253: How a Pattern Designer Built a Multi-Million Dollar Business Without Art School (Bonnie Christine)

I'll never forget the moment that I realized this is possible. The lies that people are believing are, I'm too old, I'm too lazy, I'm too... You gotta believe in what you do so much that you understand that it is doing every single person a disservice if they don't hear about it. We used to have to pay to get in front of mass audiences. What a gift it is now. That was Bonnie Christine, surface pattern designer, educator, and the founder of a multi-million dollar business teaching creatives how to turn their art into income. Today, we talk about her 12-week runway that fills her course every year, her 10% ad budget rule that removes the fear, and what happened when she bet $42,000 on a trade show booth. and wait until you hear what happens in her workshops when she asks about the lies people believe. We get into it in this episode. Bonnie, welcome to the podcast. I'm so glad to be here, Stu. Yeah. Okay. So we have a lot of history. I know your business quite well, but what's pretty crazy is how long you have been serving this market of surface pattern designers. And a large part of it is because you have just gotten really sappy about how to attract the audience that you want to serve and I want to kind of break that down. So for starters you have a course and a membership. Those are your two primary offers. Now we'll get into a little bit later some of the other things that you're exploring which I think are really exciting because when the market's going one way you are going in the complete opposite. So I want to break that down but Let's take your bread and butter. Okay. What has been the process for you to continuously grow the audience and generate more sales? Yeah. So I think one thing that's really interesting with my business and also any highly niched business is that we have to do some preliminary work. Like if I start talking about surface pattern design on the street or wherever, nobody knows what I'm talking about. So we have to back that up quite a bit and meet our audience like way steps ahead of that and start to educate them on what this even is. Like, I'll never forget the moment that I realized the phrase and what it meant. And then my mind was just like, this is possible. This is a job. And now I see it everywhere. And so it's really fun to be the person who kind of sparks that moment for so many other people, too. So we spend a lot of time in that messaging because we've got to back it up. So we'll start talking about, so you want to design fabric or, you know, the wallpaper on that wall, like somebody designed that and that person can be you. And so we tend to start talking about patterns on products, specific products like gift wrap and wallpaper months before we start introducing them to the concept of this beautiful industry called surface pattern design. And so because of that, we often do the majority of our list building months before we get to our biggest course offering, which is a course that we offer one time a year. It's typically in February. So our kind of biggest reach efforts start happening in November. So we do a lot of organic marketing and we do a lot of paid traffic marketing as well, just to kind of get our message out to creative audiences. So we typically start that in November and we start it with a class on how to design gift wrap. And it's the perfect thing for the perfect time of the season. Design your own gift wrap this season. And then of course, the same skill can be taken to so many different applications as well. So we've got people designing fabric to make, you know, family pajamas or grandparents who want to do a project for the kids or someone who wants to design their Christmas cards or something. It's all kind of the same skill that we start teaching in a free mini class. Can I pause here for one second? Because I think there's a big lesson that I want to unpack for everybody. And that is that if you were to only focus on surface pattern design, there's a tiny sliver of the population that even knows what that is. And therefore there's probably an even smaller percentage of the population that would then have interest in what it is that you're offering. And what I hear you saying is, we're opening or broadening our scope, trying to reach people that may not be specifically aware of service pattern design, but may be great designers in their own right and want to use those design skills in ways to design gift wrap, wallpaper, pajamas, you know, patterns of any kind. But in order to do that, we got to show them what's possible. And I would even tell you, you don't even have to have design skills. You don't have to be able to draw. You don't have to be an artist because I wasn't. I was like crafty. I would say I was crafty. I would say I was always creative, but I was not an artist and I did not go to design school. And so that is another thing that we have to really battle is you don't have to be this magnificent artist in any capacity. In fact, you don't even have to draw it all if you don't want to. And so we back it up to like general creativity. So we're hitting kind of that creative audience that knows that they love to bring something to life from nothing. That's challenging to like challenge ourselves. Can we go broader? Can we go even broader to reach someone who just feels generally creative? And it's in this first mini course where they're learning to create a gift wrap, like wrap paper. That's your first swing at the bat to reach that broader audience and