Tahoe Community and Economy Through Art
From quitting her job as a grade school teacher, to selling art out of her driveway, and ending up having an art collective shop, Nicole Stirling goes on an unexpected journey.
Nicole Stirling, a true King’s Beach native, owns Chickadee Art Collective with her husband. This store is located in Kings Beach, North Lake Tahoe, where she showcases 62 local artists’ creative work. Everything from handmade jewelry to colorful abstract paintings is sold online and in store. Chickadee sits on a property called Tahoe Backyard, neighbors to the Bear Belly Brewery, where you can also find some Chickadee Art on the walls next to dart boards and beer mugs. The Tahoe Backyard property has an outdoor space shared between these two establishments, where many locals and tourists will come in and out of the social atmosphere.
Nicole is a very outdoorsy person, which is one of the many reasons she stays put in Tahoe. Between paddling in the summer and skiing in the winter, Tahoe is the perfect place for her to feel connected with nature in its forestry environment. Being an artist herself, she does beadwork and paints color-packed mandalas.
In 2019, North Tahoe had several collective art stores, one of which Nicole originally sold her own artwork at. The collective ended up closing down and Nicole didn’t have a place to sell her art anymore. As the domino effect plays out, all the similar art shops started to close down shortly after.
In the pandemic summer of 2020, Nicole started a pop-up store in her driveway where she sold her own art pieces. With the continuous flow of tourism, even during the pandemic, she made lots of great sales. As the locals started to notice her driveway pop-up store, local artists asked her if they could come sell their art in her driveway as well.
During the summer of 2021, local artists were coming over and setting up shop in her driveway, which was packed with as many white pop-up tents that could possibly fit to fill the space.
At the time, Nicole was running a preschool in Incline Village as the director and teaching grade school. She started to notice all the empty lots in Kings Beach, thinking she could find a place to start a craft fair. There was no luck and no leasable spaces in Kings Beach. Reaching out to the North Tahoe Business Association, she was connected with the current property: Tahoe Backyard. She was informed about the retail space next store that was looking for someone to rent it out, which was the Bear Belly Brewery.
This is when she started to realize she could really do this and felt inspired by all the artists in her area cheering her on in this endeavor. But, her own self doubt started to creep in and made her second guess everything. Being as self aware as she is, she needed to get into her self-convincing mindset, and she thought back to how she ran an entire preschool. As the director, she did budgeting, marketing, advertisement, enrollment, and social media. Remembering how business savvy she is, she knew she could run an establishment, no problem.
Still unsure and second guessing starting this journey with Chickadee, she thought of someone else getting to start an art collective in Kings Beach and was instantly hit with jealousy. She knew that if seeing someone else beat her to her dream bothered her that much, she absolutely had to dive all into her idea. So, she quit her teaching job, used the money she had been saving to potentially buy property, and jumped ship on starting the art collective.
The key components of her business plan were achieved: there was a necessity for her business in the Tahoe area, she had the capital funding, and knew she would have success in the concept because it had worked in her own driveway.
Nicole identifies two of her main challenges she has faced running her business in North Lake Tahoe: tourist economy and not being on the main street. Tahoe’s seasonal business market, summer and winter months, makes Chickadee reliant on tourism in an economy that is not year round. Due to the low snowfall count this winter compared to last winter, causing less tourism, Nicole has seen a decrease in her sales. Being now two and a half years into her business, she can start to see patterns, and her numbers are only a quarter where they were last winter.
Her second biggest pitfall is that Chickadee sits not on the main Kings Beach downtown strip of road, but just behind it. Customers will often come into Chickadee and say, “I had such a hard time finding you!”, breaking Nicole’s heart.
She struggles with letting the locals and tourists know she is there, creating the challenges of marketing and advertising. Small business owners need to be problem solvers, “everyday I am learning something new, and every time we hit a new challenge, we learn how we are going to overcome it,” says Nicole. A current bump in the road is finding durable signage that can withstand Tahoe’s intense winter conditions and still be visible to the public.
Chickadee is advertised in Tahoe Weekly, Moonshine Ink, on the radio, and other online sites. Though, Nicole says, “Word of mouth has been the most effective, it’s free and that’s great, and the artists telling each other that there’s a spot for them.” The best strategy to bring awareness to her store has been word of mouth between Tahoe locals and artists. Also, holding events in the Tahoe Backyard property helps people to notice that they are there. She also has a mailing list where she will reach out to the community and ask what they want to see and what they want to do at Tahoe Backyard events.
