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

Alright, Eric thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today

Mainly, I think that if I were to start over, I’d probably just try to be a little bit more organized. However, if I had to correlate the differences between what’s in my head and brain versus what’s in my studio, I would have to imagine it’s set up practically the same I’m a very disorganized/organized person meaning that my disorganization is organized at least to me and I think in the beginning, having a good set path and understanding what you are going to do going forward having an idea getting it written down, drawing it out having some kind of an organization to the thought process of an artist is probably the most important thing that I’ve learned over the last five years of running my business so I would say to make sure to try and stay organized.

Eric , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

For me, I started the CrawlahClub after a life changing injury in 2017 in 2018. I launched my brand after the injury left me immobile for about four years during that time I took to my creative side and started to draw and create things with my hands, including stationary sticker design, artistic development design, and it really helped me get through some of the brunt of the beginning of that injury and to be very clear. I still live every day with the injury but doing the CrawlahClub has helped me immensely with mental stability and knowing that my physical state has nothing to do with my mental state , and that no matter what I’m still able to provide myself with well-being and pushing forward in the world that’s designed for people who don’t have physical disabilities.

Another thing to point out would be that creating also gives me the freedom to explore a world that I was very unfamiliar with previous to the injury because previous to that I did travel around a lot and toured with a band as a front man, so I understood the idea of selling myself, or selling an idea to people that would create energy Around what I was doing so taking that information and applying it to today’s standards of what an artist is and what an artist can do has helped me become the artist I am today and also helps me give advice and guide younger artists, or even an artist that are trained and very established kind of see a different point or side view of what’s going on.

Currently, I mainly deal in the production of stationary paper, decorations, kind of a nod to Halloween style paper, jointed, decorations, stickers, and sticker art street art graffiti apparel, and everything that comes with that patches, keychains merchandise, all kinds of merchandise anything that I can throw a custom design on and make I will and I also have a very extensive catalog of enamel pins and wearable art.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I can tell you that what I do and pushing forward in an artistic way has been very hard especially when you have a lot of people outside that take their 9 to 5 jobs very seriously or take their careers very seriously and can’t understand that being an artist is a career in itself. It’s some thing that I never had the mentality to understand until I was actually doing it, and I never intended to actually create this brand and use it as a career or as it means to make money, but as a creative outlet for myself, to keep my mind in tune, with what was going on in earlier on, and even now peep People don’t really understand how someone who draws bugs and creates creepy. Crawley weird artwork can move forward because I have been told directly “no one is ever going to support a dude who draws bugs for a living“ and I hear that sentence often in my mind when I’m doing shows or when I’m connecting with people which is really the most important part about all this is the relationships and friendships that I’ve met over the last five years of having this brand in business, doing conventions, traveling, and being able to get out to the masses it’s something that I keep in my mind as a motivation.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

So this is something I get asked quite often by other starting artist, especially in the sticker scene is basically how did you come up with starting what you have? How much money did you put into it and I’m always pretty frank with them. I started with $50 and I made some stickers some makeshift stickers that I had printed. I made some 1 inch buttons and I put little packs together and I pre-sold them to a small community that I was in as a toy collector in the capital I gained off of that I put back into making my first series of enamel pins which I was able to produce 100 enamel pins and I sold those Immediately after getting those in it took about five months to get through the 100 pins not doing a single show. This is all online sales and Word of mouth and all of the money in capital from that has been re-put into the brand and has carried me over the last five years , so I believe that it’s very important to separate equity in the business and continue to evolve the business by putting the money that you make from selling your products back into your Brandon products I think that’s the most important thing or piece of information that I could give to anybody starting because once you start making money you want to spend it but if you spend it, you won’t have the money to put back into the brand and you have to continuously push and evolve and come out with new stuff and promote yourself in order to grow in the way that you want.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @HardDragon
• Facebook: @CrawlahClub
• Other: You can catch me at Five Points Fest in Brooklyn NY on June 10th & 11th at Zero Space Brooklyn. As well as a slew of upcoming shows that I’ll be posting a full schedule soon on my Instagram.

Image Credits
All images were taken by Myself.