Michelle SaintOnge Business Timeline- Part 3

My Journey to Become an Independent Artist and Craftsperson.

Part 1/ Part 2/ Part 3/ Part 4

Crafting My Place In This World

2006- I secured financing and began to look for studio space. That was much harder than I anticipated. I didn’t need a lot of space but I needed enough to house a small darkroom, a long print table and a washout sink. The industrial business parks near where I lived had units that could be used but I was going to have to rent three times more space than I really needed and there is no good reason to spend more to rent space you don’t need. So I kept looking but the downtown core didn’t really want to have a screen printer in their nice buildings and I needed water access for a washout sink and that just wasn’t available. Finally, I drove through the city’s North End, new home to an ever growing artist population, and I saw an older building that had a studio space for rent. It turned out to be the perfect place, the rent was a bit high but it had everything I needed, it was an empty box with water access. So my father and I began to build my studio.

My business plan centered around production of one colour prints of animal breeds that would be sold through gift stores and high end pet retail outlets. I had orders for custom work which I completed but I thought long term it might be too difficult to only produce custom work for clients. Anyone in the business knows that the largest part of your production cost is the stripping of screens, coating, producing acetates and shooting the screens. All that has to happen before you produce even one print. T-shirt printers and poster printers absorb that costs over hundreds of prints but if I was going to produce a one of a kind silkscreen and I would have to build in that cost for every portrait. So, instead of the labour intensive custom work I decided I would make one colour prints of animal breeds and sell them through gift stores and high end pet retail outlets. That decision would be the beginning of a very important lesson.

Once I was up and running I began to produce work, held an opening for my new wall canvasses of cat and dog breeds, was really well received and secured retailers for the prints. For a while I produced prints of different animal breeds but I saw a trend emerge. While some of the prints sold, most customers saw them and would really want one of their pet, a custom portrait. I had to listen to what the clients wanted and they wanted custom portraits. So I went with the flow and I switched from making generic breed portraits to making custom ones. I was so busy with work I could hardly believe it. One client often referred me two or three or four times! But I wasn’t making any money! After paying for supplies, rent, insurance, taxes and equipment leases there was barely any left over. I learned then that if your products are flying off the shelves; your not charging enough. So I increased my prices by 50% and still I had lots of clients but wasn’t quite matching the real cost of production. So I increased the cost another 25% and I felt I was closer to what the work actually cost to produce. I worked on custom portraits for the next two years, became an expert at shooting, coating and stripping screens; I did it hundreds of times! 

I was happy to make artwork for my clients that made them happy but every artist has some work they want to make to make themselves happy and I was no exception. So I began to produce my own silkscreened work for gallery shows. 

2007-    My first big show, called Good Dog Bad Dog, was not really so big. The gallery was out of town and it was not really so much a gallery as it was a converted garage on the side of a store. But I was happy to have my own show and I was very proud of the work. I think the eight people (including my family) that came out to see it were all really impressed! I look back on that show now and laugh; I had no idea how important that work would become for me. I had two shows that followed in the next year that were much bigger and drew larger crowds (in the hundreds). I got great press in local and national papers, a few tv spots and lots of new clients. I had been asked by a gallery owner in another city to be represented by them and I began to produce more work. Although my work was really well received I still ran into the same problems with the high cost of production when I would make gallery artwork. Because I was making work that I wanted to make I didn’t try to make it cost effective by having just one colour, or making it smaller in size that I wanted it to be. Often the work had a minimum of four colours in it, sometimes up to ten colours and the work tended to be very large, some were up to seven feet long. Most were a one of a kind prints and others were part of a run that was limited to three or four. I had to cover at least the cost of production in the price I charged and this made the work seem expensive to this small market of clients. I realize that if the work appeared in one of Canada’s larger cities no one would have questioned the cost but in a small city where clients knew nothing about the process of silkscreening the cost appeared high and the work sold slowly. People loved my work but most couldn’t afford to own an original canvas so I tries to think of other revenue streams for my artwork. I decided it might be a good move to develop the illustrations I had already silkscreened and turn them into artwork for licensed products. That was an area of design I always wanted to tap into. Unlike the work I did for the commercial studio in New York, where artwork is sold with all the rights to the buyer, licensed work was sold on a contractual royalty based system. I thought if I could take my popular images from my gallery shows and develop them so they could be licensed for products then I could earn an income from the work even if the original work took a long time to sell; all while retaining ownership of the images.  

So I ventured out to make it happen and while I planned for one thing I got something much bigger in return.

Continue on to part 4…