then begin teaching some of these skills and introducing some of these concepts. Are you selling something in this first mini course? There's literally nothing to buy. And one of the, this is what we call our awareness level campaign. We are just trying to introduce people to the idea, to the concept, to the industry. And one of the things that that mini class does is it encourages you to share your design and start kind of using hashtags and tagging us. And so the people who take part in that are also just doing this kind of early on, months before we get to our bigger offer, awareness level campaign. Um, so it's, it's really fun and it allows us to start growing that relationship really intentionally very early on. Um, so we have a, about a, a 12 week, uh, nurture sequence that is really meticulously designed for this person who comes on around three months, uh, before our offer, because it really takes a minute to onboard people into our way of seeing the world. the reason that this is such a beautiful thing that you can take part of, but also to battle those doubts. I think creatives and artists, particularly, they've often been told so many lies, like it's not a legitimate way to make money or you got to get a real job or you could never do that or whatever. So we kind of debunk these myths along the way. And we have so many people who are for the first time really understanding that this is something that is feasible that they could do. What's really cool about it, when I take a step back and I think about like other businesses, it's one, you're, you know, reaching a much broader audience. Two, you're creating tremendous goodwill. Three, you're creating advocates who are now talking about what it is that you do. And four, it gives you a chance to warm this audience up well before you make an offer. Whereas a lot of people have a much shorter cycle. It's like a few days before they sell the thing. And what I hear you saying is like the longer the runway, the bigger the result. Like we're using this runway to build trust. And in that, when we build the trust, therefore, the idea of the strategy is we're going to have higher conversions down the road. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. You know, we care about these people deeply. And so we want to get that. Yeah, imagine that. You know, that nurture sequence people talk about all the time, but legitimately we want to nurture these people. We want to get to know them and hear back from them and ask them questions and invite them into different parts of our world. And that, you know, core relationship building is really at the heart of all of it. So you got this course. They're going through, they're learning about to get wrapped in, they're posting about it, they're feeling good about themselves. You're continuing to stay in touch with them. So your launch for your main program is usually around February. Is that right? Yes. Okay. So what are you doing between the end of this mini course and February? Hey, Bonnie's about to break down her entire runway strategy. This is the exact system that fills her course every year. But if you're watching this somewhere where you can't take notes, don't sweat it. I got you covered. All you got to do is just go into the description. You'll see a link there for a free resource kit where I'll have all the notes and links. So with that, go enjoy the rest of the episode. So we've got these people who come in kind of in two big lumps, if you will. So kind of in November, December, and then in January, we're doing some other preliminary work, like we run a scholarship program. So we're kind of like talking about it. We've got some other things that we provide our current list, like a guide to get them thinking about it. But really, we start pushing all roads leading to a workshop that we host in February. And so this is where another kind of huge group of people come in. And so not everyone will have come in in November and December. We kind of like split that up half and half, but the goal is to get as many people as we can in as early as possible. And then we start announcing this free workshop that we host in February This one is different I think something may be unique to my business is that it kind of two different things. Like at the end of the day, I teach Adobe illustrator and art making. And so that's kind of this first mini class. And then the workshop is really more like we're not making art in it. We're really discussing, uh, what's possible. What is the industry like? How do you even make money, uh, with your artwork like this? What are the different revenue streams and the different ways that you can do it? And so it's more like, really, let's map this out and see what is possible. For me, this was the hardest part when I was learning was like, I don't even know, super overwhelmed. What do I do next, let alone in two weeks, let alone in six months? And so we kind of reverse engineer, you know, at this point, we've seen tens of thousands of students be successful. And so we just have eyes on this roadmap that really everyone in some variation goes through. And so we kind of map that all out to give clarity on what this looks like. If you were to dive into this, what can you expect in three months, six months, 12 months? And what are the steps to get there? So that's what happens in the free workshop in mid-February. And then we hit the ground running with that year's student cohort. I love this. And I want to get nerdy. Yep. When you think about like your ad budget, what percentage of your ad budget are you