We were lucky to catch up with Amy Stock recently and have shared our conversation below.

Amy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

In October of 2022, I took a big risk. I decided to move my art business of five years from Southern California to Northern California. While I had personally done big moves in the past, I didn’t have a business of my own that I had to factor into those past moving decisions. While I was ready for a change just as I was when making all of my past moves, this time was different. After COVID, my priorities and lifestyle needs had changed. I sought to be closer to my family. I yearned for an atmosphere closer to nature. I already had family in Marin County in the Bay Area where there was easy access to nature. It checked both boxes.

But what about my business? I had started my art gallery in Long Beach in 2017 where I focused on selling artwork made by local artists to the local community. Long Beach is filled with a multitude of talented artists, with extremely limited outlets to show and sell their art. My goal was to be the premier gallery for purchasing art in Long Beach. But let’s be honest, my business hit its peak in February of 2020. I slowly watched it dwindle from there while I swiveled and swirled with all of the twists and turns that happened for all business owners in the next two years. The truth was, I was running a business in an area that “supported the arts”. But without “supporting the arts” from a financial perspective, could my business really survive?

I absolutely love what I do and I knew that if I wanted to realistically keep my dream alive, I needed to make a change. I needed to find a market that would support the arts financially. That’s when I realized a move to Marin had a better chance of success than if I stayed in my current market. So, I took the leap and moved myself and my business to Marin County.

It’s now been a year and it hasn’t been easy. The personalities in how you show and sell art in Marin compared to Long Beach are night and day! As I got myself aquatinted with the artists and galleries in my new area, I slowly realized that my plan to continue doing the same wasn’t going to work. I needed a new business model for my gallery. Being solely online wasn’t working the way I thought it would. I needed to figure out how to interact with my audience in person.

Then, seven months into my move, I had an epiphany! I was in the midst of attending Marin Open Studios, a yearly event where artists open their studios to the public. I stopped everything I was doing and jotted down a whole page of notes. I realized my problem was, I didn’t have a target audience. While in Long Beach, there was so little competition, I didn’t really need to focus on a target audience. Anyone that liked art was my audience there. But now I had galleries with a lot of clout in the art world sitting in my backyard, things were different. So what did that look like? My target audience needed to be families in their 30’s – 50’s. I wasn’t really seeing artists or galleries making or selling art for this audience. Yet, this is a quickly growing audience in Marin. I also realized that this is an audience that’s too busy to go gallery hoping on the weekend, so I needed to bring the art to them, full service art consulting at their fingertips.

It’s now been a year since I moved my business and honestly, looking back at this last year, it felt like I had to almost completely rebuild my business. But I’m so extremely excited about what my future is going to bring for this rebuilt version of Kennedy Grace Gallery. I feel like my brand and vision are even more at home than ever before!

Amy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on how you came about starting an art gallery and tell us more about the business?

I graduated from High School knowing that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Yet, I fell into the art gallery world a bit by accident. In 2006, I’d been doing sales for an upscale resort in Southern California. I was traveling a lot! I had a new boss, and the general manager of the hotel was new, too. They wanted me to travel even more than I already was. I felt burned out and was no longer challenged by my job. Working late one night, I went to the employee cafeteria to get some food. That’s when the owner of an art gallery at the resort sat down next to me. I’d been in her gallery numerous times and had purchased art from her. She asked how things were going. I’d just gotten back from a trip to New Jersey (in January) that was horrible. That’s when the gallery owner mentioned she recently let her gallery manager go. The rest is history. I convinced her to hire me…it took two months. I absolutely loved everything about the job, being surrounded by art all day, meeting people from all over the world, building relationships with the artists. It was a perfect match that I’d never considered before even though I had graduated college with a Major in Business and a Minor in Art. I eventually got let go from that job during the Great Recession as the art market had crashed.

I was OK with this as I knew I was ready to start my own business. I just wasn’t sure what. It took me another seven years of bouncing in and out of sales and marketing jobs that just weren’t quite the right fit for me. Then one day, a friend challenged me with a question. If I could do anything, what would it be? It took me a bit, but as I thought about what I did and didn’t like in past jobs, I realized I really loved everything about running an art gallery. I’d also been living in Long Beach’s arts district for the past 10 years. While the architecture and people were artistic, I wasn’t seeing the type of art I liked. So I started to do some research. I attended art events and artist’s open studios. This is when I realized the type of art I loved was being created in Long Beach, it just wasn’t getting shown. That’s when I decided to open my own art gallery, Kennedy Grace Gallery.

