Lucky Elephant Studio| Entrepreneurial Design Recap
For Entrepreneurial Design’s $1,000 project I chose to skip the fast-tracked Kickstarter approach and attempt to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: start a business.
Years ago, I bought the domain luckyelephant.studio. I knew it would ultimately be where my art lived but it had been sitting dormant in my GoDaddy account since. As luck should have it (🍀🐘), the matching instagram handle was available too!
Bios are never easy. As the person describing it, you know so much more than the necessary information. You are also biased as to what is considered necessary. I wanted to convey that this project… excuse me, business, as a personal hodgepodge. It’s a place where I get to make things that I’m curious about instead of subscribing to a single specialty. I knew it was too long for an elevator pitch so I gave myself the Twitter parameters––it needed to be cut down to 150 characters. Lo and behold, I was able to condense it down to its very essence:
So, I started with art.
For Lucky Elephant’s pilot project, I went back to an old creative favorite: paper marbling. I knew the condensed timeframe of the class was too tight to develop illustration work en masse, so paper marbling was the perfect medium. It allowed for quantity and shunned perfectionism. Being that it’s a pandemic, I have taken advantage of not having to be in NYC for school, which meant that I had to restock on all my marbling supplies.
After splurging on Golden Paints (once you go high end with your art supplies you can never cheap out after that), stocking up on paper and getting the studio/garage setup, I was out about $255. (Over $100 of that was paint.) I wanted the site to actually look like I knew what I was doing so I bought some frame mockups on Etsy and spent some extra money on an ecommerce site on Squarespace so I could have the site and shop seamlessly in one location. Rigid mailers and shipping costs are built into the shipping price online but I also hadn’t calculated in the $18.21 in transaction fees––everyone has to get their cut!
Ultimately I ended up making $290.36 in profit by the time we presented our projects to the class. A far cry from the $1,000 goal, but I’m quite happy with the results. I think there’s always a paranoia that envelops an artist when it comes time to put your work in the public sphere. If it weren’t for the requirement of actually launching something for this class, luckyelephant.studio would still be password protected.
To get to this point, I have three offerings in the shop: limited originals for the Desert Series in 8x10 (matted 5x7 marble) and 11x14 (matted 8x10 marble), and a print from an old favorite called Succulent Frame. Putting these out in the open was ultimately met with lovely support. Friends who have purchased this art in the past (at pop up art shows) were excited about the new style and color inspiration, some even purchasing more, and it was a great way to start connecting with the marbling community on Instagram.
The second feedback shocked me and sent me down some fascinating conversations about art, its value, and how you quantify it. Because I feel my creative adventures are explorative (and not expert), I’ve always lowballed myself. Art is time-consuming to make but it’s not terribly strenuous––for me. I enjoy doing it. I forget that all of my years doing art and designing culminate in the moment I’m making. Whatever I create is the amalgamation of all the past years doing color palettes and layouts. Learning design principles and (more importantly) how to break them. Having an eye for the details while also understanding the story. And finally, taste is not something that can be learned. The value of art is subjective and people more often buy for the artist than the art. With all that to consider, it’s a surprise any seasoned artist underprices themselves.
I’m a practically-minded person but business is not a passion of mine. However, if Lucky Elephant is to continue to grow, I know now that even a casual business needs structure and organization. I have a feel for how the ecommerce site flows now but I have some backend things I’d like to tighten up––like shipping costs per size and zoom features. I also need to hone in on branding, both visual and copy.
I want to continue with marbling for a bit because I can see it applying to different mediums and it would be fun to continue bringing this ancient art to the modern art world. I can see physical and digital products down this road, from puzzles to overpriced-digital files. I had someone ask if I considered marbling masks and, while I hate to think we’ll need them long enough to justify it, there is a current market need!
We take a lot of cool classes in this program but this one in particular stuck out to me. I’ve had the entrepreneurial bug for years, but I’ve never been bold enough to believe it would work. If I learned one thing from this project, it is that: be bold.
But I learned a lot more than one thing. I learned that deadlines are very effective when met. I learned that it is important to use (and make) connections. I learned to push perfectionism aside, if even just long enough to hit publish. I learned that budding entrepreneurship is a lot of work, but damn does it feel good when you start to see results.
Follow along on my creative adventures on Instagram! Heck, after this post, maybe a blog needs to be incorporated into luckyelephant.studio.
Cheers!
B
