Which markets are booming? with Patricia van den Akker

Want to know which markets are booming as we near the end of 2026?

That’s one of the things we covered in Episode 561 of the Marketing Mentor Podcast, with my London-based guest, Patricia van den Akker, who for many years has been running a company very much like Marketing Mentor.

It’s called The Design Trust and it has evolved into an online business school for designers, makers & other creative professionals.

(That's not all we have in common -- it sounds like we both got creativity genes from our mothers and entrepreneurship genes from our more practical, business-oriented fathers!)

In our conversation, Patricia shared which markets she sees booming right now, how she thinks about teaching as a marketing tool and much more, of course.

As I was listening to Patricia, I was channelling some of y’all – my listeners – who may just be ready right now to take her perspective and run with it, whether that means repositioning yourself for a high end market or figuring out a way to use teaching as a marketing tool. Is that you? Think about it.

So listen here and below:

And if you like what you hear, we’d love it if you write a review, subscribe here and sign up for Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.

Read the complete transcript of Episode 561 here: 

ilise: Hi there. This is ilise benun, your marketing mentor, and this is the podcast for you if — and only if — you're ready to leave the feast-or-famine syndrome behind. And I mean for good.

ilise: Do you want to know which markets are booming as we near the end of 2026? That's one of the things we covered in my new conversation with London-based Patricia Van den Akker, who for many years has been running a company very much like Marketing Mentor. It's called the Design Trust, and over the years it's evolved into an online business school for designers, makers, and other creative professionals. In this conversation, Patricia shares which markets she sees booming, how she thinks about teaching as a marketing tool, and much, much more. So listen and learn.

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ilise: Hello, Patricia, welcome to the podcast.

Patricia Van den Akker: Good afternoon, or good morning — I'm very excited to be here, thank you so much for having me.

ilise: Of course, please introduce yourself.

Patricia Van den Akker: I'm Patricia Van den Akker, and I'm the director of the Design Trust. We're based in London, and I've been a creative business advisor, trainer, and coach for over 25 years now — and I love what I do, and I keep loving what I do.

ilise: That's awesome. Tell us a little more about what you do as a coach.

Patricia Van den Akker: I'd mostly introduce myself as a creative business advisor. I work mostly with designer-makers — high-end people working predominantly in crafts. My mum had a gift-shop gallery in the Netherlands when I grew up, so from a very early age I was surrounded by beautiful things and learning how to sell — going to trade shows. My mum was the creative, my dad was the alpha-male businessman, and in me — and in my sister — we both got the genes of creativity and entrepreneurship. She also runs a very successful creative business in the Netherlands.

Patricia Van den Akker: I came to London nearly 30 years ago — I can't believe it — and started my career at the Crafts Council here, which is the national body for crafts. I worked for many different organizations, and then in 2012 I took over the Design Trust. I'd actually worked with the woman who set it up back in the 1980s — she was a journalist who realized that a lot of creatives, especially in crafts, were making fantastic things but weren't very good on the business side. She set it up as a charity, and I worked with her at the end of the 1990s. Then her health deteriorated, other things happened, and in 2011 I was approached to take it over.

Patricia Van den Akker: I turned it into an online business school fairly quickly. At that time there was a lot of blogging, a lot of online activity happening. It was originally a charity, but I couldn't afford to keep it as one — she'd had a very rich husband, I didn't — so I realized that business model wasn't going to work for me and my circumstances. Very early on — this was the exciting period of 2011 to 2012, with a lot of blogging and big things happening online — I remember someone saying to me, "Patricia, if you're getting a bit bored teaching the same thing again and again, online teaching might be for you." And that was true — I was repeating a lot about costing and pricing as a coach and advisor at the time, and it just wasn't working financially.

