Hi, I'm Hannah
“I grew up watching someone pour everything into making beautiful things and struggle to sell them. I became obsessed with understanding why, and then fixing it.”
A sewing machine, a mother, and a question I couldn't let go
I have been buying handmade since I was twelve years old. Long before I understood what it meant to support a small business, I understood that something made by a person's hands felt different to something made by a machine. That instinct came from growing up next to a sewing machine.
My mum made dresses, costumes, patchwork blankets, cuddly toys, beautiful things made with real skill and real love. She started businesses, attended markets and made sales. But she could never quite build something that lasted, and I watched that for years, willing it to work because the passion and the talent were always, obviously there.
“When I became a mum myself, I started dressmaking to bring in some extra money. And I struggled in exactly the same way she did. I cared so much about what I was making but I had no idea how to talk about it or reach the right people.”
First-class honours and what it really taught me
While raising two children I enrolled at the Open University to study Business Management and Marketing, working most evenings once the house was quiet, and I graduated with First-Class Honours.
What stayed with me most was not the result but the foundation it gave me for understanding how businesses actually work, how value is communicated, and what separates the ones that last from ones that do not. After I graduated, I kept reading about real businesses, their failures as much as their successes. And the same pattern kept coming up.
The businesses that lasted had built something slower and more patient than any tactic or trend. They had built a genuine bond with their customers, and that had formed slowly, through consistency, storytelling and genuine understanding, not urgency or pressure.
“At its simplest, marketing is an exchange, and it works best when it is built on genuine understanding and trust. That is what Love Marketing is built on.”
From my Mum's kitchen table to something bigger
I took everything I had learnt and made it my mission to help my mum market her products properly. I sat with her, worked through who her customers really were, what she was actually offering them, and how to communicate it in a way that felt like her. She was finally starting to build something steady, following a rhythm she could maintain.
After that I spent several years working with small handmade business owners online, supporting them with their marketing and getting to know their problems properly, and the same things kept coming up again and again. The struggle to talk about their work, the same pricing anxiety and the same exhaustion from following advice that had never been designed for them. They had the same problems my mum had, and nobody was giving them the right answers.
My husband Karl is a software engineer whose work has been recognised at the highest level in his field. When he saw what I had been doing and how much it was needed, he said: “We could help more people like your mum, properly and at scale”. So that is what we set out to do.
The Isle of Man, and finally finding the pace
My mum had spent years making around children, around life, late into the night, and I had never stopped thinking about what a different approach might have meant for her. Something that did not ask her to run herself into the ground just to get a sale. That question came with me when we moved to the Isle of Man, and it was here that I finally had the space and the quiet to start properly answering it.
When we moved to the Isle of Man, something shifted. The rhythm here is quieter and there is far less noise competing for your attention. It was here, in the evenings once the house was quiet, that Karl and I began building the platform, and it was here that everything I had believed about marketing was playing out in real life around me every single day.
“The Island has a particular kind of pace. People here support small businesses not because they have been persuaded to, but because they know the person behind them. I had been trying to articulate that for years and here it was, just happening naturally around me.”
Watching that happen; neighbours buying from neighbours, makers being known in their community, I kept thinking about the sellers I wanted to help. The ones doing it alone, online, without a village around them. The advice they were being given was the opposite of everything I could see working here. Post more, be louder, chase visibility.
None of it was building what actually made people buy. What those sellers needed was to be known and trusted by the right people, and that takes a different approach entirely. One that does not demand you exhaust yourself to keep up.
“The Island showed me that trust isn't a superficial tactic. It's simply what happens when you show up consistently for the right people over time. That authentic connection is exactly what Love Marketing is built to help you create.”
—Hannah Bateman, Founder
This is why good makers stay stuck
Marketing advice assumes that if something is not working, the answer is to do more of it louder. But for many small business owners, especially those making things by hand, that approach does not just feel uncomfortable, it does not work. Their customers are not responding to pressure, they are responding to trust, and nobody was teaching them how to build it.
I have watched handmade sellers undervalue their work and apologise for their prices. I have watched them exhaust themselves following advice that was never designed for them in the first place. I watched my mum do it for years, but she wasn't failing at marketing, she was just using the wrong kind.
Karl and I spent the better part of a year building Love Marketing together, him writing every line of code, me writing every lesson, because we both believed there was a gap. We were not building another course full of tactics, we were building a structured platform that takes handmade sellers through every stage of a real marketing approach, in the right order. Because jumping straight to selling before anyone knows who you are is exactly why so many good makers stay stuck.
The result is a structured membership platform; 34 lessons organised across five stages, built to take you through every part of marketing a handmade business in the right order, for £5 a month.
“This was built for the makers who are doing everything right except being shown how to do it properly, without having to sacrifice everything else to get there. My mum deserved that, and so do you.”
You care deeply about what you make or sell but struggle to talk about it in a way that feels natural.
You want to build something that lasts, not just have a good week and then go quiet again.
You are doing this alone, or close to it, and you need support that actually fits your life.
You believe in what you make, and you just want to find the people who will too.