When Sarah Renae Clark sold her first coloring book, she didn’t own a single colored pencil.
She’d designed the thing in a day, posted it into a Facebook group of people who actually colored, and waited to see if anyone wanted it.
In the first month she sold 50 of them, enough to push her to create another, then another.
But this isn’t a story about how she went on to build a thriving coloring book business. After all, it’s a saturated market, and she admitted herself that she was far from the most talented.
Instead, Sarah saw something these hobbyists were struggling with once they had the books.
Today her business has crossed $5 million in sales, has moved over 100,000 units and has expanded from digital products into fully developed physical product extensions.
And none of it would have been possible without her mother’s battle with cancer and a decision, years earlier, to give up art completely.
The Designer Who Stopped Drawing
Long before the coloring books, Sarah Renae Clark drew constantly. Art was the subject she looked forward to at school, the thing she was known for.
When she left, she turned it into a small business, designing logos and websites and flyers for friends.
Then a full-time job came along, steadier than freelance work, and she took it.
The drawing slowed, then stopped.
She’d traded the pens and paper for a screen, and after a while she didn’t pick them back up at all.
For years, that was the arrangement. A regular job, a marriage, a life that didn’t require her to make anything.
Then in 2015 she had her son, Zac, and everything she’d expected motherhood to feel like came apart.
The post-natal depression set in for months before she understood what it was.
She was anxious, isolated, putting impossible pressure on herself.
And somewhere in that fog she started designing coloring pages again, for no reason other than that it gave her a way to breathe without feeling like she was failing at everything else.
What she wanted, once she could think past the fog, was something of her own she could run from home.
She tried building an iPhone game, then printing t-shirts, but both went nowhere.
The solution came in the hobby that she was using to keep her own head clear.
Adult coloring had become a craze, with grown adults buying intricate pages by the millions to unwind.
She figured she could make one to sell. After all, she was a designer, and a page of patterns wasn’t far from the work she already knew how to do.
So she made one, in a day, and put it up for $3.
It sold fifty copies that first month, enough to make another, then another.
But the market was saturating fast, other sellers were flooding the same groups, and pages were getting harder to move.
So she went looking for what her buyers actually struggled with.
She spent her days inside the coloring Facebook groups, reading what people asked each other.
The same problem kept surfacing.
They had the pages, they had the pencils, and then they froze. They didn’t know which colors to put where.
It was the one part of coloring nobody had solved.
Pick the wrong combination and you could ruin a page you’d spent hours on, and most people knew nothing about color.
Sarah did, though.
A decade of design work meant color theory was second nature to her, the thing she understood better than almost anyone in those groups.
The people around her were trying to sell prettier pages.
She’d just realized the money was in the problem that came after the page.
The $30 Guide That Outsold Every Book
So she built them a tool.
The Color Catalog was a guide that showed which colors worked together, page after page of combinations a colorist could copy with confidence.
She started it as a $5 PDF, then rebuilt it as a $30 interactive version for the iPad. Same idea, 6 times the price, and people paid it for the convenience.
Over the next 4 years that one product sold around 20,000 copies.
It outsold every coloring book she’d made, paid her wage, and eventually let her husband leave his job to work beside her.
But the Catalog only converted the way it did because of the ladder she’d built beneath it.
The first rung was free.
Sarah gave away coloring pages, but not as plain downloads.
She listed them in her store at $0, so a buyer had to add one to a cart and check out.
The first transaction cost them nothing, and once they’d done it once, paying felt like the same motion they’d already made.
The next rung was the cheap stuff.
The $3 book, the $5 guide.
Almost no risk, just enough to turn a free customer into a paying one.
Above that sat the $30 Catalog, the same content as the $5 guide in a format people would pay more to use.
Then came the rung that turned a hobby into a business.
A mentor had told her she’d never reach $1 million selling $1 and $5 products, and that she needed to learn to bundle. So she packaged 20 or 30 products together at around half off.
