Show Your Work: What Vendors Can Learn From Austin Kleon
Valuable insights for vendors, straight from an iconic creative framework.
Show Your Work is a small book by Austin Kleon. You can read it in an afternoon. The argument it makes is deceptively simple: if you want to build an audience for creative work, you can't just produce in private and wait to be discovered. You have to show your work. The drafts, the influences, the mood boards, the practice.
The book came out in 2014 as the follow-up to Kleon's viral Steal Like an Artist, and it wasn't necessarily written for wedding vendors. But the principle translates almost too cleanly. The wedding industry is built on polished final products: the perfect gallery, the flawless tablescape, the seamless timeline. Vendors are taught to hide everything that came before. The blooper reel doesn't make it to the website. The mood board doesn't make it to the feed. The 14 versions of the floor plan stay buried in Pinterest. And then those same vendors wonder why they look interchangeable with every other vendor in their market.
Kleon's answer is that the work itself, the daily practice, the influences, the process, the way you teach what you know, is the marketing. Not the finished portfolio. Not the boosted ad. The actual evidence that you're a human being doing this thing on purpose, every day, with a point of view.
Here are five of his principles, and how they apply to your wedding business.