spending on the November mini class versus the February workshop? Well, I'll back up and talk about ad budget in general. I think ad budget is can be terrifying, especially to a newer business. And also it's really like you got to pay to play. I think, I don't know. Especially if you want to scale and grow. Like, we'll talk about this in a minute, but I mean, you've grown in this business where you've got, you know, thousands of people who are coming in. That doesn't happen, you know, all organically. So I think it's, you can do it organically, but there's, you know, probably there's limits and it's much slower growth. Like the ads accelerate that growth. Yeah, and maybe the people listening are much younger than me, But I remember when organic did just work, you built it and they came. And, you know, there's a lot of thoughts about this and opinions because, you know, your stuff just doesn't get seen organically as it used to. And so I spent about 10 years growing organically and thus extremely slowly. And I'll never forget. Someone told me, you know, as long as you have something that you know is transformational, you just got to get more eyeballs on it. And you can do that if you're just willing to pay to get them. It's so simple and it just unlocked something for me. And that was the first time that I started to just boost the efforts. And it's probably one of the things that I wish that I would have really understood earlier. Because what a gift it is now. We used to have to pay to get in front of mass audiences like billboards and magazines and TV commercials. And what a gift it is now that we can get really, really acute with who our perfect person is. So, and it's amazing and, and so much less wasteful of your ad dollar. So anyways, I started thinking like, how can I make this not scary? And so I started studying like, what would be a reasonable amount of our gross annual revenue to dedicate towards marketing specifically, uh, paid traffic. And the number I came up with was 10%, even though larger companies and brands that we're aware of that that's typically more like 30%. So I felt like, okay, 10%. And so with every, you know, the other interesting thing about my business and maybe a lot of the listeners is that money isn't necessarily like spread out evenly across every week or every month. It like comes in big lumps and depending on launches and things. Yeah. So with our biggest promotions, we just pull out 10% of the gross revenue that came from that and we and we chuck it into our ad spend account so that it doesn't feel so scary and so whether you're making twenty thousand dollars a year or two million dollars a year that percentage stays the same and it's what facilitates the next year's growth um so that's what we do i want to pause there because i do think this is really important when you share this with me me, it was like an unlock of removing the fear about spending money on ads. It's like, I'm not scared to spend money on ads because the money is there. It's like when it's earned, I take 10%, I put it over in this account. I don't even think about it. And now that account is what's paying for the ads. So every year that we do a promotion or launch or whatever it might be, I'm just taking a percentage and I'm allocating it over here. Don't even think about it. And now that fuels the growth the next year and so forth and so forth. And I just think that that's just an elegant way to eliminate the fear because the fear could be like when you start scaling up and spending more money, it's like, yeah, you know, that's a lot of money. Oh, I hope this works. For sure. Like you clench and you get fearful and therefore you don't spend and therefore it's, you know, it's hard to grow. And say you do a launch that does $10,000 and you spend it because there's expenses. And then in six months from now, you're ready to do a promotion. And you think if I only had a thousand dollars, right. And so this is what I see in business after business after business is like, I don't have the money to spend on ads. And that's scary. It is essential to the next phase of your growth. And so, you know, ideally, not even ideally, but just by definition, the way that that works is that as your revenue grows, the ad budget grows with it because it's always 10%, but you're making more because of it every time. And therefore the next round, you're able to reach more people. And it's like, as our mutual friend, Nathan Barry will say, it's like this flywheel. It's a flywheel. Totally. And I think the other side to this is that not only does it remove the fear, but you're thinking much more strategically long-term. You're not just solely thinking about this promotion that I'm in now. You're thinking, how can I leverage this promotion for the next promotion? And I think that that little shift in mindset is a big deal for any business owner is that you're not just focused on the moment. You're also thinking, how do I leverage the momentum from this into the next thing? and your momentum stacking. As you said, like as one launch gets bigger, you got more budget to spend, which means you can reach more people, which means the next launch is going to be bigger. And you just keep stacking the momentum because you're strategically taking that budget and allocating it accordingly. Yeah. So back to your original question, how we disperse that. And we've honestly played with this a few different ways. We've tried to do the most, the unfortunate thing for me is that November and December are not my friend when it comes to ad spend because I'm competing