My vision for a gallery included a beautiful brick and mortar space. But just as I was getting ready to launch everything, my financing to cover the cost of a lease fell through. Not wanting to wait, I started to think about creative ways to start my gallery. The pop up trend was just starting to take off and fortunately I was living in an area where there was a lot of support for this idea. So that’s what I did. I popped up in empty spaces or inside other businesses for the day. That eventually led me to start working with business owners on a long term basis, providing artwork for their walls that was for sale. This turned into a beautiful business model until COVID hit and temporarily closed most of the businesses I was working with. Frustrated with having zero control over this, I then turned to creating a robust website, where anyone could buy art from my gallery at anytime.

As my business has evolved, my website now focuses on selling artwork that has a strong connection to nature and the beauty that surrounds us. I’m currently working with about 10 artists and look forward to adding more artists that are local to the Bay Area. In addition to the website, I’ve also added consulting services that includes bringing artwork into clients’ homes, as well as, hanging their art for them. My goal is to provide beautiful original art while giving friendly, creative personal attention to each of my clients.

It’s now been three years as an online gallery and in that short period of time, the art market went from mostly just browsing art online to actually buying art online. Staying on the cutting edge of the art market as it’s evolving quickly is one of my main goals. With AI and NFTs looming, I think it’s important to have physical art surrounding us. The texture, the movement, the feeling you get from these elements, these are things that you can’t get from a digital reproduction. As our world is also quickly changing, I think the process of making art with your own hands is going to become even more important. Because of this, I think that it is so important to support not just the arts but the artists who are making the art.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Pivoting in business has become far too common in our current era. But my very first pivot was before I even launched my business and it’s something that I’ve continued to stand behind to this day. The evolution of the gallery world has drastically changed since starting my gallery in 2017. Brick and mortar retail stores were still king and I often fantasized about what my own gallery would look like, the type of events I’d throw, the conversations I’d have with the people who would visit. As I was preparing all of these details, I learned that my funding to cover the costs of a lease for a brick and mortar fell through. I was crushed, that was the last piece to the puzzle before officially launching.

Not wanting to wait any longer, I quickly pivoted. I had been seeing more and more about art pop ups. So I decided to go this route, This would give me the time to grow my business to the point where I could then financially afford to move into my own brick and mortar. As my new business model was working with relatively low overhead, I was also starting to notice art galleries going out of business. First it was new or relatively unknown galleries. But then I was hearing of well known, well established galleries going out of business. Making me question if my goal of still having my own brick and mortar was realistic. But the beginning of 2020 was amazing! I had record sales in both January and February. Having my own space was starting to become more realistic. I signed an agreement with a commercial real estate agent to help me start looking for my own space. And then we know what happened. The world stopped. I was left disappointed but so grateful that I hadn’t signed a lease yet.

As things continue to shift in the art world, more and more galleries have closed their brick and mortars, and are now online only. Which is a positive thing that happened during COVID, more people became comfortable buying art online, making online art galleries a true possibility. While there’s still a part of me that fantasizes about my own brick and mortar, it’s no longer a goal. That very first pivot is something that has set my businesses trajectory on the course it’s on today, to constantly be seeking the next new ways to show and sell art in financially responsible ways.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I grew up in a family business on a farm in Nebraska. When I was a child, it was run by my grandparents and parents. The office was across the driveway from the home I grew up in. The operations surrounded our yard. My playground consisted of all of this. I moved seamlessly through the operations of the office and farm on a daily basis. Stopping into the office to ask my mom a question or say “hi” to my grandpa. As I was a child who liked a lot of stimulation, I started helping with the family business when I was five doing easy clerical work.

At the time I didn’t realize it, but I soaked up so much information from observing the conversations being had with customers both in person and on the phone. On top of that, we always ate dinner as a family and it was often the first time during the day that my parents had time to catch up as my mom did the accounting and my dad was running the farming operations. While the conversations always started with asking me and my sisters what we did that day, they always turned to talk of the business. Little did I know, I was absorbing all of the soft skills that come with running a business. These conversations were not the things you learn in business school.

I’m very fortunate and grateful that my family has done an amazing job with their business’s reputation. I’m sure I’m doing things and making decisions that I’m not even realizing that have been ingrained in me. But when I’m challenged with a repetitional business decision, I always go back to my family’s business and ask myself, “how would they handle this situation?” Being authentic, kind, caring and truly wanting the best product for your customers always wins.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kennedygracegallery.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kennedy_grace_gallery/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kennedygracegallery

Image Credits
Blue Sky’s Studio