- Artspiration -
Madison Chessare & Victoria Inghram
- Business Activities for Artspiration -
At Artspiration we provide a service where you give us your old piece of furniture, a canvas, or anything you can think of and turn it into art. We pull inspiration from everything around us making old things new again. We will let you choose what we do to the product or you can choose to let us use our creative capabilities to design it ourselves. We provide the supplies and you supply the canvas. When you come into our shop one of our workers will sit down with you and discuss your object of choice and why it is of importance to you, why you want it altered, how you want it altered, and a lot more. We give you an estimated time your product will be done and take your name, number and email and we will contact you as soon as it is ready to be picked up! We provide the supplies to recreate your art and we you charge the depending on the amount of supplies we need per project and the labor.
How did we get started?
We started our business 3 years back when we were sitting in the park. We both have a passion for recreating things and making them new again so we decided to make something of it. We started small in our community by walking door to door and selling our things. We sold painted key chains, painted jars, we painted old keys and put them on a chain and sold those. People seemed to love it and love the idea so we decided to save up our money and open a small shop. We saved up for a few years and bought a small shop in downtown Springfield. We had a good amount of supporters because of our door to door sells and the word spread quickly. Now our shop is busier than ever!
Competition?
With our business there is some competition. Since we are in a downtown area there are other shops that sell all kinds of art surrounding us. But I think we have an advantage because we recreate items. We are a small business just trying our best to have fun and get by but we are very lucky because we get to do what we love! Many of the shops around us only sell other people's art, meaning the artist herself of himself have to pay a fee to sell their things in the shop, they pay the fee, drop them off, and wait for them to be sold. Our shop is just us and a few other friends working with us recreating YOUR items. We also sell original pieces here but we recreate your objects meaning it is more personal. We don't like to think of ourselves as competition to the other shops we like to just consider ourselves acquaintances with the other shops!
A question we get a lot is where we even get the money to afford our place and afford to use so many products because those can get expensive. When we first started, as I said before, we went door to door to sell our own original recreated items. We started saving the money we made from that and went from there, we started saving the money we were making money from our part time jobs also. We made enough to afford the place on the corner, and after we purchased it we kept door to door selling in order to be able to open our shop.
Can you work with us? Sure! Usually when we are looking for more workers we put a sigh outside out shop and post something to our website. When we first started we had just us two working and no one else because that's all we needed. We weren't too big of a business so everything worked out nicely. As our business started growing so did our staff. We realized after we had bee swamped with orders for over a month that we needed more people involved in our business so we started hiring. If you wanted to apply you just have to follow these steps :
1. Ask for an application for Artspiration in the shop
2. Fill out the application
3. Come to the shop and drop it off, wait a couple days and we get back to you!
When you fill out the application we have you do a test. We supply an old chair, brick, key, or whatever we have just laying around and ask you to recreate it. When you drop off your application you give us back the object! Usually that is one of the main determine factors in having us hire you or not. Don't be scared though! We aren't too hard on first timers :)
When we first started we got our supplies from local art supply stores but as we are getting more and more business we realize that isn't going to work anymore. We use an online art supplies store and make mass orders of supplies and when we get it we keep it in the back of the shop. We only get our basic supplies like acrylic paints, hot glue sticks, colored pencils, etc., from online and when we want other objects we go to our local store. We don't have any restrooms or other rooms in our place so we don't need much more other than art supplies. We have a few cleaning products we keep at the place like glass cleaner, sanitizer, wood cleaner (for our wood floors), and things of that nature in our back room. Other than those things, we are set!
5. Marketing
All of our business is done in the store. We have not yet expanded to online orders and sales but that is our next goal! Victoria and I aren't math majors so we have our parents help us with it! My brother Alex usually does our billing information so we don't mess it up.