with like Black Friday and e-commerce majorly. And so we've kind of flip-flopped that and we try to spend a little less just because the ad dollar goes way further as soon as 1-1 hits the calendar. So I would say we do like 30, 70. So before the new year, about 30%, mainly because, man, people are not quite in the right headspace. It's like just Christmas and holidays and everything. And then one, one hits and that energy of like, this is my year. I want to learn something new. I've got the space to do it. But one thing that we're doing new this year that we've never done before that I picked up from our friend, Susan Bradley, is that in years past, I probably have to admit that some of that ad budget goes back to getting the people who signed up for the mini class to then get re-signed up for the workshop. You know, like we're paying almost twice, even though they're warm. and engaged, they're like, I got to go get them to sign up for this workshop again. And so this year we're trying to do that double, I'm going to call it a double opt-in, but that's not the right phrase. It's like, uh, you're signing up for this. Do you also want to sign up for this? Just kind of check this box so that we can try to capture their yes for both at the same time. And also see the fact that, Hey, we've got this other thing coming and it's going to be amazing. Susan Bradley is amazing. She's so fun. But she's, you know, humble and brilliant. And this was just like a little presentation that she shared. And when we saw it, we're like, wait a minute, you're doing what? And it's increased your opt-in rate by what? But as you said, all she's doing is she's thinking a little more strategically. She's like, I'm spending money to drive people to this opt-in page. And then I just have another little checkbox that says, would you also like this thing. And in your case, it's like you're signing up for the mini class, but would you also like this workshop that we've got? And now they've opted into two things, which means you don't have to re-engage them, spend money to get them opting into the next thing. They already are selecting that. I think it's just brilliant. And they know that it's starting to just seed the fact like, oh, there's something else coming rather than us just double downing on messaging and hoping that they, you know, hear it. So, uh, we're excited to do that this year. Yeah. Okay. So 30% for the class, 70%, um, for the workshop as people are going through the workshop. Um, this has been a really effective model for you to drive literally millions in sales. And I want to kind of break it down a little bit. What do you think has been your secret sauce for this workshop that works so well? Well, I mean, I learned so much of this from you, Stu. I think a huge part of this is helping people understand what is it even, what even is this? And what does it make possible? And is it possible for me? And so we played with this a little bit like you know doing a prerecorded version or teaching it live but at the core it always the same thing And it is the opportunity how to get started what it looks like to go from A to Z and, um, and an invitation to come do it with us. And there's low pressure. Like, uh, I always use, uh, like a sign of success of this workshop is that I've got people who leave saying, awesome, thanks, Bonnie. I'm gonna go get after this. Even if they don't buy. Even if they don't buy. You want them to have the win of like, hey, I got this. And there's a belief in themselves. And if they're bootstrappers, they can go get after it. But the invitation to do it with us in this incredible community with an incredible support system together is there if you want it. And if you don't want it, you've got the roadmap to get you exactly to where you want to go. And so we just, gosh, I just, it's just the most magical week. I always have a live component. And I think that that is really where the connection just goes really deep because we're just in it together. There's one part in this workshop that we talk about the lies that we are all struggling with. And there's five of them. And one of them is I'm to fill in the blank. And the chat just goes, so you're asking them to finish that fill in the blank. And it's a lie. What lie do you believe I'm to fill in the blank? And, um, I don't cry very often. And I tend to tear up at this point every single time, because the lies that people are believing are I'm too ADD. I'm too old. I'm too lazy. I'm too whatever. But nobody is the only person who says the thing. There's like hundreds of people who are saying I'm too lazy or hundreds of people who say I've got, I'm too ADD or whatever. And so that moment of just bringing everybody together that like, listen, you're not alone. Like we're, nobody is successful because they weren't afraid. Everybody who was successful was terrified and they ended up saying, I'm going to give this a go anyways. And so we've all got stuff, every single one of us. And it was just like not alone. And also you can still do this. Even if you've got that lie that you are tempted to believe there's truth that overrides that or can override it. What a powerful moment that must be for you, for the community. Yeah. Because so much of an effective marketing or sales campaign is we got to overcome three beliefs. One is that they believe in you, that you are the right person that can guide them. Number two, that they believe in your process, that your process, if they follow it, they will get the result. The third one is the one that hold people up the most and that's their