A new direction

Last weekend I met a friend's boyfriend who is a designer. I showed him my work - which he liked - and was talking about my frustrations and difficulties at getting into a gallery. His advice: screw the galleries and start selling to shops on Queen West. Then, when you start making money, start concentrating on the big stuff for the galleries.

I've thought about his advice over and over again and it's starting to make sense. I've really changed my thoughts on the direction I'm heading in and decided to take a more business minded approach. First of all, I'm going to start selling on eBay. I've joined an online site for artists, EBSQ, that provides a space (and more importantly - templates) for creating an online portfolio and presence. They also provide you with excellent templates for putting in descriptions of your artwork on eBay. It looks good and simply pulls all your info from the EBSQ site so there isn't much work involved. Plus it looks professional.

Secondly I've opened up a store on Cafepress.com (it's not ready yet). They allow you to create all sorts of merchandise (apparel, mugs, stickers, calendars, etc) with your images on it, all for free. Everything has a base price, you decide on the markup, and when something is purchased they send the markup to you. You can also purchase stuff of your own to sell without the markup. They take care of the ordering, manufacturing, money and shipping. I don't think it gets any easier than that.

Thirdly, I am redoing a few photos in solid colours so they can be silk screened onto t-shirts. Printing photos on t-shirts is very expensive, but images with only a few colours can easily be silk screened by a number of companies here in Toronto. I know someone who's friend does it, so I'm going to start there. Of course I'll have to learn Illustrator (because I have ooodles of time). Once I have prototypes made, I'll be approaching shops on Queen to see if I can get them sold there. I'm hoping that at least one store out of the whole city will be willing to sell custom shirts. Oh, and did I mention the postcards and possible greeting cards?

In short, I've decided to create my own brand. Soon absolutely everyone will have to have a jBarrie something or other. It's going to take a lot of time, but there's no rush.