Earnestness is not enough
Rachel Binx on turning her interests into companies.
Earlier this year I had the pleasure of talking with data visualist, artist and entrepreneur, Rachel Binx. Rachel has founded several companies including Meshu, Gifpop! and Monochōme. She’s currently working on mapping technology for Mapzen, has done dataviz for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, MTV and curated gif.local, a wonderful little art exhibit for Eyebeam’s LittleNets exhibition. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TL;DR turning your passion into a business doesn’t mean anyone wants what you’re making.
Can you give us a rundown of the projects you’ve been involved in… are they side projects, startups? How do you view these?
Good question. Sometimes I call them recreational ecommerce, sometimes I call them “the companies” sort of tongue-in-cheek. But there’s no VC so I think they’re technically not startups. But maybe some combination of both?
What was the first project and what made you jump in?
Meshu [which maps your travels and turns them into jewelry] was first. It was this nights-and-weekends, fun project we were building out. The response to it was way more than we thought it would be. It was this hobby thing that people got really interested in and placing orders. Then we had to reconsider how to turn this into a business that we could sustain.
It’s interesting because all of the issues about fulfillment and making pieces and all those lessons got rolled into the next project. Like with Gifpop! we found a printer that took care of fulfillment, which was just this amazing thing. We were like, wait, we can send you data and you do everything else?
For Monochōme it was kinda the same way. Meshu was built on Django and was all handmade, a little bit janky, but both Monochōme and Gifpop! were built on Shopify. I didn’t have to deal with the backend. I could just worry about the part that I care about. You learn how to make your life easier. That’s why I’ve been able to continue working on this kind of stuff because I’m just rolling the lessons from one to the next. It gets easier and easier and less time to do.
Back in 2014 at XOXO you were giving a brief background on what you’ve worked on up until that point and something you said really stuck out to me. It was “earnestness is not enough.” What’s interesting to me is that in business you have to make something people want but in art you don’t. If you’re OK with that, that’s fine but if you want to be a working artist that can be difficult. I think that’s on the same page with what you were talking about, but can you explain more?
That story comes out of when I was in Albuquerque and I was making jewelry. I was working with materials that I thought were interesting and making pieces I thought were interesting. At some point I thought I’ll go sell them. I’ll go around to stores and just make this work. As I’m going through this process of trying to sell samples and trying to get things put in stores I realized the chasm between what I was trying to sell and what the general finished product looks like. It taught me that just because I love something doesn’t mean the rest of the world will love something. It’s fine to make your own pieces, your own personal art if that’s the limit of what you’re hoping your adoption to be. But if you’re hoping people will go out and want to buy your pieces and to have a sustainable practice around it there’s a certain level of polish that exists in the world that you can’t just ignore because you really like the work for yourself.
The more recent projects I’ve worked on there’s a fair amount of market research that goes into it…polished photographs and sites that feel professional. Even it’s just something I’m doing on nights and weekends.
I’m assuming you approached Meshu and Gifpop! with this mentality?
Definitely. Something that was very important for us on Meshu was to get a professional photoshoot done before we launched. This actually delayed the launch by about a month because there were so many people that were involved in the shoot and we had to get availability for everyone. I was joking around with [my cofounder] Sha [Hwang] about this and he’d be like, “We can just take photos ourselves.” But for me it was really important to have that full studio experience and to have professional lighting, professional photographers, hair, makeup, models. I wanted there to be a certain level of polish and presentation on the photos that we use on the site. This was a huge expenditure. Sha and I are both web developers and so we just built the site basically for free on nights and weekends. But then we did this shoot and we wanted to pay people. We didn’t have a ton of money because we were paying out-of-pocket, but it was important to us to have professionals there and pay them for their time to get that level of polish.
I did all the photography for Monochōme, for Gipop!, for TrekNotes. Sometimes there’s not quite the same level, but for jewelry shoots I think there’s something really nice to have that high fashion studio look. Certainly for things like Monochōme I was envisioning things like a streetwear kind of company so it was OK to be out on the street or in front of a mural.
Did you view all three of those as real companies or side projects that make money?
For me all of them are both an exploration of manufacturing techniques and building interfaces. So there’s more hobby perspective on that but it was important for me to present them as actual companies. Part of that was to make the customers feel comfortable to place an order. Because if it was just some side project website that was explicit in not being taken seriously, but I’m asking people to pay me money… I don’t people would want to do that. I tried to come off as a real place. Which sort of backfires sometimes when people email you and want to get a hold of you. I have this full-time job and so I’m coming home and only remember to look at my inbox every couple days. And so people are like, “Oh my gosh, your turnaround is terrible.” I’m like, well it’s just me and I have a job. I’m sorry.
In one perspective you want to make it really personal because it’s your creation on a scale for everyone else to enjoy. But then there’s this idea of professionalism. People who are familiar with you or your company’s history may be more lenient. But then there are people who only see this as a company and want to order something. That seems like an interesting thing balance.
Sometimes people write in and they’re like, “Oh, I’ve seen your [other] work somewhere else” but a lot of people just hear about it word-of-mouth or saw an article about it somewhere and are just treating it like a real company. I think the fulfillment side of it is the most difficult side of it because people have gotten a little bit spoiled by stuff like Amazon and Amazon Prime. So I’m like, “I’m sorry, it takes four weeks to make this and I’m shipping it USPS because I don’t have a business license. I’m sorry, it’s slow, it’s expensive. It’s just two of us. We’re sorry!”
Does responding candidly help?
