Michelle SaintOnge Business Timeline- Part 2

My Journey to Become an Independent Artist and Craftsperson.

Part 1/ Part 2/ Part 3/ Part 4

The Working Years

2001- I was able to land a job as a CAD designer for The Hudson Bay Company’s private brands. The job was terribly underpaid but I took it because I knew it would be a great training ground for commercial textile design. There I worked putting prints and patterns they purchased into repeat for production and every once in a while I would design coordinates for the all-over prints. I didn’t have a lot of design freedom but I got a chance to see what kinds of print and patterns they were buying and from whom. I got a first hand look at what a large retailer looked for in a print. After two years at that job I decided I was ready to begin working full-time as a freelance print and pattern designer and started to send my portfolio to agents in new York. I took a contract with GroupFour Design. The Bay purchased a lot of their prints and I was consistently pleased with the quality of their artists work. I moonlighted for the next six months, working evening and weekends doing prints for G4 and my regular design work for The Bay during the day until I had built enough of a nest-egg to go out on my own. Needless to say, it was not the most social period of my life but the chance to work on my own without a boss was highly motivating. I also felt it was important to make sue that I could produce prints that people would want to buy so the six months I spent moonlighting was also a testing period for my own work. I have to say that the work was not perfect from the start and learning to work with an art director was a huge learning curve. Especially since my Canadian politeness and sensibilities were regularly assaulted by my art directors New York City style frankness. I look back at that time and laugh; my art director was such a great guy- I’m sure he had no idea I would hang up the phone with him and sit there in a daze of shock. Obviously I learned to appreciate his frankness and took his great advice and it made my work a lot better.

2002- Being a freelance textile designer was a great way to make a living. You produced how much work you wanted, when you wanted and only had to meet over the phone with your agent once a week. You were your own boss- you could work one day a week, in the night or the morning or just on weekends. But it had it’s fair share of ups and downs. You are on contract with an agent and it is an exclusive contract. You are obliged to not work with other agents- that is a big no-no in the industry. The agent in contract agrees to represent you and show your work at trade shows, in showrooms, make appointments with potential clients to promote and sell your work but they do not do this exclusively for you- you are one among the rest of their artist roster. The clients can be anyone who wants to purchase print and pattern. Generally they are clothing manufacturers, retailers or converters (converters buy fabric and have prints made on it then send it to clients that have purchased it). The agent also doesn’t pay you until they sell a print for you; if they can’t sell your prints then you don’t get paid. Even then they only pay you once the client pays them. That can mean you wait for up to four months to get paid. 

On top of the uncertain paycheck, the industry itself suffers greatly with the mood of consumers. The North American retail industry will adjust it’s buying strategies to match consumer purchasing and growth. When consumer confidence is weak- they cut back- sometimes way back. That means that when consumer confidence wanes retailers are going to cut costs and one of those costs will definitely be the amount of money they spend on purchasing prints. After the beginning of the Iraq war I saw a dramatic drop off in my print sales- for a period of time they dropped off 70%! After about a year I saw them regain strength but by then something else had changed. In order to survive the economic difficulties you had many retailers buy each other out, merge and become one instead of two. That meant that all of a sudden you had one customer instead of two; meaning a 50% reduction in your ‘potential sales’. I had heard from many people who had been in the print design business that it used to be a lot more lucrative twenty years ago. I can certainly see that six years ago it was for me. Eventually, I started to get burnt out from the sheer volume of work I produced. By year five I had produced about 340 collections of work- eight prints in each collection- and I was losing steam so I decided to take a break for a couple of weeks. That break turned out to be the beginning of an entirely new path for me. 

2005- After a whirlwind of strange circumstances I found myself moving from Montreal, where I had been living for three years, back to my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. There is a great art college in Halifax, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), and they have a textile program. During the slow summer months you can rent time in their print studios for cheap. Their studios hardly compare to the ones I had been used to at Sheridan College but I was anxious for the first time in quite a few years to do some hands on printing. I rented studio time but had no particular project to work on; I just wanted to do something fun. I had an idea and asked my friends to give me pictures of their pets. I thought I might try to come up with a new kind of pet portrait, one that was silkscreened and very contemporary (not like your grandmothers charcoal sketch of Fluffy)! After some trial and error I came up with a look that I really liked so I exposed my screens and printed the works onto cotton. I built frames (actually, I had my father build them) and stretched the printed material so that the print could hang like a gallery styled canvas. My friends loved them. I loved them too; silkscreening the portraits ended up producing an image that was simple, clean, modern and allowed the animals personality to show through. And it felt great to be back in the studio. I had always found printing to be a very zen activity; one part craft and one part creativity.

Most of my friends had hung their pet portraits in the place of business. Before I knew it I was fielding requests from their clients to make custom portraits for their animals. The problem was at this point that the students had gone back to school and the print studios at NSCAD weren’t available to use. I looked all of the city to find somewhere else to work and came up empty. A few thoughts came together and evolved into my next move; I decided I wanted to pursue work in a studio again and that I might have something people wanted in my pet portraits but in order for these things to happen I was going to have to build my own studio.

So I wrote up a business plan and hoped to secure some financing to build the studio. That was not easy to do. The silkscreening industry has a history of not sharing information. There are companies (especially commercial t-shirt printers and sign makers) that don’t want you to become their competition so they are not forthcoming about how they do business, or what equipment or products they use. (I have always felt that the more people that know and understand any business the stronger the entire industry becomes). And I was hard pressed to find information about other people producing pet portraits as a business model, nor could I find information on running a textile studio so I did the best I could with quotes for equipment, some ‘guesstimations’ on production costs and production capacity and a general business model. 

My next step was to build my own studio. It was time to find out if the old adage “If you build it they will come” was true or not.

Continue on to part 3…