Patricia Van den Akker: So fairly early on I set up an online membership model, focused on helping people start or grow their craft business, and also working with illustrators and visual artists. I also did a lot of teaching at art schools here. That period in London was booming, too, because of the Olympics — I worked in what we called the Olympic boroughs at the time, and creativity and culture were highly subsidized, mostly through European funding. So I had a business model that was partly online, very much building on what I saw happening in the US, where people were far ahead in terms of online business possibilities. Most of my competitors at the time were very much stuck in the 1980s, to be honest — it was an exciting time.

Patricia Van den Akker: Then, of course, lots of other things happened — Brexit, COVID, all of that — and I grew older, the world changed, and now I'd say the Design Trust is an online business school for designers and makers. We work a lot with people in illustration, printmaking, visual arts, photography, interior design, and similar fields. Most of our clients are sole traders and small business owners — many have Etsy shops — and a lot of them have very deep passions for what they do. There's also been a growing interest in heritage.

Patricia Van den Akker: What I do now, I'd say, is help people grow their business — although for a lot of people it's actually less about growing and more about pruning, really looking at what works for them. I don't just talk about social media or marketing — it's strategy, goal-setting, confidence, costing, pricing, financial management, all aspects of marketing, and actually making your big ideas happen. That sums up what I do.

ilise: Beautiful, thank you. It sounds very big when I hear it — is it just you?

Patricia Van den Akker: It's me, and I work with Anne-Marie. We have about 200 Business Club members — that's very much aimed at teaching people the skills of running a business, and it's mostly run by Anne-Marie. Then we have about 200 Dream Plan members, aimed at strategy and time management — thinking about your business and planning it every quarter, very seasonally.

ilise: Wait, let me interrupt — 200 members in the community Anne-Marie runs, and 200 members of what exactly?

Patricia Van den Akker: The first is the Business Club — 200 members there, focused on how to run a business. Every month there's a different topic, very seasonal — we start with business planning and finance, marketing, then move to things like creating and launching collections, wholesale, selling online, improving your website, and so on. Anne-Marie runs that membership, and there are four live sessions each month: one with an expert, one with a successful creative around that month's topic, a community session — which could be a Q&A, a discussion, or a website review — and one co-working accountability session.

Patricia Van den Akker: Our Dream Plan program is very much around strategy, business models, and creating a business, marketing, and financial plan for the year, and how you juggle the different parts of your business as a sole trader. At the heart of it is a planner I've been self-publishing for the last 11 years. It's a quarterly program — they need about three hours for a strategy meeting with themselves, which I facilitate, but they do the work — and then every month they have a 90-minute catch-up session, reviewing the last month and planning the next.

Patricia Van den Akker: On top of that, I've been doing more work with creatives who teach — I'm fascinated by that, both as an income stream and in terms of marketing.

ilise: Interesting. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you — we've known of each other for a long time, 15 years or so it seems, but never actually talked, if my memory serves.

Patricia Van den Akker: That's right.

ilise: There's obviously a lot of overlap, but one main difference seems to be that the people you serve are selling actual tangible stuff — their own crafts and artwork — while the people I serve are mostly selling services, the intangible. Does that sound about right?

Patricia Van den Akker: In principle, yes, but that's changing. A lot of our clients produce products in small batches — printmakers, illustrators, for example — and that's always worked well. But what I see increasingly is people moving toward services, often through commissions. Take a weaver — it takes a very long time to weave something, and there's a bit of a market for art pieces in that space, but more people now are working on commission. There's been a lot of interest in that, especially in the last two or three years, particularly at the higher end of the market, where you're not just selling a physical thing — you're selling your name, your reputation. In terms of marketing and creativity, the question becomes: what are you really selling? That's definitely shifting. We're similar in age, and I used to learn "this is how you market products, this is how you market services" — that distinction has gone a bit out the window, especially at the higher end, where the question is whether you're selling a product or selling yourself and the whole package around what you do.

ilise: So what I hear is that at the high end, when you're selling commissions, the value goes beyond the thing itself — that's what the high end is looking for. Tell me about the high-end market — people are curious, since that's where the money is.

