchased and gotten right. And experience can happen over time. So you just have to get started and your identity will change as you kind of like rip away that limiting a belief by just simply doing the tasks involved with making that hobby into a profitable business.

And I think very often when we turn that hobby into a business, there’s always this question around should you quit your job or at what point do you quit your job? And I think I’ve seen people on both sides. I’ve seen people who actually kept their day jobs and still run a very profitable business on top of their day job, just on very few working hours.

What’s your take on that? You know, I think everybody is right on this. You know, I think everybody has their own way of doing it. Me personally, I teach a lot of design students. I have tons of designers who I work with, whether I’m a creative director over, you know, whatever we’re working on. And my feeling is, and this is because I am risk adverse, to keep your day job until you make enough money to prove that you can replace your current job. It always makes me slightly nervous because a lot of markets need proven techniques, right? Like I’ve noticed there are certain markets that in my mind, and granted this might be a limiting belief, they have kind of a market margin. Like it’s very difficult to kind of get over a certain hump unless you like open up another category. And so because of that, I would say like, for example, if you’re canning jam, like if that’s the thing you’re doing and you’ve got it in three mom and pop shops and you’re selling pretty good, if you’re still not making your current income, or you’re not like at, I would say 80% of the way, there’s kind of where I would be. Then I would make me a little bit nervous because it really isn’t about number of jamming can jams that you’re making, right? It’s about number of opportunities, marketing distribution opportunities available to you. And so that’s what I would say, like getting to at least 80% of your salary, if not your full salary, before you make that leap, makes a lot of sense to me. I didn’t leave one of my current jobs until I literally had made in a month what I had made at my job for a whole year. So like my entire salary I made in one month and that’s when I quit. Like that’s when I kind of made the transition. With same thing with my husband. So my husband’s a stay at home dad. He’s been a stay at home dad now for about two years, but we didn’t let him quit his job until I made his entire salary in a single week. So like we have kind of stringent methods for making those decisions, but it’s because I’m risk adverse. I want to make sure that we’re safe, that financially we’re okay. We have three kids, we’re paying for college and I just, I want to be careful. And if you’re someone who’s like, you know, kind of like spontaneous, you might not feel like you have to be that stringent with the way you do your finances, but I just like to be really careful. So. Yeah.

Wow. Well, building a multi million dollar business in less than three years, that’s definitely something you can brag about, right? What would you say were your top tips though in making that happen?

Yeah. I think one of the best things I did was join a mastermind that probably changed everything for me. When you’re designing or entrepreneuring all by yourself. One of the problems is you just don’t know what you don’t know. And I did not know a lot. Yeah. Despite the fact that I had a PhD and that I had been in business for 13 years, it was truly the moment. Like I can, I can mark it to the day, February 17th, 2020. Like when I joined a mastermind, it changed everything because I flipped my mindset around a couple of things that needed to be done in my business. I think one of the biggest things that I figured out was that, you know, I have always used other distribution methods for making income. So I own, I own another company called mini Lou, which is a physical products. It was a physical products company. We did deals with like Nordstrom and just really big entities and then 500 independent stores. We use wholesalers to get to where we needed to go for that. So I was using those distribution methods. I didn’t understand online distribution methods like this course creation thing and, you know, selling programs. I didn’t understand it. And the moment I joined a mastermind, it changed everything. Cause I really learned what I needed to learn. The second thing probably was, I am sure you hear this a lot since you’re a life coach, but like, just because you’ve done it before, it doesn’t mean that you did it right. And you feel like you’re spinning your wheels because you’re doing the same things over and over again. There’s a pretty good chance. You’re not doing it right for me. That was Facebook ads. I had run Facebook ads previously a couple of years before, and I just didn’t get very much traction on them. The, the time I did it while I was in the mastermind, I had a little bit of help and I still run my own Facebook ads. We don’t, we don’t have an agency do them, but when I figured out how to do them and got the education around them, when I did them again, they worked, they totally made sense. But a lot of it was cause I just didn’t understand how to make them work. And I think this whole idea, you do something and you’re like, well, that’s done. Never doing that again is actually a very poor way to look at business. Like you have to do things and iterate a few different times to get it right.

I love how you talk about practical, these practical online education can really change your life, right? Like we don’t learn if anything like this in our regular education system.

