If you've seen artists talk about their “print club” or “monthly mail club” and wondered what that actually means, here's the simple answer.
A print club is a monthly subscription for your art. Members pay you a set amount every month, and in return you mail them something you made. Most often that...
You've thought about this at least three times.
You make something beautiful. People tell you they would happily pay to get it in the mail every month. And every time you sit down to actually set it up, you close the tab, because it starts to feel like signing up for a second full-time job.
Let me...
Every so often, a Leverage Your Art student shares a story that beautifully captures what building a creative business can really look like.
It is not always a straight line. Sometimes it looks like returning to your art after years away, learning through difficult seasons, and choosing to keep mo...
Some artists arrive at their creative careers by a winding road, and those are often some of my favorite stories.
Federica Volpato, who goes by Fede, has been drawing since childhood, but her love for living things initially led her in a more scientific direction. She pursued her studies and a care...
When I started Gingiber, I wasn't a full-time artist. I was a brand-new mom, working a full-time day job, and building my art business from my dining room table after bedtime. Fifteen years later, Gingiber is a multimillion-dollar art licensing brand with products in 1,400+ brick-and-mortar stores —...
Stacie Bloomfield here — founder of Gingiber, Hay House author of The Artist's Side Hustle, and seventeen years into selling my own art.
I recently asked my email list of 150,000+ artists what they were most afraid to admit was hard about running their creative business.
One answer showed up more ...
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What do you do when the platform you built your business on changes the rules? For Mindy Young of Indy Bloom Design, that moment forced a reckoning — and a pivot that ultimately made her business stronger.
In this episode, Stacie Bloomfield sits down with M...
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What happens when a software engineer goes looking for fabric she can't find and decides to design it herself? For Mel Armstrong, that one question launched a career she couldn't have planned — and a life built entirely around art, illustration, teaching, an...
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What does it take to turn watercolor paintings into a seven-figure art brand? Ben Taylor Paladino took a year off from Stanford during COVID, set up a booth at a Dallas farmers market, and figured out how to sell his art face-to-face as a self-described intr...
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What happens when you mix illustration, consistency, and a willingness to charge what your work is actually worth? You get Jess Miller — an artist who built a thriving, multi-stream business by showing up every day and treating content creation like the legi...
How to Start a Print Club: Lessons from Madison Phipps
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What is a print club, and can you really start one while working full-time and raising a family?
Madison Phipps is a Houston-based artist, mom to a toddler, and full-time professional, and she’s bui...
So many talented artists are told that a professional art career is an impossible dream — by people outside the art world, and sometimes by fellow artists who've given up on their own. The advice to "be practical" and "keep art as a hobby" is everywhere. And while practicality has its place, buildin...
If you've ever felt like your creative path is too weird to follow someone else's blueprint — too many disciplines, too many pivots, too much of a zigzag — Brittany Warner-Smith's story is going to feel like a deep exhale.
Brittany is a full-time artist who considers herself a bit of a nomad, curre...
Today I'm sharing a story from one of my Leverage Your Art graduates — a story that captures exactly why I built this course and why I keep teaching it.
Elizabeth Berglund is a freelance graphic designer, illustrator, and art director based in Memphis, Tennessee. She'd always dreamed of creating mo...
The number one question I get asked as a business owner isn't about licensing or pitching or pricing. It's this: What does "Gingiber" mean, and how did you come up with it?
It's a fair question. The name is unusual, memorable, and a little mysterious — which is partly why it works so well as a bran...
Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self that the dream was going to happen. That the art career I longed for — the one that felt impossible from where I was standing — was actually going to become real.
There was a time when the dream to have an art career felt like exactl...
One of the most common questions I get from artists thinking about launching an art licensing business is: how much is this actually going to cost me? It's a smart question. And the answer is probably better than you think.
When I started my art business in 2009, my out-of-pocket expenses were my a...
Are you excited to talk about creating a great art licensing pitch email? Because I am! If you've been following along with the Art + Audience content, you know that the pitch is one of the most important and most avoided steps in building an art licensing business. So let's talk about it — specific...
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What do artists who've actually made it look like on the other side? Not the highlight reel — the real version, from people who sat where you're sitting and did the work to get somewhere different.
In this episode of the Art + Audience podcast, Stacie Bloom...
