Part 1: The Artist Unlocking Our Creativity Through Coloring

Sarah Renae Clark creates content about coloring. What started as selling printable coloring books through Facebook is now her own little empire earning $2.6 million per year with a team of eight. Sara is a great example of how a creators can build a strong, engaged community by tapping into a deep human desire. The desire to be creative.

Happy Tuesday Friends,

Ever since she was young, Sarah Renae Clark loved to draw. But, when Sarah finished school she stopped working with pen and paper. She was a full-time volunteer at her local church and started a digital graphic design business on the side. A few years later she started a full-time job at a local church and completely abandoned drawing. In 2015, Sarah went on maternity leave with her first child. It was during this time she was determined to build a business from home doing something creative.

She never looked back…

The Early Days 🪜 

Clark saw the rise of adult coloring books and thought it was a cool business opportunity that matched her interests and design skills. She created her first adult coloring book, a 20-page printable PDF, that she designed in a day. Although it was only selling for $3, it was hard for Sarah to get any sales as she didn’t have an audience.

Clark started an Etsy store and searched for, “adult coloring books” on Facebook to promote her product. Soon, she was selling 50 books per month and she realized there was potential. Clark went down a rabbit hole to learn about other creative ways to market her books online. She eventually launched her own website, blog, and created several more coloring books. They came in the form of downloadable PDFs that people had to print themselves. It was a way for Clark to get started with extremely low costs and risk.

Sarah started to build an audience on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, which allowed her to establish a direct relationship with her audience making it easier to receive feedback and to launch new products based on what her audience was asking for. Many community members shared with her that they were struggling to match colors that worked well together. Clark started thinking about products she could launch to help solve this problem and landed on a book of color palettes. The color palette was launched in 2018 aimed at helping people match colors and it quickly became Clark’s best-selling product. The first version of the color palette was a PDF file that people bought for $5. It sold so well that Clark released a larger, interactive PDF of several palettes for $30.

Becoming a Creator 👩‍🎨 

In 2019, Clark started to think about making video content. Originally, she didn’t want to do this as she lacked the confidence to be in front of the camera all day. However, that changed when a creator with just 15,000 followers reviewed one of her new products and more than 100 people purchase it within an affiliate link. The first creator helped Clark grow daily sales from $1,000 to $12,000 within one month. This creator was not an exception. Other creators helped her achieve similar results. After this experience Clark decided to make videos herself and launched her YouTube channel in 2020. She gained over 100,000 subscribers in just over one year. Since launching her YouTube channel, Clark’s business started to take off. Below are her annual revenues before after launching her YouTube channel.

Although color palettes were Clark’s best selling product, she was still receiving feedback from her customers that they would love to hold it in their hands instead of having a digital PDF or interactive version on the iPad. So, in 2022 Clark introduced the Color Cube, a physical product that makes choosing colors for any project easy and fun. It was inspired by the original color palettes. Within two days of launching the Color Cube, she made $50,000 in revenue and soon began earning close to $200,000 per month from the product.

Today, Clark earns $2.6 million per year and has a team of 8 full-time employees. Her success can largely be credited to her community building skills and incorporating feedback to guide her product development roadmap.

Breaking Down Sarah’s World and Key Takeaways 🌎️ 

Let’s dig deeper why the world Sarah is building is interesting and a few insights from studying her journey as a creator:

• She is addressing a deep, human need - one of the most remarkable things about humans vs other living things is our ability to be creative. It’s a deep human need and desire to create. Sarah has tapped into this at a time where people are looking for creative pursuits that are not in front of a computer screen. Further, Sarah has used her adult coloring books as a sort of a therapy for people to get through lonely or difficult times in their lives. She even designs some of her coloring books based on the life moments.

• She started with a digital product - most creators first build an audience and then think about launching a digital or physical product around their community as they already have built-in distribution. That was not the case for Clark. She started the opposite way. Clark first came up with the idea of selling color books, but at that moment, she didn’t have an audience. She started interacting with folks in Facebook groups and trying to answer their questions. Sarah eventually launched her own blog and began creating content, which led to the growth of her own community and YouTube channel. Unlike many creators, she took a different path by starting with selling a product first. One key factor that made this possible was her ability to keep upfront costs minimal by offering coloring books as printable PDFs.

• She has a smaller, engaged community - although Sarah has only 300,000 subscribers on YouTube today, she has been able to sell millions of dollars worth of products and support a small team. This is because her content and products bring real meaning and value to peoples’ lives. Further, Clark continues to come up with new products by simply engaging her audience, discovering problems, and incorporating their feedback into her product development process. As a result, she can upsell current customers with new products over and over again. This is something most creators are not able to do. The lesson here is that creators shouldn’t be focusing on getting as many followers or subscribers as possible. They should focus on creating meaningful, valuable content and products for their audience. The rest will follow.

We think Sarah is a great example of the future of the creator economy. Going forward, successful creators will have smaller, niche audiences where content is just one part of their platforms they build a community around. They will have to go super deep into a category and build real, meaningful relationships with their subscribers to create a full-time, sustainable career. This is simply because the amount of content and creators clamoring for peoples’ attention continues to increase.

Clark is a great example of going deep into a category, creating meaning in peoples’ lives, and building a real community around everything related to coloring. Check out her YouTube channel below:

Have good week and remember to Go Direct!

Jordan & Scott