We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Evan Brown a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Evan, thanks for joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea?

I started my business during the summer going into my senior year of college. I went to school for graphic design and illustration at the University of Kansas so at the time I was really focusing my school efforts on freelance editorial illustration. Thus, I got an internship with a newspaper in Washington D.C. doing spot illustrations, feature spread layouts, and special projects. However, once I started my internship I quickly realized that I did not like the fast pace work speed and limited creativity that the editorial industry requires.

Just prior to leaving for my internship one of my professors had seen me working in a totally different style in my sketchbook and he encouraged me to pursue that route as it was much more unique than the style that I was working in for my school projects. So, during the evenings after I got home from work at my internship I started exploring the concept of applying the technical training that I had been learning in school to my sketchbook work. By the end of the Summer, I had filled around 10 sketchbooks with my experimentation in the new style. Around that same time, I started getting really interested in listening to business and entrepreneurship content online. As my style began to develop I recognized that due to its uniqueness I could potentially turn it into a marketable product if I were to build up my own brand and vision revolving around it.

When I got back to Kansas City I used my senior year to organize an LLC, brand my company, and prepare all of my plans for jumping right into running my business full time after school. Around that time, I also started up an Instagram page where I posted a drawing every day. Funny enough I ended up doing that for about 1,700 days in a row before it got me enough exposure to where I had a hard time continuing to balance doing both that and my workload. Right out of school I started selling my drawings for super cheap at street shows in order to gain exposure. Through those street shows I got my first two mural jobs in the same week. Since then, projects have kind of snowballed due to both my Instagram presence and word of mouth from project to project.

When starting my business, I really just decided to jump into testing every avenue that I was interested in exploring. Thus, I stared with doing murals, canvas paintings and drawings, coloring books, stickers, and apparel. By doing this I figured that if one thing didn’t stick another would. With effort, all of them actually ended up sticking and I got my apparel brand into Hallmark store and other local retailers, got into doing murals full time, and developed my body of paintings to the point where I now do juried art fairs regularly. I actually just recently had to decide to cut something out due to an overload of work, so unfortunately I had to temporarily discontinue my apparel line. The only thing that I have yet to get around to starting is a series of kids books that I have been planning since I started my business. However, my thought has always been that in order to gain a market for kids books I would need to spend several years building a name for myself to ease the need to push so hard to get it out to the masses. With all that said, the startup process was just constant trial and error. The key was always to not be afraid of failing my way through the process.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I have always been interested in pursuing art as a career, so I was pleasantly surprised to find out that graphic design and illustration/animation were an actual field when I got to college. There is always that push for parents to steer their kid away from the “starving artist” route, and I found that going into commercial art created a sense of security for my parents even though I didn’t end up getting a job working for someone else after school. Because of my interest in business and entrepreneurship I always tell people I’m 10% artist and 90% business. Perhaps that is the thing that has made it all work for me. Who knows, but I do know that the harder you work, the luckier you get. I am a very “type A” person, so clients tend to be surprised with how interactive and professionally collaborative I am able to make the process without making them feel unsure of my consistency.

As far as my personal interests are concerned, I grew up on a farm, so I am huge into the outdoors. I’d say that my work is primarily inspired by the organized chaos in nature. I just find it incredible how nature always finds a way to “figure it out”, thus my business pursuits have always followed a constant effort to emulate that natural flow. As mentioned in the previous question, I am a painter, illustrator, and mural artist that works in one specific style. I hand paint 99% of my work and mix all of my colors out of the three primaries in order to reflect the true rawness of the color pallets found in the natural world. I am personally most proud of how I was able to take something as simple as an art style and turn it into a brand-able product that can be applied to any medium or business venture.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Social media has been a huge part of my business from the start. I think it’s really simple, people want to know who they are doing business with and will choose to align with businesses that align with them. If used correctly social media can really give businesses the ability to communicate with their consumers on a much more personal level than ever before. I often see businesses on social media that appear to be tone deaf towards their consumer’s interests, strictly using the platforms as yet another channel for transactional behavior. I’d highly suggest not using social media as a sales channel but more so as a place where consumers feel like they can connect with and get to know you in an environment where you are not asking them to pull out their wallets.

Every time a new platform pops up businesses tend to ruin them by attempting to make it a sales channel. I personally think that these platforms are precisely designed not to do that, but rather to ensure an open-ended business to consumer relationship. When I was focusing on how to build my social media audience I decided to spend all of my time offering a documentation of both my progress and my process for free so that people felt like they were coming along with me on my entrepreneurial journey. Because of that intentional approach I find that a lot of my work nowadays comes from clients that feel like they have grown to know and develop with me over the years. One tactic that had a huge impact from the start was treating social media like a place to engage in digital door to door interaction. By engaging with, commenting on, and celebrating other people’s posts you are putting yourself in the position to get recognized. If all you are doing is sitting there and asking for something from these people, odds are they will treat you like any other door to door salesman. However, if you engage with them with no ulterior motives, they will be much more inclined to return the engagement and potentially even help promote and build your business up in the process.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

By exploring the concept of applying my work to so many different products early on I noticed that over time people started to recognize and identify my brand with some of the merchandise that I was putting out rather than my original art. Thus, after my fourth year of business I made the hard decision to cut out a large chunk of my merchandise and focus on using my existing network to begin promoting the one thing that I really wanted to be known for in the future, my paintings. While this was a hard decision at the time, my business has since grown extensively because I feel like others resonated with and respected the reason for my pivot. Actually, since dropping all of the merchandise that was taking up most of my time to produce, my workload has essentially tripled. For that reason, I think it is very important to stick with your true passion from the start because if you don’t it is very easy to allow the weight of other people’s interests and suggestions to chart your course.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.doodledood.com
• Instagram: @doodledoodart
• Facebook: Doodle Dood LLC
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-brown-a99358111/