Being an art collective means that local artists have to sell and contribute art to the store. Chickadee started with, “12 artists and now we have 62, so that fire lit and it grew quickly,” Nicole says. Those original 12 artists had been the artists selling out of Nicole’s driveway in the summer of 2021. When the store was opening, Nicole seeked out artists by contacting people she worked with at the collective that closed down and posting ‘call to action’ artists request on social media. Today, artists come to her by calling to inquire about the collective and bring in their work to show. She will select artists simply on negotiation of price points to be affordable for her buyers, if they are truly local artists from the Tahoe, Truckee, or Reno areas, and based on the uniqueness of their product compared to other items being sold in her store.
Claire Bostford-Allain was one of the original 12 artists. She saw Nicole’s social media posts recruiting local artists. At the time, Claire had just moved back from traveling the world, which started with a one-way ticket to Paris after earning her college degree to become a physical therapist. During her travels she would find yarn stores and make a sweater for each place she went, a personalized souvenir. In this time of self-discovery, she realized a 9 to 5 job as a physical therapist would be, “the death of my soul”, Claire says. Moving back to Tahoe, with no place to stay, Claire lived out of her pick up truck for a few months with her cat, Marx, in the Truckee forest. Embracing herself as an artist with a collective personality, she now works many jobs: Chickadee artist, waitress at a pizza parlor, model, actor, private chef, and a house cleaner.
Claire’s own brand is called KnottyBot, her brand’s catch phrase is “get knotty with me”, she likes the ambiguity and sexual themes at play, “life is too short not to have a good laugh about it”, she says. At first, she just wanted to make the perfect ski hat, and then got creative with textile and fiber arts. Her products have switched to hand-dying hoodies and sweatshirts, which she does in her well ventilated house. She sells her clothing at Chickadee and online under her own website and social media.
Most of her sewing and screen printing is done at her rented art space, “at the end of the day it’s for me. Yes I want to share it with the world, but my creativity and my self expression is for me. I just want to keep evolving as an artist and giving myself the space to keep creating,” Claire’s studio gives her a safe place to let suppressed emotions come to life in her art through self-expression. KnottyBot is also an outlet of feminist activism for Claire, printing the symbol of the Women’s Movement with a clenched fist inside planet Venus on some items.
Claire dedicates a lot of the inspiration for her work and her growth as an artist to the Tahoe community in supporting and advocating for creativity, “everyone needs someone to tell you to keep creating and that’s what community is for.” Nicole is a person in Claire’s life who encourages her to make products and be her authentic creative self.
Chickadee is a commission based art collective where the artists set their own prices. Nicole has implemented a 60/40 % commission split, with the artists taking 60% of proceeds and Chickadee taking 40% of profits. The artists will bring in their work, set their price, and create an inventory list showing exactly what price they want each item to sell for. She will then put this information into her computer to do all the magic and math. The computer also organizes every artist with their own personal brands and the system will tell her what sold that month for each brand. At the end of every month, Nicole will cut all the checks, each artist gets a slip of paper that says what sold with their check in the mail. She tells every artist that she doesn’t know what will sell, because she learns every six months how things change and what the demographic is of the shoppers, which also changes.
Chickadee’s most popular items in the store are Tahoe shaped things. Anything with a Tahoe theme or bears sells the most and is bought by tourists. The locals will buy items within a $50 gift range for each other or for family members. These buying patterns will change seasonally, in the summer more apparel is purchased and in the winter more art and books are bought.
The cohesive theme for the store is well kept by Nicole, creating a warm whimsical colorful feel. She credits this look to her artist background in color theory, “I think that leans a lot into my decisions and where I am going to put things.” She will often move shelfs, displays, and art around her store, “people just need to see things in a different way, or they don’t see it the way I put it, so we need to rearrange it so they see it in a different way.”
Everything that comes into the store is put online with photos, prices, and the artist brand. Nicole hopes that by posting all items online it gives her artists an online platform to make them feel more successful. She loves how she is creating a community who sells their art together, “community over competition,” Nicole likes to say. Being a mother herself in the Tahoe community, Nicole knows how important and impactful creative experiences are for growth. She recognizes that it’s not just kids, but adults also need an affordable way to recreate together, “sometimes recreation doesn’t mean skiing and jumping around, sometimes recreation means something smaller and calmer.” Nicole will teach art classes for the local community and at Tahoe Backyard events she will have a free kids arts and crafts table set up in front of Chickadee.
Looking towards the future, Nicole hopes to expand Chickadee in a multitude of ways. She dreams all the time about having a bigger space to sell more art, and also to have a space that is on the main downtown Kings Beach street. Further down the road, she has dreams about owning stores in different areas, expanding her audience, “I guess that’s like the next best thing, what if I had a Chickadee Reno? What if I had a Chickadee South Lake? And what I had a Chickadee Carmel.” Noticing the trend in shops like hers popping up in Tahoe, “what if tourists came here for our art. That would be an amazing thing for our town and for our artists,” Nicole even fantasizes about Tahoe one day being known as an art destination.
