We were lucky to catch up with Jm “aeior1” Quitalig recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi JM “Aeior1”, thanks for joining us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
You know? That’s a very interesting question. I found that my views of success have changed as I got older. Growing up in the Philippines, it was all about getting good grades because it meant that it would lead to a good life. Now i’m much older, I don’t think that it was necessarily true. I’m sure there are tons of people who had amazing grades in school but do not feel successful now. I mean, I went to college but I didn’t graduate so I felt like a huge failure then. Now that I’m making a living creating art and providing for myself and my loved ones, I’m pretty happy where i’m at and I think for me personally, that’s what success is. Being able to live doing whatever it is that you love the most. I don’t think I’d be where I’m at had I graduated college. If you really think about it, there are so many ways to measure success. For many it’s about money but, when is there really enough money to consider yourself successful, you know? When does the want for more end? I think that we have to be wise in how we measure our own success. It’s very possible to have everything you aimed for and still feel like a complete failure. You can do everything right and still feel empty. I once had this conversation with my friend Fern. I had voiced out to him my lack of satisfaction about what I’m doing as I felt that I wanted more out of myself and was a bit glum about it. What he said really helped put a lot of things in perspective for me. He told me that I was already where I wanted to go…. and all that I needed was to appreciate and enjoy it. When you see things from that angle, you start to see everything you’ve been overlooking and how far you’ve come from where you were. In the end of the day, we all just want to be happy right? Isn’t that the end goal? So to me, If you’re happy where you’re at and you’re surrounded by people who make you happy, then you’re pretty successful in my book.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Well, where do I begin? This might be along story. My friends call me JM, but I go by Aeior1 and I am an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. I’ve been an artist since I was a kid but didn’t become a working artist till 2015. I am 42 years old and I kind of just fell into this business via life’s many interesting events. As I mentioned, I migrated to America from the Philippines, I was 14 then. That part of life was very difficult because of culture shock so I ran towards art because there was nothing else for me to run to. It was just me and my pops so emotional support was very rare to come by. He did his best you know? but It was very hard for him being a single parent at the time and constantly working just to provide for us. So during times when I just felt really alone and defeated, I would go to the backyard and take it out on whatever junk is back there. I’d use whatever paint is laying around and paint on any flat thing I can paint on. They were not good paintings though. Mostly ugly expressions of my own self loathing. You know? Abstract splatters of anger and fear LOL! After high school, I went to CSULB for Industrial design and unfortunately had to drop out since I did not meet the requirements to graduate. I really felt down after that but life had to go on and I did learn very much to improve my art. College was a very fertile ground for me to develop a lot of my creativity and grow my art and a lot of the concepts I run with today, I’ve derived from my experiences during that time.
I went from job to job from washing cars to selling cars to working in a laboratory testing blood in the ER and moving to Guam for a while. Ultimately, life had its ups and downs but the worst of the downs happened to me in 2015 when a string of unfortunate events including losing a relationship and the passing of both my dog and grandpa sent me on the dark spiral. Just like a lot of people, I did the very human thing of running towards booze and drugs to try to not feel everything ruining everything I had along the way . That went on for about a year until I finally had enough. I spoke to God and gave him my life. I told him that I could no longer manage so is it okay if I just became his employee. That I would go wherever he took me cuz I knew he knew what would make me happy. A few days later, a friend visiting had seen the art I was making at the time and offered to purchase it. That was the first time I’ve ever sold art as I always just gave it away to people I knew. That same week, the same friend informed me that they were starting a gallery and they would love to have my art up for display, and of course I agreed. Unfortunately, that experience only ran a few months till it was cut short due to mismanagement. As a consolation though, I did make a few contacts during my time there. One of them was a pro-skater named Aaron “Ajax” Johnson whom offered me to have an art show at a bar he was tending at called “The Red Room” on 4th st. in Long Beach. Sometimes, when you smile at life, it starts to smile back you know?
That was my first art show. I painted 30 ice creams on 8×10 canvases and titled the show “Stay-cool” as a call to action during those hot times when police brutality was at a rampant. This was around 2017 and the show was successful. I sold the pieces for $30 dollars each and had sold majority of it by the end of the night. The rest were sold through social media the following days after. That was my first taste of the art business and I’ve been making a living creating art since. I started putting my paintings in art stores where they could be sold on consignment and I also started renting galleries per hour to throw my own art shows. It wasn’t easy since you can lose big sometimes but the experience was always worth it for me so I never stopped grinding because quite frankly, I have tons of fun during these events lol! I also really really love sharing the new paintings I make as I always put meaning behind them for people to relate to. I just really enjoy this lifestyle you know?