belief in themselves. And what I hear you saying is like, let's get this big, bad wolf out into the open and let's talk about it. And I love that you do that. Like I didn't realize that that was a piece of it, but I can only imagine the relief that they have and the walls that it breaks down when they just start taking that thing that's been holding them back and they put it out there and now we can start tackling it and you can start addressing it and helping them build the belief that they can do it. And if they believe that they can do it, they're far more likely going to join you in that program. But if they don't even believe that they can do it, then you've lost them from the get-go. Yeah, and also that they're not the only ones. That's, I think, super powerful. It's like, wow, I think we all are in our heads like I'm not successful or I'm not doing the thing because I'm the only one who's dealing with this. Never true. Yeah. And I can only imagine the momentum that that creates. During this workshop, you're walking them through this whole process, then inviting them to come join me for your program. What's your process for inviting them? Is that, are you live during that time? Talk to us Okay. So this is the way that we do this workshop is that there are four lessons. And at the moment that the fourth lesson goes live, we open enrollment for the course. And I, I think I'm probably with every single other person listening that like making that offer is not a super comfortable moment. And this is the key. You got to believe in what you do so much that you understand that it is doing every single person a disservice if they don't hear about it. And I legitimately cannot change your life if you don't come join us. And I just believe that to my core. I know the transformation that this course offers. We've got thousands and thousands of success stories. And so I just live in that moment of true belief in what it is that we offer. We've built something incredible that I stand behind. And so the way that that works is that we have, uh, this roadmap that we've taught all week. And it also is like the thing that we use to build the course. And so they're already really familiar with it. And so, you know what, this module is step number one, and this module is step number two. And so if you want to come get a really clear path and do it with me and do it with an incredible support system, the invitation is here. And so it is just that it's invitation. It's an invitation into something that we know works and we believe in wholeheartedly. I love that you address probably one of the biggest things that holds people back when it comes to growing their business is that they are unwilling or don't want to even make the offer because it feels scary. We don't want to come across as feeling slimy and sleazy. And we all have those experiences of that, you know, one salesperson that was far too aggressive and in our minds were like, we would never do that. So then we hold back. But what I also hear you saying is that if you don't even present the offer, you can't help anybody. So you've got to put it out there and you center yourself by thinking about the transformation that you're going to help create in these people's lives. Yeah. And this is not a small ask. It's a $2,000 course. And I think that the bigger the price, the more hesitant people are about making the offer. And again, I stand by that even with my own user behavior is that the more I pay for something, the more I interact with it. I do the work. I promise myself I'm not wasting this money. And so in a strange way, the more you charge, the bigger favor it is to the people who really need to get the transformation. And so I think that's why we have so many success stories is because people are really, really dedicated because of that kind of transfer. I love it. I want to shift gears. Yeah. This year, you've also done some experimenting. Yeah, sure have. On the marketing side. And where the world seems to be going more and more digital, you're like, I'm going in the opposite direction. Yeah. I'm going to go more physical. Talk to us about some of the changes that you made this year from a marketing standpoint that were going in the opposite way of what most are. Yeah. So we love digital. I mean, we love technology. We love where technology is headed. We're having fun with it. And also, I think about a year ago, we had a hunch that this is going to really drive the need for more touch points, physical touch points, analog touch points, face-to-face connection. And sure enough, the research is coming in. Like Barnes & Noble is opening more bookstores this coming year than they have in many years past. things like backyard chicken keeping is at an all-time high and sourdough bread baking is at an all-time high and so what we're seeing is that this kind of need for analog touch points is on the rise and I think that is because we're having to make sense and and kind of like co-live in this high-tech world so how do we feel really good about this and also keep our humanity and keep our creativity at the core of everything that we do. So there's two things that we did this year that were big bets. They were bets and huge risk. One of them was that we exhibited in person at the world's largest licensing trade show in Las Vegas this past May. You know, we had a couple of options on the table. We could go. We've never done this before. And this was as like my brand as a art artist and designer. We went from like, we should probably go walk the floor and just kind of like get a sense of it