Patricia Van den Akker: Yeah. What's really interesting — I'm based in London, which is a very rich city, and also a very poor one, let's be honest. But what I've definitely seen in the last three or four years is the high end doing extremely well. We're talking £10,000 and above — a small market, but for example, I currently work with a duo doing wood turning. When I started working with them four or five years ago, they were selling wood-turning vessels for around £200–300. They were clear about where they wanted to get to, and I helped them move to the higher end — they now work with a gallery here in London, and recently sold a set of five pieces for $25,000. That's a very different, very international market, very much about reputation and how you present yourself. The gatekeepers there are specific galleries, plus international trade shows and exhibitions — SOFA in New York, TEFAF Maastricht, shows here in London. It's absolutely thriving for some people — I have a few clients in that field producing £20,000 to £50,000 worth of work.

ilise: So it sounds like the marketing there is really directed at the gatekeepers.

Patricia Van den Akker: Yeah, exactly — getting in with certain top galleries. There are probably only eight or ten galleries in the world capable of that kind of work, and they make the connections with museums, collectors, interior designers, agencies, and so on. It's a very long-term strategy, and it's very much about becoming known and managing that process carefully.

ilise: Alright, a couple other things I wanted to ask about — you mentioned growing versus pruning, and I like that idea. Tell me more.

Patricia Van den Akker: I've started looking more, in the last few years, at business management, because so many of my clients are in very seasonal crafts — especially in the UK, where 70–80% of turnover comes from the last two or three months of the year because of Christmas. It's such a dominant factor, and it really depends which part of the market you're talking about. I've become very aware of seasonality — looking at when clients are most likely to buy, then working backwards and planning seasonally. For example, I work with a knitwear company in Scotland — they work incredibly hard for eight months of the year, but for two or three months in early summer, business is dead. What they've started doing is actually closing for those two months and going on holiday. It's interesting in terms of work-life balance — it doesn't have to be one way or another, it can be structured around weeks or months.

Patricia Van den Akker: Many of my clients are also very close to nature — basketry, ceramics, clay — and I see a strong connection to heritage and nature, especially for people living near the seaside, which really shapes heritage crafts, a big part of who I work with. What's interesting is that when I work with people one-on-one, some of them look from the outside like they have a fantastic, very busy business — but actually, for many of them, it's too much. Over time they've grown organically, and a lot of craftspeople are hoarders by nature, so the business has just grown and grown. What I do most, especially in strategic consultancy work, is really focus on what needs to go — pruning, not growing. It's about looking at what's actually working, what their talents and values are, what they love doing, looking at the finances and numbers, but also flexibility, freedom, and sometimes the bigger dream or legacy. It's about asking what they really want and what success means for them. Very often, especially in the last few years, it's about being smaller, but more focused and more deliberate.

ilise: I see some overlap there — my language might just be simpler. "Pruning" sounds like simplifying, getting rid of things that aren't the most effective, even if they're sometimes a little effective.

Patricia Van den Akker: Exactly. "Good is the enemy of best," isn't it? Sometimes people keep trying and trying, but actually letting go is the only way — especially if you're a sole trader or small business. Many of my clients work in partnerships of two or three people at most, and it's about letting go of what doesn't work anymore. That's not always easy, especially if they're hoarders — and I did say a lot of them are. They hold onto things and feel guilty letting go. I can relate to that myself — I recently had to restructure my business, and someone said to me, "Patricia, remember the Beatles stopped touring, and then they made Sgt. Pepper." That was exactly what I needed to hear — I might not be making a Sgt. Pepper, but the idea that sometimes you need to stop and let go really resonated, because you can't take on everything, you just get too overwhelmed. I don't know if it's age or wisdom, but you just can't do it all. With about ten clients I now work with at a strategic one-on-one level, most of the focus is really on: what do you actually want, what's working at this stage of your life and business — and it's about letting go.

ilise: I love that — I actually love letting go and getting rid of stuff. I'm not a hoarder.

