Marketing Says: Invent Personas To Know Your Audience. Real Life Says: LOL.

People Are Not Niches 🙄

(Or: Sarah Likes Yoga and Oat Milk and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves)

Somewhere in a well-lit marketing office, or a cheerful PDF titled How to Sell Better, or even worse - in mainstream romance books and side hustle articles, there is always a woman named Sarah.

Sarah is 34. She likes yoga. She drinks oat milk, she owns neutral-colored things.

Sarah is very tidy, predictable, never scares a search engine.

And Sarah does not exist.

The persona problem

When I first started, solo, and with zero other knowledge apart from making leather bracelets, I read a lot.

Like, A LOT. 

And this was everywhere, in every "how-to" article and course, social media posts from gurus, forums and so on:

"Know your audience."
"Understand your customer base."
"Create buyer personas."

But I just make bracelets!

And I remember staring at the screen thinking:

How exactly am I supposed to “know my audience”, invent a human being I’ve never met, make them fit into thousands of others - and then make things for them?

I tried. It was fun for a while, until it wasn't.

Because my personas had elements that could possibly make them "my customers", but they didn't quite fit. They had one "something" that made sense and 10 more somethings that didn't.

So, I tried to make a "buyer's persona" according to myself (lol), afterall, I make these bracelets 🙄 How hard would it be?

Well yeah, good luck with that.

Because...

(Meet Kate (she breaks your framework))

Kate is 44.
She’s a mom of teenage boys.
She loves cats, zombie movies and believes in Santa.
She listens to Slipknot and Vivaldi, not necessarily at the same time. 

She reads simplified neurobiology, dystopians and Harlequin.

She has a secret crush with Yuri Boyka and loves K-Dramas.

She wears cargo pants and oversized hoodies, swears like a truck driver and hides miniature figurines and tiny plushies in her pockets as emotional support friends, like these:

She also makes play-doh thingies between orders when she gets tired, like this:

And she also wears delicate chains, large hoop earrings, black All Stars and 5cm-wide spiked cuffs. 

Sometimes.

And she lifts 80kg and blows soap bubbles and she is obsessed with jumping spiders, patterns and algorithms.

And she buys 2 books for every 1 she finishes and if you ask her she'll tell you she just loves to collect books, but in reality she makes sure she'll have enough books to read when she grows old.

(Screaming internally - another skill I've developed - and I also buy paperbacks after reading their e-version, yes, I'm weird, too many "ands" for one single person)

Anything you might want to sell to Kate, is probably wrong. She doesn't fit anywhere particular.

Kate is not “buying” stuff. She’s responding to recognition.

Which makes me, a "not a seller".

Ah, such a mess.

Real people send mixed signals (yes, constantly)

(And it's perfectly normal.)

Marketing advice treats “conflicting signals” like a problem.

Any guide would short-circuit:

❌ conflicting signals detected - why isn't everyone the same as the other?

But reality says:

✅ fully functional adult, stfu.

People are layers.

But marketing relies on stereotypes:

If you like metal, you’re supposed to dress one way.
If you do yoga, another.
If you’re a mom, something softer.
If you’re practical, nothing decorative.

Real life doesn’t work like that.

The moment you describe a real human, personas collapse.

Because...

"Sarah 34" might do yoga, embrace minimalism, wear beige and drink oat milk. But she can also:

• mosh at night

• play D&D

• hate pretending that she is friends with other moms at kids parties

• hate kids parties in general

Sarah wishes for solo trips in Japan and immediately feels guilty for doing so because she's a mom, sometimes she hates her job, her apartment, her car, her life and then shrugs and keeps going because hey, that's life.

Machines get confused by all this.

But humans are just humans.

I don’t design for “target audiences”

I don’t make  “gift for teens.”

I make:

• a sturdy handmade lanyard for keys

• with a name, because names matter

• with a favorite soccer player if they ask, because why not? - Since it matters.

• with an extra split ring for a tiny pouch to carry a bit of pocket money, just in case

That object might end up with:

• a typical angry teenager that still keeps their favorite plushie next to their pillow, wondering if it's gay to wear a bracelet on that wrist

• a tired parent, an office worker, an exhausted nurse, a coach

• someone who just wants their keys to stop disappearing, while having a small emergency cash stash in handy, just in case

Age is irrelevant. Care is not.

Objects used to be made like this

Traditionally, craft never asked:

Who is my target audience and customer base?

(Ummm, what?)

It asked:

Who will use this? Who will be in a hurry? Who will be broke, distracted, emotional, human?

Who needs this?

Good objects were made to survive moods, age with their owners, and work on both soft days and spiked-cuff days.

At least that’s how I chose to work.

And by this conscious choice, my keychains can hold your keys but they can also hang from your rearview's mirror, dangle from your bag, decorate your luggage, fit inside your book, serve as essential oil diffusers (yeah, why not?)

My Lion bracelet is a birthday gift for a Leo, it means something to someone who loves to roar with pride because they earned it, but it's also important to someone who could roar, but choose not to, because they don't believe they have to.

Personas flatten people

Personas are supposed to promise clarity and make things easier, while they actually flatten humans into cliches and make things just... worse.

Real people are contradictory.

Fluid.

Life never sits still. We all carry a past, a background we didn't choose, we try to keep what works and ditch the rest (not easy), we live in a present that sometimes feels right and some other times completely wrong, we make mistakes, we choose the wrong people, we think of the future, we love, fear, hurt, dream, wish, fail and start over, again and again.

[Because: The winner is just a loser who tried one more time]

When something works, it doesn't match a demographic, but recognizes a situation.

I lose my keys.
I need this to remember.
I want it to mean something.

That’s it!

Each person is a whole world. And that's enough.

They contain:

• softness and aggression

• nostalgia and rebellion

• tenderness and spikes

Why try to reinvent them, when all it needs is to respect them?

Well, I don’t design for "Sarah, 34" or "single-mom-Kate", or "John 43, interior designer".

(What people do for a living is the most boring and useless information to me. I prefer knowing their top 3 favorite books, their hobbies, what they do when things go bad, what was their favorite cartoon when they were kids, if they also find jumping spiders SUPER CUTE, or how they manage to never lose their socks after a laundry cycle. But I'm just a bracelet maker, what do I know from proper marketing 🙄)

I design for humans.

And somehow, they always recognize themselves.

“Invent personas” is one of those ideas that sounds smart in a PDF guide and does actual harm in real life.

Personas fail (especially for handmade)

Those guides assume:

• you’re a corporation

• you keep distance from your buyer

• you’re optimizing funnels, not lives

• you don't care

And they ask you to fabricate:

“Sarah, 34, likes yoga and oat milk”

Meanwhile you’re standing there like:

“I’m trying to make something useful that doesn’t feel insulting, thank you.”

So yeah, ban personas. Forget Marketing.

"Inventing products” for "personas" is impossible and unnecessary.

I see your contradictions.

They’re welcome here.

(Especially if your pockets hide emotional support friends, please show me and I'll show you my collection. You are my forever friend.)

P.S. I had no idea that introverts had their World Day when I wrote about the "8 Soulful Bracelets for Introverts". Apparently they do, it's January 2. (thank you!)