to like, well, what if we did like a little 10 by 10 booth to literally booking one of the largest booths at this place? It was a multi six figure adventure, a huge 600 square foot booth. We had this huge like greenhouse structure built in the middle of it. And we got there. This is such a longer story, but I'll keep it short. We got there and we were just like, oh, oh, gosh, we don't fit in. like nothing looks like us. It's all very high tech and LED and vinyl and slick. And we're like, we had this huge floral installation and we're literally a garden bed in the middle of this, this booth and candles and, you know, we're like, I don't know if this is the right thing. So not only are you going in the opposite direction where everyone's going digital, you're, you know, going physical and wanting to create attendance trade show. But even at the trade show, everything is technical, LEDs, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, no, we want these beautiful floral arrangements. We want like the smells. You were paying attention to all these little details. It was incredible. This is such a huge story. We made a documentary about it. It's a story worth watching and learning and so many teachable moments. But we're literally there at 11 p.m. the night before the show opens. We've been the only people on the floor for the last seven hours. at the world's largest licensing trade show. Tens of thousands of people. And we're the only ones there still because we're like hanging birds from the greenhouse, okay? To boot we had let me get this number right I think we had 150 meeting slots to fill and we went in today One was six and we had spent weeks and weeks in reach out And so I want to get clear. So people understand what, okay. Okay. Okay. What the meeting slot is all about and what were you intending to do? So this is the licensing trade show where brands and companies are walking the floor to find their next, um, like artwork to put on their product. What would be some examples of brands that would be like? Oh, Target, Pottery Barn, Anthropologie, but also like Pokemon and like musicians like Ed Sheeran, like huge, huge, huge. Like every brand that you can think of uses IP intellectual property like artwork or illustrations or characters in their branding. And it all goes down here. So Mr. Beast was down the hall for me. Coca-Cola was there. Airstream was there. And then there was me. We knew we were new. But anyways, we had six appointments, which was not the feeling that we wanted. Nobody looked like us. And everything changed as soon as we opened. And by 11 a.m. on the first day, we could have gone home and it would have all been worth it. So much so that we got completely booked and had to go to Target that night to get more furniture to set up a secondary meeting space. And the fact that we had done something different than everyone else there ended up being our biggest benefit. People just stopped in their track and just magnetized to what it was that we were doing. And so it ended up being the most incredible experience that we've ever done. But primarily my biggest takeaway was the power of face-to-face interaction. And this is something we know, but we're not doing it. And so I there's just nothing that can compete with meeting someone eye to eye and shaking their hand and sitting down together. And so we legitimately, without exaggerating, think that we made about 10 years worth of connections, contacts and relationships in the span of three days. And so it it just it was such an electrifying thing for our brand and our company. 2026 is going to be a year for the books. I want to take you to the moment where you're deciding to go from, oh, maybe we'll walk the floor to maybe we'll have like a small little booth to we're going all in. What are you thinking in that moment as you're making these decisions? I had no idea what I was getting into. And this this is really fun in the documentary. because we have the team meeting where this got brought up. And Kylie on my team was like, I think we're going to go walk, me and Nikita are going to go walk the show this year. And I'm like, May? That's in Las Vegas. Not without me, you're not. I literally say that. And we're like, okay, maybe we'll go, we'll just go walk. And so that was a Wednesday. And on Friday, I just started, just started looking, you know, I'm just like, what, what kind of booths do they have? You know, there was one booth left. The booth space itself was $42,000. And something in my gut was like, it's yours. And I just, I called my team member, Kylie, who is kind of in charge of this. And I said, do you think we can do it? This was January and the show's in May. And she's like, I'm all in. We just didn't know what we didn't know. But at that point we signed the contract. So there was no turning back. And then the learning curve began around booth building and all the regulations and the union workers. And it was the biggest learning curve of our life. Just kudos for you for like your willingness to, you know, as an entrepreneur, take that on. In the midst of, I want to point this out because we just talked about it earlier, your busiest season. No big deal. Really the way we did that was we made a small, highly proficient team. And we put this over here in this bucket because we were delivering on our biggest offer. So this show was two weeks after graduation of all of my students. And so it was it was a little insane. And also, I think the best thing we've ever done. Amazing. And that's one example of something that you've tried this year. Again, the