Patricia Van den Akker: I definitely have it in my family.

ilise: You're making me think of a client I worked with many years ago, Andrew Faulkner — a graphic designer in the Bay Area in Northern California. At a certain point, not too long ago, he decided he wanted to go back to painting, which is what he'd studied in school. He's since used what he learned about marketing to market his paintings, and he's done exceptionally well — high-end, through galleries. More recently, he's also started teaching workshops — people travel to Tuscany with him for a week to learn how he works with color and paints. I know teaching is something you're very focused on these days, so talk to me about that.

Patricia Van den Akker: Teaching is a really big one — especially retreats, if you want a good life, honestly, look at that. I was talking just yesterday with a client who does very high-end embroidery, currently in Paris for a week, teaching in a 300-year-old library of threads. A company organizes these international retreats, and it pays very well — you get lovely clients, and it can work incredibly well.

Patricia Van den Akker: I've been teaching in different ways for nearly 25 years. In March 2020, when COVID was starting, we were about to roll out a program, and I thought, hang on a minute — within about half an hour I'd sketched out, on the back of an envelope, an idea for how to teach online. I created that program and rolled it out during COVID 2020, and it became the biggest program we'd ever had — around 250 people. My business grew 300%, which was almost too much — but so many creatives told me afterward that the course, both financially and in terms of community and sharing, really saved their lives and their business.

Patricia Van den Akker: Then in 2023, Bloomsbury Publishing came to me and asked if I wanted to write a book about teaching online. I said no — if I wrote a book just about online teaching, by the time it was published it would already be out of date. I wanted to write about both in-person and online teaching, and they agreed. I thought it would take a year — it didn't, because I decided to interview around 80 people about teaching, and the research was fantastic.

ilise: Did it take longer or shorter than expected?

Patricia Van den Akker: It took three years.

ilise: Three years, okay.

Patricia Van den Akker: They told me it would take about a year on average — never trust the publisher. I could do a whole other podcast about publishing books, very interesting — but it took three years to fully write and get it out there. It was published in 2025.

Patricia Van den Akker: I absolutely love working with people who teach, for so many personal reasons. I was just talking to a specialist knitwear person on the Shetland Islands, incredibly remote, with knowledge going back four or five generations. She runs online courses about life on Shetland, about nature, and told me utterly unbelievable stories — but she also teaches really old traditional knitwear patterns, and about community. That's what I love about creatives who teach — it's about the past, the future, legacy, technique, culture, storytelling. It's also a very good income stream. Going back to the graphic designer you mentioned — a lot of people teach because, especially here in the UK, the bottom end of the product market is very saturated. Anything under £100, there are now so many craft shows — it used to be only around Christmas, now it's year-round, with so much competition. So more people are teaching because it's a more reliable income stream. But also — and I think you'd agree — teaching is a form of marketing. For me, marketing and teaching are really the same thing, because it's about educating clients, explaining the value and the difference you can make, which is closely tied to know-like-trust. That could be a free online webinar to launch a new collection or talk about commissions, or a talk or demonstration at a museum or craft fair. These things are memorable and accessible, and again, it's about more than just selling a product — if you want something cheap, go to a department store, but if you want something special from a creative, that educational element and storytelling behind why you create is what makes it more memorable and more valuable.

ilise: I agree with a lot of that, especially teaching as a form of marketing, offering a free webinar, for example. But where I want to push back a little is on the idea of online courses as something you can just make a lot of money from — there are so many people out there selling that hype, which a lot of people have fallen prey to. I have to ask — are you at risk of the same accusation?

Patricia Van den Akker: Oh, no, I completely agree with that — I fell into that trap myself, back in 2011, 2012, the "good old days," when you could just record something or write blog posts and everyone would lap it up. That doesn't work anymore. What I always tell people is that teaching online and teaching in person are two very different things. Online, what works well is a free webinar, or an intro webinar as a starting point — something at a lower price point to welcome people in. Be a little careful about giving everything away for free, though sometimes, if it's promotional, you might need to. But even charging something like £25 for a one-hour talk or a trial workshop before people buy an in-person course or commission you — that works well.