Yeah. It’s a very interesting thing. I don’t know if you know this, Lucy, we actually are starting a university. So our private university will be starting in January of 2025 and we’re trying to change that exact thing in the current education system. I love the current education system. There’s so much good about it. The way we can teach our students, the time they get. I love those years, that 18 to 24 year old time period where a lot of people are changing. But I work specifically with women who are like 45 to 65. And a lot of it’s because you get enough life experience at that point to realize what you really want to do with your life. And so I started thinking about how can we change design education or any education so that it’s more outcome based? Because at that age, you’re not going to want to come out with just some general education. You want to come out with the ability to actually do things. And so we’re all of our curriculum is very much centered on you leave our program owning an actual design business that’s actually running and actually making sales. And when you start thinking about outcome based education, there’s actually a lot of it out there, but sometimes we have like kind of looked down on it. Great. A great point of that is plumbing, electrical, like all these vocational schools are outcome based education. And I would love to see our white collared education follow suit that there is actually all of these outcome based education pieces that we can do in the white collar segment.

I love that. And I love about outcome based education. my daughter just got accepted into an art school and I actually never knew these like pre educational schools existed until her teacher told us about it. And now I was so excited because we don’t know what we don’t know, right? They have a hundred percent acceptance rate into art colleges after that. These kids just love art and they’re all creatives. All your friends are going to be creative, truly exciting stuff.

Yeah. I love that your daughter is doing that. And the fact that you didn’t know about it and someone had to tell you about it, but what they’re doing is so important because the fact that she can get into an art college after that is because they’re spending so much time preparing them. So they have a good enough portfolio to get into art college. That’s something our general education system is not going to do. And a lot of that is because most kids don’t know they want to be X, Y, and Z in middle school. Right. They don’t, they don’t know yet what they’re going to do, but like when you’re able to give them opportunities and kind of put them on a path, it’s really interesting because then they can kind of become expert quicker. It’s like that 10,000 hour rule, like Malcolm Gladwell or whatever, like, yeah, 10,000 hours. I’m like, is it 15,000? Is it 10,000? It’s a lot of hours, but you can, if you can get those hours earlier in your life, then you succeed much faster. And that’s basically what you’re doing with your daughter in art school by getting her along the way a little bit faster. You are giving her the opportunity to get to a place faster than somebody else. And that actually is really important because we actually live in a society. It’s so crazy. We keep talking about general education, giving people general education, but we actually live in a society that’s specialized. I don’t use grammar every day. That’s like not the thing. I’m not writing and making sure my grammar is perfect yet. I went to school for lots and lots of grammar. It’s not a terrible thing, but what if some of that education space had been design space for me? Would I be further along? Would I be an expert faster? Right. Because at the end of the day, most of us are doing specialized things. Have you talked to somebody who’s like, oh, I do a little bit of math and I do a little biology in my job and I do a little, right? No one does that. You’re a copywriter or you’re a designer or you’re a administrator. There are very specific things that we end up all doing. We are in HR. We understand law, right? It’s very, very often, I don’t see anyone who’s just like, I’m a marine biologist and I also go work in the life sciences and I also am in charge of writing all the, you know, I mean, there are some things we do that’s general, but usually it’s not that broad of a scope.

Yeah, that’s funny, but hey, it’s never too late to start, right? So no matter what stage you are in life now, no matter what season it is, you can always start a new goal and make it fun. Yeah, it’s so true. So what are things you would suggest to someone who’s just starting a creative business?

Distribution, distribution, distribution. If you can find a way to get distribution for your product, whether it’s physical or digital, that is everything. So there’s that piece. The second piece is it’s going to take a lot longer than you think it’s going to take. And I think if you think in your head, this is a three to five year process, not a three month process or a year process. You set yourself better up to win.

I love that. And there’s always going to be bumps on the road, right? Nothing’s ever perfect. So what was one of your memorable moments where you overcame an obstacle that you can think about? Oh, my gosh.