second example, everybody's going right. You decide to go left. Talk about the next thing that you decide to do. Well, so this is something we've wanted to do for a long, long time. We kind of played around with a digital version of this for about a year. and we decided to, at the trade show, debut the first volume of a magazine, a physical print magazine. Physical print magazine. And we're not really talking about the membership today, but this was a huge part of the membership too, is that the membership gets this magazine, which is where we were playing with the digital version for like a year. The print magazine is really our love letter to creative living. It is the first magazine that serves surface pattern designers. It is gorgeous. It is about 120 pages each volume. It's quarterly. And so I'm so proud of our team. We like, we're so grownups too. We're like working so far ahead and we've got publishing deadlines and we're, you know, we're thinking about photographing a year in advance for articles. Like it's a real big girl thing. So we debut this magazine and by the middle of the first volume, Barnes and Noble picks it up. And so today it is at every Barnes and Noble in the US. And it's called Pattern Magazine. And it is for creatives, artists, designers, pattern designers. But we have, and it's visually just delicious. It is made for the eyes. But not only that, it's really made for education. And so we are teaching in this magazine and we have, I don't even know if magazine is the right word. It's almost like a book that is built to live on for years. And so though what really has driven it much deeper for us is that we want to be able to stay top of mind for people even after they're done with their screens. because quite frankly, we want to encourage them to be on their screens less, go do the thing, go be creative, go make the art. And also, uh, I'm looking at you from the coffee table, you know, like our brand is right there as a consistent reminder of what's possible and, and, uh, and that we exist. And so it also serves as almost this top of funnel to our membership too, because we invite you to go deeper and deeper and deeper in with us. Uh, for instance, If we do like a trend report, we'll give a page of the 40-page trend report in the magazine for free and invite them to come get the whole trend report if they come join our membership, which is Pattern Plus. You see what I did there? Yeah, I see what I did there. So it's been fun. It's been also a huge learning curve and something that we are just doubling down on. As we look to wine, I want to ask you what your thoughts are for people watching and listening. They're hearing how you have built this model that has worked for years and years and years to fill your course and your membership and so forth, which is digital. And they also hear that you have taken some risk this year to go in the complete opposite direction. And they're trying to settle in their mind, like, what does this mean for me? What would you say of that? We, about, I don't know, a year and a half ago, really came together and we're leaders in this industry. And we want to be the leader in the industry. And in order to do so, you have to do things that other people are not doing. You have to be first. And you have to give other people the gift of going first so that they see a way to come and try little things similar to it behind you. And that is risky. And we may be doing some things that fail. And also that is part of leadership is being willing to do things that no one else is doing, even if potentially you're failing. I would say that that is not something that happens. it's a decision that you get to make are you going to lead are you going to be a leader in your industry and if so what risks are you willing to take in order to be the leader and you know we're figuring it out like we we don't really know uh certain things that we're doing may or may not be thriving in a year or two years from now but we're willing to um experiment and we're willing to be leaders in the space and let people watch us succeed or fail and that's vulnerable and also a very intentional decision that you get to make. Well said. I want to end right there because that is a great moment for people just to sit on and to think on and reflect on is if you want to be the leader in your industry, you're going to have to do things that others are not willing to do. And that may mean that you're going to fail, but it also may mean that you're going to win and you're going to make 10 years worth of contacts in just three days. And you're going to be able to get distribution in physical bookstores all around the US. It's pretty freaking amazing. And I'm just so happy for you and congratulations. Where can people go to connect more? I am Bonnie Christine in all the places and you'll find Pattern Magazine there as well. Amazing, thank you so much. Thank you, Stu. All right, my friend, if you got value out of today's episode, buckle up because next week I've got another incredible guest sitting down with me. someone with a story that you're gonna want to hear, and trust me on this one, you do not want to miss it. So here's what I want you to do. Hit that subscribe button wherever you're listening right now, and the next episode shows up automatically. Done, easy peasy. And hey, if this show has given you even one idea you can use, share it with a friend who needs to hear it. That's how we grow this thing together. Until next time, my friend, the more money you make, the more impact you can have. I'll see you next week.