In 2019, I founded Find Love And Kindness or FLAK United as I started getting requests from my customers for wearable art. I chose to call it that cuz it think that when it does get very popular, then it would have a name that carried a very powerful message. I think we underestimate how much difference love and kindness or lack thereof can make in our lives. The clothing’s designs are loosely based on the paintings I create and people end up owning. I also launched a website, flakunited.com to provide access to the products. I currently have a few inventory in there but I am in the process of adding more products by the middle of the year. It gets hard to keep up sometimes as I do embroider and print the clothes myself. I also work as the lead artist at a Haunt company which provides a wholesome Halloween experience for toddlers and kids so that also takes up a lot of my time. We carve designs on foam pumpkins and light them up with LED’s during November for the kids to enjoy on a trail. The job is very fun so I enjoy that too very much. Shout out to Gavin Shy and my 13FEG fam! They are the awesomest!!! As of last year, my friend Anthony Cruz and I had been collaborating with legendary guitar player Jairus Mozee to throw an art show called “Fat Friday” in Long Beach every three months so please be on the lookout for that. We provide and highlight amazing musical and visual artists so please make sure to follow the IG account for details @aeior1.
Life and business can be very scary and frustrating, but once we focus on the good things in it, it becomes a very enjoyable thing. Some jobs suck, but only because we’re not supposed to be there. In my case, soon as I let go of trying to control my life, I was able to see the opportunities God was presenting in front of me. Ultimately, it led to my personal and business life being finally in harmony. I am forever thankful that things went the way it did, both good and bad. I would not change a single thing in my experience. .
Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?
Yes, currently, FlakUnited as a company owns a few businesses through stocks. All the net income that the company makes is reinvested in owning shares of Nuclear, Thermal Management, Commercial Ventures, and Construction companies like Centrus Energy and KULR Technology. This decision was made in 2021 when I had to figure out what to do with the money that was just sitting around and not being utilized. The return on just interests through deposits isn’t enough to grow exponentially so investing in stocks was the only move to make. It involved a lot of education through reading books like “The richest man in Babylon” and “The Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham. But after 6 months of obsessing about it, I was able to Navigate although it was a rough start. I needed a good Investment theory cuz I really did not want to gamble. I had to go in there understanding the probabilities. I theorized that since the world is being forced to go electric, that the sensible investments would be in Nuclear and Thermal Management companies. This was 2021…… and 2022 everything crashed. Luckily, I did my homework and I bought a ton more shares when all the prices went down as I knew that there was no getting away from the need of electricity and the management of heat it produces. I just kept buying shares and growing the portfolio’s earning power while knowing that sooner or later, the price was certain to snap back up. Fast forward to 2024 and all of it paid off. Today, FLAK United’s portfolio is worth about 100k and growing. I’m very happy with the investments the company had made so far and thank you Internet for providing the information I needed to not lose these trades. Internet education is very underrated.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Oh sure! I had this revelation once about that and it goes “A person’s resolve is tested by how well they can handle uncertainty”. Often, when we don’t know something, it’s very easy to get frustrated which ultimately leads us to giving up due to our emotions just simply overwhelming our thinking. I had this experience when I first started making the T-shirts for FLAK. There was a demand which is why I made them but I had more inventory than demand. In order for me to profit from the garments, I had to grow the number of people who would buy the shirts so I had to introduce the brand to new customers. My idea was to give away a few promo shirts to new people. I printed about a dozen shirts and went to a party one night with promoting the brand in mind. I thought that I would give away the shirts and people would wear them and conversations about it would be struck. Boy was I wrong LOL!
Most of the shirts were left at the party and people didn’t even wanna take them. At first, it did kinda hurt because it felt like rejection and it was. I did not understand what had happened but later I realized that I was doing something wrong which resulted to that experience. I had to educate myself about branding and people’s psychological tendencies when it comes to purchases or just simply wearing something. I soon learned that the reason the shirts were rejected was because the people did not know what the brand was about. How is a shirt supposed to represent them if they didn’t know what the brand is about?
So I quickly went back to the drawing board and created a plan to overcome this obstacle. I spent the next two years constantly talking to everyone and anyone who would listen about FLAK, what it stood for and how it all began. I went to backyard get togethers and spoke about it, I went to business collectives like vector 90 to share my business story, I went to San Diego for art shows and talked about it, for two years I sounded like a broken record telling the story over and over to everybody I came across and all I wore since then was FLAK United clothing and I still do to this day. I do not wear anything other than FLAK. That move paid off as now, people can recognize the logo and are no longer apprehensive about wearing the brand. Actually, thinking about it now, I really need to do more of that. It’s such a great payoff in the end.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://flakunited.com
- Instagram: @aeior1
- Linkedin: JM Quitalig
- Youtube: FLAKtv
Image Credits
@d3bo
Aaron Peterson
Vincent Vuong
@HVRCRFT
Evanna Simpson
Joseph DeJesus
Stephen Miller