We recently connected with Chloe Trent and Deken Taylor and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Chloe Trent and Deken Taylor thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Chloe Trent’s sustainable childhood inspired the business concept. Chloe comes from a family that drinks a lot of water from plastic bottles and has seen how people discard them on a daily basis. She believed there was a way to transform these bottles that most people consider trash into something valuable. Her family has always repurposed everyday items like grocery bags, pasta jars, metal cans, paper rollers, and old shirts into newly functional everyday items like trash bags, snack containers, utensil holders, classroom manipulatives, and drying cloths.

Chloe earned her bachelor’s degree in graphic design from the University of North Texas, which has a sustainability initiative. She worked on an environmental storm drain mural on the UNT campus to raise awareness about pollution entering water supplies. Chloe has always believed that humanity should protect and preserve the world’s environment. She is a dedicated artist who enjoys expressing herself through her work. During her MBA program, she began collecting water bottles and tried to figure out ways to repurpose them and change people’s perceptions of bottles. She realized she could transform the common perception of used bottles as trash into art!

Chloe wanted to make this idea a reality and knew she could turn to her close friend and creative Deken Taylor, a UNT graduate with a master’s in journalism and a bachelor’s in public relations. The duo’s ultimate goal is to find an innovative and groundbreaking way to reimagine the use of bottles through art. As a result, BottlesCape Art was born!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Chloe is the company’s artist. She attributes her love of art to her parents, both of whom are creatives. They saw how she became interested in fine arts and was drawn to sculpture, digital illustration, traditional painting (acrylic, oil, and watercolor), and animation. She was enrolled in advanced academic programs, studio and graphic design courses, and a remote art program called Art Instruction Schools while in high school. Through the assistance of teachers and programs, she progressed from a self-taught artist to a developing artist in college. She also became interested in graphic novels, web comics, and anime, and she is currently working on a web series called “Youso to Sekai.” All in all, she is proud of how far she has come and wishes to continue creating art that speaks to a wide range of people through BottlesCape Art, Youso to Sekai, and freelance.

Deken is the company’s strategic communicator. For the majority of his life, he has lived a creative lifestyle. He began telling stories at a young age and participated in creative public speaking and writing competitions in elementary school. He soon discovered a love for music and began singing and playing musical instruments. Throughout high school and college, he frequently took on leadership roles in creative endeavors such as event planning, management, and coordination. Taylor’s career ambition is to create vision statements and strong reputations for other creatives.
BottlesCape is an arts and crafts black-owned business dedicated to repurposing the use of bottles through art. So far, their product line consists of bottles, tumblers, and vases.

“We try to make our art products based on what’s trending and what customers at art markets we vendor may like such as specific themes from anime, holidays, and zodiac signs,” Deken says. “We are open to doing commissions in the future!”

Since their launch in July 2022, they have amassed over 20,000+ impressions across their social channels and have attended several DFW art market conventions, including Dream Con. BottlesCape has established itself as a company that makes art with purpose and has been featured on ShoutOut DFW and the North Texas Daily.

“It’s defiantly a proud moment when you are recognized for your business by someone working in a drive-thru,” Deken says.
Overall, the goal of BottlesCape is to get people to be mindful of sustainability efforts. Their tagline is “Saving the world, one bottle at a time.”

“We want people to realize that things you consider as trash after a single use can be transformed into something that you can treasure forever,” Chloe says.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Thanks to Deken’s previous experience in running other social media accounts for businesses, BottlesCape created a social media plan before going live on social media.

“We made quarterly and monthly goals for each social media platform, just to gauge what to expect,” Deken says. “Since we are still in the early stages of our business, key focuses for our social accounts are building visibility, raising awareness and of course sales.”

As for advice, it would be wise to prepare as much as possible before going live with your business on social media. Many business owners may suffer from having social media knowledge, but there are plenty of ways to overcome this. Research terms dealing with growing your social media presence through articles and videos. Determine which platforms you will engage most of your customers on and stay consistent with posting. Make sure that the content that will be posted is as high quality as possible. Find your business niche through hashtags and engage with your audience as much as possible. Use social media management tools (especially the free ones) to your advantage like the Meta Business Suite to save time and money. Consistency is key and always try to make an effort to put quality over quantity when needed.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

By being the paparazzi at the events go to! Ha! Only kidding. Honestly, it’s actively participating and recognizing other local artists, vendors, and cosplayers for their hard work. BottlesCape is a two-person team; there are many creatives who are just riding solo. When BottlesCape does attend events, they make sure to support and shout out people on their social media as much as possible. You never know what one post on a story can turn into.

Also, not a lot of businesses repurpose bottles into art, so that’s a plus too! People are pretty astonished when they realize that.

BottlesCape plans to vendor starting in November 2022 at the Pancakes and Booze Art Show!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lnk.at/bottlescapeart
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bottlescapeart/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bottlescapeart
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bottlescapeart/?viewAsMember=true
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/bottlescapeart
• Other: TikTok : https://www.tiktok.com/@bottlescapeart

Image Credits
Photos were taken and edited by Deken Taylor and Sarah Hogan.