The Long & Winding Road
Hi, I’m Dawn Shears, the founder and creative and technical juice behind Red Spiral Hand. I’ve been building websites and helping businesses with marketing and SEO for a long, long time…over 25 years. Before that I was involved in traditional marketing, advertising, graphic design, illustration, print and publishing since my late teens.
I just need to take a moment here to say that I love what I do. I always have. Helping businesses thrive is my passion and forming lasting partnerships with clients is what keeps me going.
Working with small and medium sized businesses is much more rewarding to me than my previous work with large corporate entities (software, direct selling, banking…) I used to work with. While it was tough for me to make the leap, since doing so, I’ve never looked back.
The majority of Red Spiral Hand clients, over the past 8 years, have been vacation rental owners and managers. I kind of serendipitously fell into this after helping a number of vacation rental businesses on the Oregon coast and managing a rental myself for several years. I was looking for a new business niche to specialize in and a friend of mine said, “Well, you already have a niche in vacation rentals, duhhhh!” I wanted to become the best resource I could be so joined the (very cutting-edge) VRMB Inner Circle of vacation rental pros and started to push the envelope…and I’m still pushing it.
That being said, I also help businesses in a variety of different sectors, mostly specializing in those with products or services that need to be presented in a highly visual, photo-centric manner. Among those are an art gallery, a direct selling organization, a food blogger, a writer’s collective, a family-owned grocery and a company that sells industrial fire systems.
Why Choose Red Spiral Hand?
I don’t spend a lot of time and bandwidth spinning a sales-heavy message on my website. This is because I’ve always believed that good work should speak for itself: world-class websites and happy clients who achieve (and exceed) their chosen goals and also enjoy working with me is my “pitch”. Every business and client is unique and I spend a lot of time, research and eliciting feedback to assure that uniqueness is captured in a way that will make them stand out among their competition. I’ve developed hundreds of websites and marketing strategies and have fine-tuned a simple formula for success that works!
And have I said that I’ve been doing this all for a very long time…
Living My Dream
This is something I have been working towards for decades…to live and work on the Oregon coast. Working remotely allows me to live or travel anywhere and still keep in touch with and take care of clients. Generally, I stay put here on the coast since it’s quite a wonderful place to be. When I’m not behind the keyboard I’m generally either (in good weather) out hiking in nature or (during our frequent rainstorms) working on wild-crafted herbal remedies, fine art and other creative endeavors. I’ve also become quite enamored with workouts at our local Crossfit gym.
Giving Back
I believe in giving back to my community and, prior to the 2020 closures, helping the local community garden by providing online resources as well as gardening tools, seeds, plant seedlings and sharing my organic gardening knowledge. I’m proud that the Gold Beach Community Garden projects was chosen as a member of “The Star Throwers,” an initiative started by Matt Landau of VRMB.
RedSpiralRightHandMan
My son, Chris, is also an integral part of Red Spiral Hand. He is experienced in computer hardware and he builds and maintains the computer systems we use here, helps with security and our network and also helps on website builds and special projects like research and video editing. He is an accomplished organic gardener, herbalist, mycologist, artisan and outdoors person.