Business Spotlight: DIY Empire

After closing their Red Velvet vintage store on Commercial Street in 2013, sisters Emma Chapman and Elsie Larson put all their eggs into one self-crafted basket: A Beautiful Mess.

Once a hobby, the Springfield-based lifestyle blog has taken center stage for a team of five employees. Capitalizing on their passion for do-it-yourself crafts and recipes, as well as photography, the siblings’ risk has paid dividends. Last year, the business came $10,000 short of a $1.5 million revenue goal, beating 2014’s roughly $1 million tally, Chapman says.

The flagship DIY blog, ABeautifulMess.com, collects 1.5 million-2 million unique readers per month. On social media, A Beautiful Mess has over 384,000 Instagram followers and 210,000 on Pinterest.

“One month we noticed that we were getting really close to a million page views in a month, and we were like, ‘That’s really crazy. I think this is a thing,’” Chapman says. “Shortly after that, Pinterest started, and that’s when you could really feel there’s definitely a community, a whole big group of people who want to make stuff and share it and see what other people are making.”

The team has published two books, with a third scheduled to release next year, and three apps. The latest release, in January, is a photo-editing program dubbed A Color Story. A Beautiful Mess has appeared in multiple magazines, including Seventeen, Health and HGTV, and hosted online visitors to check out the newest crafts, recipes and classes taught by the sisters.

At the heart of it all is a recognizable style – clean and fresh, with bright colors often against white backdrops – and endearing personalities.

“We lean toward a real homemade, handmade vibe, and the reason is because we’re trying to encourage people to do their own thing,” Chapman says. “Anytime you make something yourself – even if you’re taking a photo – it just ends up having this feel that’s uniquely yours, simply because you are uniquely you.”

Accountable advertising
To follow the money behind A Beautiful Mess, it’s helpful to view the blog as a digital magazine.

Similar to a print publication, advertising is prevalent and important.

Alongside the sisters’ home decor projects, watercolor techniques and cereal recipes is a mix of banner and square ads and sponsored content.

Big-name advertisers like Canon, Adobe and Valspar are mentioned directly in select blog posts with a link to the company’s product page. The bloggers strive to make the arrangement transparent. Sponsored posts are labeled with a disclaimer.

“There’s very much built-in accountability,” Chapman says. “If we were trying to do a post about Swiffer, it’s going to be tough for us because we have to think of a post that we would actually write organically with that product. It’s not really something that we feel very comfortable faking.”

In a late 2014 blog post on native advertising, Adobe media and entertainment strategist Michael Goldstein said the in-content technique has gained traction connecting brands with audiences.

“Native ads work, and they can accomplish a broad range of goals, from brand awareness and engagement to direct response,” Goldstein wrote, pointing to a Sharethrough and IPG Media Lab study that found consumers view native ads over 50 percent more frequently than banner ads.

On its Web store, A Beautiful Mess sells items ranging from cellphone cases to planners and stationery carrying the company’s signature style. Larson’s handwriting adorns many items, in the same style as the company’s logo she created.

Chapman says a popular feature is the company’s Happy Mail subscription, which costs $15 a month for an annual commitment and has over 5,000 subscribers who receive monthly shipments of cards and envelopes.

Trey George, Chapman’s husband and business development manager for A Beautiful Mess, says revenue sources follow the trends, and sponsorships led the way last year. A shift toward the apps could come this year with A Color Story.

“We try to keep our revenue streams pretty diversified,” George says, noting sponsors are charged a fixed rate based on expected page views. “They’re all pretty neck and neck.”

To continue feeding content to its mostly female demographic, A Beautiful Mess has a goal of introducing one or two new revenue sources each year.  

“That’s how we recession-proof our business,” Chapman says. “But also we recognize that we’re in a very young industry, so there are no rules and there is no assurance that we will still have jobs a year or two from now.”

Apps and appetizers
October marked a big change for the company. Larson moved to Nashville, Tenn., with her songwriter husband Jeremy, which she believes can bring positive momentum.

“There are tons of successful businesses that are run by partners in different cities,” Larson wrote in a blog informing readers of the planned move. “We feel very confident that, if anything, this transition will make ABM stronger.”

The sisters mostly work out of their homes; Chapman’s is in southeast Springfield.

A Beautiful Mess maintains an office above The Golden Girl Rum Club, a downtown Springfield bar and restaurant Chapman and George opened this month with Scotch & Soda co-owner Joshua Widner and his half-brother Rogan Howitt. The bar looks like it’s straight off the pages of A Beautiful Mess.

It’s part of an early year rush for the company’s owners.

In January, the Color Story app launched with much fanfare, netting 377,000 downloads in its first three weeks. Apple named the software one of its best new apps.

Now downloaded over 450,000 times, Color Story has outpaced the early days of the company’s other two apps: A Beautiful Mess and Party Party. The flagship app still leads with roughly 1.2 million downloads.

The leading photo-editing apps are VSCO and Afterlight. But Chapman says the team saw an opportunity.

“We saw a whole new marketplace for a type of look that they weren’t doing, which is real clean, bright lights and bright pops of color,” she says. “That’s what we do on the blog, and so we went for it.”