Buyers reached for the bundle over the single item, because the savings looked too good to pass up, and every time she added a new product to a bundle her revenue stepped up again.
Each rung made the next one easier to say yes to.
By the time someone reached her most expensive offer, they’d already checked out for free, paid $3, maybe upgraded to $30, and bought a bundle.
The $100 decision was just the last small step in a path they’d been walking for months.
That most expensive offer was still to come, and it was something she hadn’t built yet.
Requests had been coming in from her customers to be able to hold a physical Catalog in their hands instead of reading it off a screen.
So she made the physical version and called it The Color Cube.
The Color Cube was a box of palette cards, the digital guide lifted off the screen and onto a desk.
The Cube itself sold for around $40, and the complete set, bundled with everything else, ran close to $100.
On launching it hit $50,000 in 2 days, then settled into roughly $200,000 a month.
More than 100,000 boxes have gone out since.
Stack it all together, the free pages, the cheap PDFs, the bundles, the Cube, and you get the business Forbes wrote about in 2024. $5 million in sales, built on a ladder that started with a product she gave away for nothing.
Where The Model Is Simple But Not Easy
Looking back on this journey, hundreds of people were selling coloring books in those same Facebook groups at the time.
They had the same access, the same platform, the same shot at the market.
Almost all of them are gone now.
What separated Sarah from them doesn’t appear in the business model.
It happened in the comments, every single day for years, before the money showed up.
She helped people.
She answered their questions when she had nothing to sell them.
She posted images of finished work and let members ask where to buy it, instead of pushing links at them.
Later she built a YouTube channel showing people exactly how to use the tools she made, hundreds of hours of solving the same problem her products solved.
That was the grind.
Not a campaign she ran for a month, but years of turning up for a community that slowly formed around her.
And the help landed because she knew what she was talking about.
A decade of design work meant her advice on color carried real weight.
People can tell the difference between someone repeating tips and someone who understands the thing they’re stuck on.
Underneath all of it sat a product worth showing up for.
The color problem was real, most sellers were ignoring it, and the market was big enough to build on.
The grind would have led nowhere if the thing at the end of it didn’t solve something people needed.
Put those all together and you get a product that competitors struggle to copy.
You can see it in the following that believed in her, earned through years of genuine help, backed by real expertise, aimed at a problem worth solving.
The Problem That Hides Right After The Sale
Sarah didn’t create an original product.
The coloring craze already existed.
The Facebook groups already existed.
The customers were already there, already spending.
She just found the one problem nobody was solving and stepped into it.
That’s the part you can take, and it’s a relief, because it means you don’t need the breakthrough either.
Start with a trend that’s already pulling, and look at what happens right after someone buys in.
Sarah didn’t invent coloring books.
They were already selling by the million.
She watched the moment right after the purchase, the buyer frozen over which colors to use, and sold the answer to that.
Pick the thing people in your world are already spending on.
Then write down every place they get stuck once they own it.
That list of stuck points is a list of products, and you didn’t have to invent the trend to own them.
Sell the same thing again in a format people will pay more to use.
Her $5 color guide became a $30 interactive version. Same content, six times the price, and people paid happily because the new format was easier to use.
Look at something you’ve already made and sold.
Ask what form of it the buyer would pay more for.
A PDF becomes a template. A guide becomes a tool. The work is already done.
Get good at the part of your field your peers look down on.
Every field has work that earns respect, and work that people think is beneath them (usually sales).
For artists, the respected work is the craft. The selling, the pricing, the path to purchase, that’s the part most of them ignore and don’t want to touch.
Sarah did the opposite.
In an otherwise creative industry, she taught herself to write copy, price her products, and build a path that carried someone from a free page to a $100 box.
The hours her competitors spent getting better at drawing, she spent learning to sell a product that would help her own buyers get better.
Look at your own field and find the work everyone treats as the lesser job.
The talented people are crowded onto the prestige side, competing with each other.
The ground they’re avoiding is wide open.