Well, we’re in the middle of obstacles. I think the more successful you are, actually, the more bumps there are. I’ve probably dealt with more setbacks in the last three years, made more money and had more wins during the last three years than ever in my entire business life. And that says a lot, right? Like the more winning you do, the more failing you do. I think there is really something to it. But in terms of like an actual bump in the road, we had a year in the last three years where we hired way too many people and the wrong people. And it was rough because there is nothing I hate more than firing people. Like it is not exciting. It’s not. It just was awful. And in particular, we had hired several people in different countries to do like VA work for us. And we had to fire several of them because they could just not get on track. They couldn’t go without how fast we were going. And at the time, we didn’t realize how fast we were going. But until we started having people on the team be with us for only two or three weeks and realize, oh, they can’t catch up because we move this fast all the time. If they can’t catch up in the next month or so, then they’re going to be so far behind that we’re not going to do anything about it. And so what you end up doing is you lose all this time in training people, tons of time in training people, tons of kind of emotional like, oh, I just love this person, but they just literally cannot do the work like they can’t keep up with what we’re doing. And then third, there’s this rehiring process to make sure that you get the right people in the job. And so I just there was a year there we hired and fired so quickly and it was clearly my fault. I mean, it was so clearly my fault. And that’s really hard. Like it’s hard when you’re kind of like gauging in your business and trying to figure it out. And you realize like everything you’re doing, you’re kind of like, that’s my fault. That’s my fault. I didn’t do that right. You know, you do you feel like you’re failing a lot. And I would say if you if you feel like you’re only winning, then you’re probably a narcissist. If you feel like you’re failing all the time, that’s probably pretty normal. But hopefully you’re celebrating a little bit of both.

Ah, such good tips. And obviously you started as a hobby and you didn’t hire until you were successful, right?

Yeah. How long did it take you to start delegating? You know, I probably so I’ve owned a few different businesses. My first assistant, I probably hired in year five of the business. So it was pretty far in. And then I didn’t even build for many Lou, we built a full team. There was six of us on that team and it was in a physical space in a warehouse because we had products getting shipped out. That was probably in year seven or eight when we started that business. And then that no longer that’s all a digital asset at this point. And then the current biggest of my companies, which is design suite, that company we currently have, there’s 16 of us and it’s virtual and online. And so I would say there is like a process because the first person you hire will probably not be the last person that ends up with you forever, right? Especially as you’re figuring it out and finding out what your organizational behavior looks like. We’re the current team I have is an online virtual team. So you have to no one’s checking your time. We do not do that in our company. It’s like, you’re just doing the work. You get the work done, you work fast, you work efficiently. And if you can’t, then it’s hard for you to keep up with everything everybody’s doing because all of our work affects each other. We had a working meeting just this morning. All the coaches, four coaches and three of the VAs were on that. So it was like eight of us on this one meeting trying to finish up grading rubrics for the upcoming courses we’re doing. And so someone was building a grading rubric. Someone was training on a grading rubric. Someone else was putting in tests. Someone was reformatting the classes. So it was like everybody was there just working, getting their piece done as fast as we possibly could. And I just think you, not every personality is meant for that. And you can kind of see that as you kind of hire people and find out who really is meant for that kind of work. Yeah.

But they like, like the saying goes, new level, new devil, right? But it’s just fun. Let it be fun. Let it be something you enjoy doing. Then that makes it worthwhile. Yeah, it does. Well, thank you so much for sharing your business with us, Karina. What is something, a quote that you go by in life?

Yeah. I, um, I think the mantra that I use very often with my designers and I think it’s relevant here is you are enough just as you are right now. You are enough. Uh, if you think that if you need to plan it and spend a lot of time planning it before you start your business, that’s nonsense. We like, you can ask my team, we get going and start doing something even before we know all the steps. We’re like, we’re in it. We go, we go for it. And this whole idea of imposter syndrome, which I keep hearing so much about, I just want to tell you, like, it is exactly what it is. It’s imposter syndrome and you don’t need to have it. Like you could actually spend your time thinking about how you are good enough and how you are the only one that can bring this to the table in the shape, form way that you’re going to do it because you are unique. There’s no one else out there like you. So like, if you can bring it to the table in this package that only you can bring, then you’re plenty enough for it.

Beautifully said. Great reminder that enough is a decision and that’s your decision. Awesome. Carina, where can we find you at?

If you want to come visit me at carinagardner.com, that’s my main website. It will direct you off to our new university site, which we hope will be up very soon. And our, our course site, we have a, an online professional development program for designers. That’s we just, it’s really fun. And then you can also see like my fabric lines and I still own design businesses and stuff and mini Lou. And so we have lots and lots of stuff always going on. So you just go to karinagardner.com to check things out. How fun.

Thank you for being with us today.

Thanks for having me.