We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Keli Hogsett. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Keli below.

Keli, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

The inspiration for CoCollect was a slow burn as I experienced the same problem over many moves as I followed my career as an advertising Creative Director and my family from Austin, to SF, to Denver, and back to Austin. I know, I am in a better mood if the space I live in is well-designed, inspiring and interesting to me. So with each new place we moved into, I would want to quickly feel settled and take careful consideration on the interior design of our space. From rental houses we knew we’d only be in for a year or two, to remodels of homes we owned, and ultimately winding up in our now family home in Deep Eddy — getting art on the walls always stopped us in our tracks and was a tough detail to complete the way I envisioned.

Art is one of the only things that is still purchased with the intention of keeping forever. It’s one of those things you want to connect with and love so much that you’re excited to stare at it for the rest of your life. However, building that kind of meaningful collection is not only overwhelming if you don’t know where to start, but it takes time, education and patience. And when you’ve both got full-time jobs and 3 kids under 4 in the middle of a pandemic, time and patience are a distant dream.

My desire was to fill our home with meaningful original art in a relatively quick timeframe. My problem was my lack of time and education for us to feel confident in making a lifetime purchase. The result was living with a bunch of blank walls we would fill “one day.”

With Austin growing as quickly as it is, I found myself going into other people’s new homes and being acutely aware that they had the same blank ‘one day’ walls as we did even though they’d moved in 2 years prior, or they had spent a lot of money on meaningless decor prints from a big box retailer to fill the space for now. It just felt like a missed opportunity to support an artist by purchasing their work, but I also understood the difficulty of deciding on ‘the one’ and the time commitment that actually entailed.

While Austin’s arts infrastructure and collector base is still catching up to its big-city status, this isn’t just an Austin problem. The fact that building a meaningful collection takes time, education and commitment directly conflicts with most consumers have-it-now purchasing mentality.

I started considering a way that we could get people to fill those blank walls as quickly and conveniently as people wanted to, but with original art that supported our actual arts community.

After a few Google searches including “loan artwork from museums” and “exhibit artwork in your home” with nothing coming back, the idea for CoCollect caught fire in my thoughts, and I haven’t been able to put it out.

Keli, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I grew up creating artwork, and I even started at UT Austin as a studio art major in painting. While I loved it, I also realized that I wanted to keep painting as my hobby and not my job. So I went on a hunt for something that was a little more business oriented. I switched my major to art history and wanted to be a curator, then realized how long I would be in school for. Then I found advertising, which, for me, was the perfect mix of art and business.

As a Creative Director in advertising, I had the opportunity to work on so many different types of brands, from airlines to software to luxury cars to fried chicken — each one coming to us to help them figure out a new way to tell their story. The most rewarding jobs for me were typically the brands that not only trusted us to direct what they were saying, but also allowed us to change what they were doing. I was always interested in the bigger business picture, and it was often that we were pitching and building different products and services in an entrepreneurial spirit.

I loved the fast paced and competitive environment advertising provided, and while challenging to my work-life balance, is often where I experience the most growth and feel most engaged. I had the idea for CoCollect in 2019. I remember ideating on it with my husband over an anniversary dinner at Perla’s we shared in September of 2019. But we were pregnant with our third boy due in March of 2020, and had no idea the magnitude of what else was going to happen come March 2020. The abrupt change of pace and mindset shift that the pandemic brought provided me just enough space to realize that I did, one day, want to do something more entrepreneurial and also gave me time to develop the idea a little further. Reluctant to leave a company and co-workers I loved behind, I went back to advertising for over a year after maternity leave, and I shifted to CoCollect full-time in October of 2021.

On an average week outside of work you can find me mostly being a mom to our three boys (2, 4 and 6). Whether it’s setting booby traps around the house, playing in the backyard, going to soccer games and birthday parties, they sure keep me busy. Otherwise, you can find me running with friends around the Town Lake trail before sunrise, on weekly date nights with my husband in an effort to keep up with Austin’s food scene, or serve on the board of Art From the Streets, a non-profit that provides studio space to homeless artists and helps them sell their work throughout the year.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

Education is a big part of how we help our members connect with art. But we know our members struggle to find the time to learn, so we reinvisioned how to educate them about their collection. Instead of asking them to spend a large chunk of time reading up front, we send our members a text every other week with a short and interesting bit of information about their collection. Not only is it beneficial to our members, but it’s a great way to stay in communication with them throughout their membership term.

We’re also fostering community by hosting member events that they’re welcome to bring friends to. This is a great way for our members to learn, but also meet other members.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Our membership fits into a high-touch luxury category. Which doesn’t exactly follow the same marketing strategy as say, a SaaS software. While we’re still working on our best customer growth strategy, we’ve found that our current members are our best advocates and so far, every member has sold us at least one more member or lead. We’re shifting our marketing efforts to make sure we do a phenomenal job with our current members that they can’t help but talk about it to their guests.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cocollect.art
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cocollect.art/
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/people/CoCollect
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cocollectart

Image Credits
Image with red carpet and white couch: Artist: Michael Von Helms. Image with painting with Cowboy Hat: Artist: Cruz Ortiz Image with living room with chess set and yellow painting: Artist: King Nobuyoshi Godwin Image with open window and white bed: Artist: Ellsworth Kelly.