Patricia Van den Akker: What doesn't work is nobody wanting to listen to you talk for hours on end — that didn't work even at the time, and it's definitely not a simple income stream anymore, it just doesn't work that way. What people really want now is discussion and community. One of the things I've really learned in my own business is that it's as much about the community as about what you actually teach — that's why people come back, it's not about me at all. With our Business Club, for instance, bringing in other experts, or other creatives who talk honestly about the reality of running their business, is a combination of different approaches to teaching. Sometimes it's skills-based — how to write an email, how to do SEO — but that's really the bottom end of it. What people are really looking for, especially now with AI — let's be honest, you can get a marketing plan from AI in a couple of seconds if you know what you're doing — is implementation and accountability. That's where online memberships work much better: over time, it's the community, the other people, and the accountability people need, seeing that others find things difficult too and how they overcome it — that inspiration is essential. If you're just doing a pre-recorded course, there's something like a 3% success rate — most people give up. That's the reality.

ilise: Alright, my last question — you gave me the perfect segue by mentioning AI, since we hadn't touched on it yet. How is AI affecting your work, and the work of people in your market?

Patricia Van den Akker: Oh, that's a big one. Within the world of online teaching, AI is massive — and I'll be honest, it can be very scary. I did quite a bit of work last year to learn more about AI strategically, put a few prompts in around coaching, and saw answers come back where I thought, here I am with 25 years of experience as a business coach, and it can do part of my job. That was a bit of a wake-up call, honestly, but it also made me realize what the ongoing value of people like me actually is — my inspiration, my humanness, accountability, collaborating and being part of a community. I think people are absolutely craving that.

Patricia Van den Akker: In terms of SEO — I worked for 12 years on a strong website strategy of blogging and email marketing. Email marketing still works, and I'm a big fan of it, because it really puts you in front of the right people. Blogging, I think, still works, but I think it's a little early to see how it fully shakes out — though I'll be honest, we used to get 40,000 visitors a month to our website, and that's dropped to around 10,000.

ilise: Interesting.

Patricia Van den Akker: That hurts. But what's interesting in my field is that a lot of people in crafts have real pushback against AI — people hate it, and sometimes it feels a bit like guilt-tripping, which I don't really like. I'm very aware of the sustainability and environmental impact, which is genuinely bad, let's be honest about that. But if you use it as a thinking partner, cleverly, it also has real potential — my verdict is still out on it, honestly. It's tricky, especially if you're an illustrator, an editor, or, like my husband, who works in advertising here in London — it's very scary for those fields.

Patricia Van den Akker: What I've found is that email marketing has stayed pretty strong, and I'm seeing something like a return to the 1990s — real personal connection, seeing people in real life. For me, that's going to craft fairs and talking to people, or sending a DM saying "good luck with your show." Kindness, customer care, professionalism — I think that will always succeed if you do it genuinely, and that's something AI can't do.

ilise: That's a perfect place to put the bookmark, as they say. Patricia, tell listeners where they can find out more about you.

Patricia Van den Akker: Come have a look at www.designtrust.co.uk, and we're also on Instagram and other social media.

ilise: Beautiful, thank you so much. I have a feeling we'll talk again as your business continues to evolve — thank you for sharing what you've learned in your first 25 years, and I'm glad to have you in my camp.

Patricia Van den Akker: Fantastic, thank you.

ilise: You're welcome.

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ilise: As I was listening to Patricia, I was channeling some of you, my listeners, imagining some of you might be in a position right now to take her perspective and run with it — whether that means repositioning yourself for a high-end market, or figuring out how to use teaching as a marketing tool. Is that you? Think about it. And if you want my help thinking about it, I'd be happy to brainstorm with you — all you have to do is sign up for my free mentoring session. You can find that, and lots more resources including the Simplest Marketing Plan, at marketing-mentor.com. Enjoy, and I'll see you next time.

 

* This article was originally published here