Hiring!

I think you're probably pretty lucky to have found decorators who ARE able to reproduce your designs. That was always the biggest challenge for me with my shop - getting a reliable degree of quality and consistency on the decorating work, regardless of who designed it. I really enjoy the creative design work the most (I hate repeating a design more than once) and felt the designs coming from my shop were a personal expression of me and my style - the hallmark of my brand, if you will - so I never really wanted (or needed) someone to actively generate designs. I just needed a solid production team.

I never thought about it that way Julia! However, the level of skill required to reproduce my cookies versus your cookies is pretty vast (with yours being much more difficult from my perspective).

Designing is the most difficult, and time consuming, part of my business. I get bogged down in actual production and have very little time to design. I wish I could find someone(s) to co-create with, bounce ideas off of etc. etc. The search continues!

I know cookies with character is selling her original cookie designs on etsy, under the name of  'drawn with character'. She might do private work for you? 

https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/DrawnwithCharacter. Good luck. 

Belle

Oh, I rarely made cookies as complex as I do now when I had my shop. It would be tough to make much money that way. To produce profitably, one needs to do some scaling up, so my designs were purposely much simpler then, designed to be re-producable somewhat quickly by others in larger quantity - though still elegant and tasty. Teaching someone how to reproduce designs is a lot easier than teaching someone to design, in my opinion, so perhaps if you found more production help, you'd be freed up to think more clearly and more often about the design work. Also, having a core stable of designs (without too frequently reinventing the wheel) is generally a good thing - too much custom work can be killer on profit margins unless you price up accordingly. Just my two cents . . .

Have you tried a graphic designer as opposed to a baker?  This is just off the top of my head, I don't employ anyone yet.

How Very interesting! I too am similar to you Julia in that respect - I love the inspiration of new cookies - new shapes, what colours I have on hand, what theme the customer wants or what theme my whimsy takes me. I love the challenge of each new yearly occasion even if I have not yet done a full year.
I am intrigued to know more about you and your business Bella Sucre. I would certainly be interested in chatting further about this.

Please have a look at what I had posted here (early days for me so far) and I have a lot more cookies photos of my facebook bage Ibiccinz. I am in New Zealand but as you intimate - internet makes us neighbours. If you are still interested or even if to update me on whether you have found one, I would love to hear from you. Thanks, Kat