We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jaclyn Corrales. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jaclyn below.
Jaclyn, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.
Shane and I have been making resin art together for years. What started as a hobby that we could enjoy together slowly became a bigger and bigger challenge as we began offering commissioned works of resin art, applying to Art Walks and being featured in local coffee shops. Eventually, I left my corporate job to pursue resin art full time. Getting used to being your own boss, having to be a self starter or the bills don’t get paid was a lot more significant of a lesson to learn and a lesson that was learned very quickly. Soon enough we decided it was time to grow, the only question was how? We still wanted to interact with potential clients, share our passion and have them come to us. Naturally we opened a store front, The Pour House by Surf Ghetto Resin. Our store offers resin classes, a space for other artists to teach classes and a gallery for people to see what we have to offer. This huge accomplishment comes with a year long lease of rent due if we sell art or not, if people show up for classes or not and if other artists choose to use the space to teach their own passion. Most of all The Pour House will show, over time, our determination to succeed…or not.
A few months have passed and we have support from so many locals wanting to see a small business grow. Every person in the class creates a completely unique piece of art. Other artists are starting to show interest in using the space for themselves.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Surf Ghetto Resin was never supposed to be. Shane and I work out of the garage in a busy alley where a lot of the same people would walk by daily. Some got the courage to ask what we were always doing in the garage every day, so we showed them the practice pieces of a much bigger project that was making myself a coffee table. People started to check back on our progress and eventually offering to buy our resin work. It was not resin art yet but if we could finance our learning by selling practice pieces we figured why not.
Over the years we make less mistakes and are always trying to stay current with new products that create a better product. We use some of the hardest curing resin on the market with high UV resistance. Also we can offer resin art that can sustain direct sun light with a special top coat.
Since we were self taught and made so many mistakes in the beginning we are able to help others trouble shoot the problems that may encounter while using resin themselves. At The Pour House we expose people to something they wanted to try out but have been intimidated. Our classes offer the exposure to a unique medium without the commitment
Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?
We definitely have a website and we quickly realized that we were in over our heads with it. Luckily we reached out to some friends for advice and help and our website looks decent. Bringing people to the website is a learning process for us. Adding links to social media posts, promoting at pop ups and art walks help.
In addition to our website we use Etsy. They make things user friendly and you can keep a pretty low maintenance shop. A beneficial part of Etsy is they do the promoting and advertising. The down side is they rightfully take a percentage and want you to offer free shipping. Etsy has the potential to keep you busy.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Our beginning of social media was not organic. I’m one of the few people who doesn’t take pictures. My camera had about 30 pictures and I thought I was a lot. Needless to say I never had any interest in social media. My niece helped me set you the account, answered my questions and helped me learn how to use it. Talking with other small business owners I was given a golden nugget. We would target a location where we would soon be participating in a pop up event scroll through and like posts, make comments and try to interact with that community. Many people wanting to help support us would follow the account, send encouraging messages and even sometimes show up at the event to say hi
Contact Info:
- Website: Surfghettoresin.com
- Instagram: @surf_ghetto_reain
- Youtube: Surfghettoresin1085