We were lucky to catch up with Dylan & Pamela Dowdy recently and have shared our conversation below.
Dylan & Pamela, appreciate you joining us today. To kick things off, Is there something you do differently from the industry standard?
Small businesses like us are free from the corporate/industry standard. As a business, you just kinda do the thing you love, make it all happen, and write your own how-to book as you go. We’re still writing ours, daily. Between the two of us, we have experience working retail, the service industry and corporate settings. It’s molded our perspective on business ownership and shown us what works and what doesn’t work.
For Dowdy Studio, we’ve leaned into taking it slow as far as dreaming up new designs and ideas or growing our store and business. As a hands-on design team, we find it gives us time to focus on quality and control, as well as taking the time to experiment with weird, off-the-wall ideas that bring smiles to people’s faces.
This matters because we can take the time to nitpick our designs. For instance, we can ask the important questions, like “should this Cool Dad’s Club whiskey glass art have a tiger spitting out fire puns or dad riding a tiger revving a motorcycle or heck, maybe both?”
The magic that a small business like ours can bring to the world is the idea that we don’t just churn out products for the sake of stocking a shelf. We take the time to challenge our creativity, turn imperfections into excitement and pour in a bunch of personality. This way we can make tees and goods from the heart that really connect with folks who want a touch of artsy, weird fun in their lives.
For folks who may not have read about you before, can you please tell our readers about yourself, how you got into your industry / business / discipline / craft etc, what type of products/services/creative works you provide, what problems you solve for your clients and/or what you think sets you apart from others. What are you most proud of and what are the main things you want potential clients/followers/fans to know about you/your brand/your work/ etc.
Dowdy Studio is a retail and gift shop that we pour our hearts into. We pride ourselves in making and designing quality cool ass stuff for our East Dallas store. Each design we create is hand-drawn by our own hands and we hand-print a majority of our tees and goods in our own art studio in the back. Our artwork dabbles in the optimistically weird, with a dash of good/bad humor and a splash of our local culture. We’ve created an imaginative Cool Mom’s and Cool Dad’s collection, unicorns that are also tacos, cats that are also bats, a musically wandering land whale, a Godzilla-sized armadillo wrecking cars, with a two-headed monster jamming out on tuna drums with an angry cat and so much more.
Each year is a push for us to create new artwork and items for us to share with the world. Not only do we sell our wares in the Dowdy Studio store in East Dallas, but also online and to other retailers nationwide.
Each year has been met with challenges. There’s always problems we have to solve or work around or ideas that we decide to stop chasing or evolve them into something new. Our biggest challenge actually turned into our biggest opportunity. Right before we go married and planned to take a week honeymoon, Dylan’s job let him go. We were devastated. It was a major blow to our plans and future. Especially when this was supposed to be a happy time for us. Instead of wading in a flood of tears though, we decided to make the most of the bad situation and pull all our pennies together and buy a trailer to build out the Dowdy Studio Wagon, our mobile shop. It was a ton of work and unpaid hours. We didn’t know if people would even like it or if we could find places to park our store, but we jumped in head-and-heart-first and it turned out to be one of the best decisions we made.
For the future, we are most excited about branching out and working on more custom designs for clients, local businesses and larger corporations, in addition to continuing growing the Dowdy Studio store. This has been an exciting turn in our careers where we get to bring others into our headspace and world of artistic fun.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
A tough lesson we had to unlearn as artists is the habit of saying yes to everything. As baby-artists years ago, we felt like we couldn’t afford to pass up any opportunity. But after taking on too many off-brand projects, we realized it was pulling us away from our artsy dreams. People come to us for the unique, artsy things we love and create. Every time we said yes to something outside our wheelhouse, we ended up scrambling to refocus.
One way we keep the focus is by attracting custom design jobs we want to say yes to. We absolutely love creating custom artwork for others. We like to make sure the requestor connects with our artwork or was inspired by something they saw in our portfolio. Without their excitement for what we do, projects can become a struggle.
It’s also not just about saying yes or no to others. We often have to say no to our own dang selves. We typically have way too many ideas in our brains. Oops! We get excited about creating a million new designs or completely overhauling our store design. We just more days in the week, people! Until then, we just have to remind ourselves to slow down and focus, even if it means shelving a killer idea for later.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
For us, the most rewarding part of Dowdy Studio is all the people we have meet throughout this journey. We started Dowdy Studio in 2008, a many bunch of years ago. We’ve been everywhere setting up shop, from under tents at local markets, to our mobile shop at local restaurant parking lots, concert venues, block parties, traveling to events and shows from Portland, San Fran, Austin and Nashville. Then finally settling in our storefront and studio home in East Dallas.
Along the way, we’ve met so many incredible people, including other talented artists, musicians, photographers, writers, and creatives who stumbled upon our work and felt a spark. Some of those connections have turned into great friendships. We’ve even seen customers who first came to us as awkward dating couples now bringing their kids to our shop. Honestly, it’s the best.
What keeps it exciting is knowing that doodling out all the weird ideas in our brains is what brought us all together. It feels like we made the world a tiny bit more fun. And at the end of the day, that’s what we’re here for.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://dowdystudio.com
- Instagram: @dowdystudio
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedowdystudio/
- Other: Tiktok: @dowdystudio
Image Credits
Dowdy Studio