I don’t use any sort of Zendesk or ticketing system on the email. I know on some level that would help me but I feel like it comes off that much more personal if it’s just me writing the meat of each email each time. And I can really bring a personal voice to it and throw in some emoticons to basically say, “Hey, there’s only one person talking to you. Please act accordingly.”
You also have another project… actually, you have a lot of projects listed on your site, which is fun because it’s like digging through a tumblr. One I found was a site that helps small ecomm sites solve problems around production and other things. Are you still keeping up with this?
Sort of. Originally I had this very ambitious goal to do a weekly release and it turns out that if everyone I’m contacting are also doing their own small business on top of a day job it turns out everyone is busy. But the reason why that started is because I found myself at conferences or parties and someone would mention a product company and I was immediately like, “Oh my gosh, can we talk about this? What do you do for fulfillment, what do you do for shipping, for customer service?” And they would be super excited to talk about this too.
I remember a friend and I were [at a party] going back and forth asking, “What do you do for this? What about this?” and someone else asked what we’re talking about and we’re like, “Shipping!”
I realized that everyone who was doing this has the same sorts of issues and we’re all trying to figure it out for ourselves. So I wanted there to be a place where people could come and talk about it and share the good and the bad side of the work they’re doing.
Are you seeing artists where you’re at in Los Angeles experimenting with the startup model or using more business tactics in their practices?
I don’t know if I’m aware of a large-scale trend but on an individual, anecdotal level I talk to a bunch of people about marketing plans and how to do photography, tips on dealing with inventory and, yeah, all these things that go into running a business.
How do you define success for most of your projects?
Much of it is me wanting to explore manufacturing techniques and web technology. Really just launching it is a success. Finishing it enough to put it out into the world and tell people about it is its own baseline success for me. And if other people are interested in it, get excited about it, place orders, and of course, money which is a good metric of success. But, I feel good that they got out there and completed the idea to show other people.
What’s interesting to me is exploring how artists are finding ways to make money in a way that works for them. There are plenty of models and paths to take but thanks to the internet people can make it their own…
And that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. How do you call it finished? Do you let it peter out and eventually turn off the lights or do you pick a certain date in the future that you want it to be over with? Like TrekNotes, the book project I worked on. It turns out printing one-off books is really expensive and that was my end of exploration. Like, maybe this doesn’t actually work out. I had to price them really high to even cover the cost to make it. There’s basically no profit margin. Eventually I was like, “OK, I put this out there and 20 or so people have bought one. They feel good about it, I feel good about it. I’m OK to let it go and turn off ordering.” And for me that was the first time I closed one of these. It felt really nice that the entire arc of the project concluded. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to end things in a way that you feel good about it. Not because you got frustrated and had to shut it down.
Sometimes you can get stuck in this middle ground where it’s not hugely successful that it can by your full-time job but it’s not nothing either. You have some number of orders or income coming through but at some point it’s like what’s the mental tax of keeping all the projects in your head?
Do you have any advice for people looking to get started with ecommerce as the revenue model?
I think the two biggest to look out for are inventory and shipping. There’s a reason that each one of my projects are one-offs. I don’t want inventory in my house. I don’t want boxes and boxes of something that I’m trying to sell off. Thankfully that’s a lesson I learned early on with my Albuquerque jewelry venture. I was making bottle cap earrings and at some point I had like 100 pairs of bottle cap earrings that no one wanted. But I put all this time and love into and it was like, “Oh God, what do I do with this?” I was like OK, I’ll never do this again. I hear that often from people who want to do this cool thing and then suddenly have boxes of t-shirts that they’re waiting to ship out one-by-one. I think that can be a little bit overwhelming. Yeah, the whole shipping part is the thing that everyone gets overwhelmed with because navigating the Postal Service and how to get good rates for postage and order boxes, ship things and stay protected and to make them look nice. There’s just all these things and finishing touches that make your product more professional and then the labor involved. It takes people by surprise by how much time it takes to start mailing things.
I’m guessing this took you by surprise?
Yeah, my first year at Meshu… I left my job in October. I was like, this is great I can focus on Meshu for the holiday season. I hear the holidays are a big thing and maybe I’ll get, fingers crossed, maybe twice as many orders. That number turned out to be ten times. I remember…[one night] I had to make chain for like eight hours. I was like, maybe I should figure out some way to make this easier for myself.
What did you end up doing?
Well, this is really dumb. At first I bought chain bulk because I was like, “I’ve made chain for years. I can make this and save a little bit of money. Look at me I’m so smart.” Turns out the time spent on making that chain… I should just buy pre-made chain. Once you’re not constructing each of these and I just attach the pendent to the chain, put it in the box, ship it out.
And hiring people. If I’m overwhelmed by work I hire someone instead of sit and stress like, “I’ll never get this done.” It was such a new thing for me.
If there’s enough orders that I’m stressed out, there’s enough money for me to hire someone.
Was your cofounder part of the shipping process?
Yeah, but he still had a full-time job though. So I would be making jewelry all day long and then he’d come home and we’d box everything up. For some reason we didn’t know you could schedule pickups for USPS so we would go and stuff every single blue box until it was full and it couldn’t open any more and then walk to the next one and put more boxes in. We did all these things you just shouldn’t do. Once you start doing this stuff you’re like, this is really dumb. I should just schedule a pickup and not worry about it.
But at the time we’re like, well, I guess this is my life and I just have to suffer now.
There are so many little tricks you wouldn’t know about until you just start doing it.
Any other projects in the works?
I’d really like to get back into more traditional jewelry design. I have a few ideas kicking around for that but it will be more me acting as designer and less about user-generated designed pieces. But, I don’t know, still kicking ideas around.
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