How to niche down in your design business (for multi-passionate creatives)
- Robin Son
- Dec 1, 2025
- 3 min read
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Originally aired: 7th July 2024
Should you niche down in your design business?
Everybody tells you that it is so important to niche down in your business. And I think that that's true; it is very important to niche down in your business.
But niching down isn't necessarily what you think it is. Niching does not always mean that you are limiting yourself to only doing one particular thing, as much as it sounds like that.
In this world of entrepreneurship where we're all told that we need to niche down and focus on one particular thing, it can be difficult as a multi-passionate person.
You know, you've tried everything at least once. You've got like a bunch of regular mediocre kind of skills under your belt. If somebody said, could you do this? You think, yeah, I could probably do that.
When you're running a business, it is important to let go of a lot of those things because there are other people who specialise in that area. So for me, for example, I'm a brand designer. I have designed websites for previous clients before when they have asked me to if I know the brand well, which usually I do when I work with them. But it's not something that I'd love to do and it's also not something that I'm an expert in.
But when it came to advertising my services and putting myself out there as a person that you could hire, I felt that it was more important to label myself as a brand designer rather than a brand and web designer. I was thinking, do I want people to inquire with me for web design alone? No.
I will happily do a full brand identity with social media design and all of that kind of stuff. But with web design, I'm not super confident in it. I'm not an expert. And it's just not something that I love even though I do enjoy it somewhat.
Although industry niching is probably the most common one, when it comes to niching down in your business, consider other things to niche down by rather than just the industry that you serve.
If you, for example, were like a makeup artist at Sephora for a long, time and now you're a brand designer and you specialise in working with beauty brands, then that makes sense because you've got actual industry experience. You are a consumer and a worker in a specific industry and you might have more insight than somebody who didn't have that experience. But if not, and you can't decide on an industry to work with, you don't have to.
As an entrepreneur, you should be able to do the thing that you absolutely love. So do the thing that you absolutely love. Think of the things you’re good at and what you really enjoy. Take those things and identify what problem that thing solves.
For example, if you're really, really passionate about website design, you can identify what problems website design solves, particularly what problems you are best at solving. Maybe you've had previous clients who were not getting sales on their website and it's because their website is hard to navigate and you specialise in fixing that. What you've got there is something that you absolutely love to do (website design) and a problem that you know how to solve (conversion to sales).
Then all you need to do is find people that you want to work with who have that problem. And you use your solution as your marketing topic.
Listen to the full episode for more
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