Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kilani Glenn & Rachel White. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Kilani & Rachel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?

The biggest challenges to profitability as self-employed stained glass artists would be increasing supply costs, and justifying an ambitious hourly wage for a “slow” artform in a market of artists who are willing to pay themselves less.

Stained glass craft has experienced a massive resurgence in popularity over the past several years (a wave that we have been grateful to ride), but with that has come a very obvious inability for the stained glass supply industry to keep up with demands on certain specialty materials. That has raised prices on some essential supplies up to 250% since we started our practice 3 years ago. While many industries have felt similar supply chain strain since 2020, the bottom line impact on artists is that if we raise the price on our products as often as the supply costs raise, it doesn’t translate well to our customers. It hurts sales. So then we begin the balancing act of maintaining profitability on products that we make regularly without turning people off.

Setting an hourly wage for ourselves as self-employed artists is a similar challenge. As our skillsets and expertise grow, we deserve hourly raises just like any other job. However, as best friends and business partners we don’t exactly sit each other down for an annual performance review and decide what each other’s new pay rate looks like. Instead we gamble on ourselves by setting a price that reflects our new desired wage and wait for the market to tell us if we’re worth it or not (i.e. does the art sell or not). It’s a constant leap of faith and the market doesn’t always validate the time and energy that goes into a piece of artwork. But when it does, it’s a huge win.

When you combine price increases due to supply costs and paying ourselves fairly over time, we have to put in the work to make sure customers see the added value. Whether it’s through visible improvements in our skills or using social media to display how intricate and time consuming our processes really are. We see a lot of our peers in stained glass experiencing similar pricing and profitability struggles, who lean towards undervaluing their hourly rate in order to make sales anyways. Frankly, we have all been there. But we believe that reflecting our actual value in the price of our artwork will help create a culture of more independent artists getting paid not just fairly, but getting paid well.

Kilani & Rachel, 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?

Flux & Flow Glass is a woman owned and operated small business, run by two best friends who design and make all our artwork by hand. We create one-of-a-kind stained glass artwork that is inspired by nature, geometry, color, and midcentury design. Based in Sacramento and Nevada City, California, we work out of two separate spaces, each making our own designs, but come together to form a single vision and platform to support each other’s creativity.

We took a one-day stained glass workshop in 2019 that sparked an artistic fire in both of us, then found ourselves with plenty of downtime in 2020 to start practicing the craft regularly. After casually starting a shared Instagram account for our artwork, we were met with a more positive response than we ever imagined. Our day jobs had dried up in the pandemic and stained glass suddenly became a small source of extra income, so we leaned in. Starting primarily with custom orders to ensure every piece we made would be purchased/paid for, eventually becoming more confident releasing designs for general sale, and scaling from small sales on Instagram to releasing larger collections in our own web shop by November 2021.

We’re proud of being best friends in business together. People often miss that Flux & Flow Glass is made up of two artists, but we like to think it’s because our 20+ years of friendship has organically created the cohesive aesthetic that has become our brand. While the similarities of our styles complement each other, we feel that our differences allow us to reach a broader audience than we could have individually. We motivate each other to grow and be innovative by constantly bouncing ideas off each other, combining concepts, or remixing each other’s ideas, and we are so grateful for the role our friendship plays in our creative process.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

We met on the playground in 1999 and have been getting our hands dirty together ever since. In elementary school we wanted to start our own fashion design company, crafting our kid-brain version of a business plan with Crayola markers at recess. Flash forward 20 years worth of staying up late making art together, Flux & Flow Glass was the inevitable outcome of many dreams and schemes.

We’ve been through everything together. Childhood, adolescence, loss, birth, so why not the art business too? People say not to be in business with your friends, but we have a solid foundation and separate revenue streams in place to protect ourselves and allow each other freedom within the partnership. It’s an invaluable support system that we treasure deeply.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

Our business success has been largely (if not entirely) due to Instagram, where we often see artists and makers like ourselves celebrate milestone follower counts with giveaways or raffles aimed at showing gratitude to followers, and maybe even picking up some new ones. When we hit 20k followers in the summer of 2022 we wanted to similarly show our gratitude, but in a way that would use our 20k platform to benefit more people than a single raffle/giveaway winner. So many of our fellow artists had spread the word about us and helped build our business over the past 2 years. We asked ourselves, how can we adequately thank the creative community that has allowed us to pursue our dream of being full time artists?

So we created a contest called “Flux Flow Your Style” where we released a free stained glass design with an open call to artists all over the world to recreate that design in ANY art medium, and promised to share any artwork that was submitted to us in our feed. Equal exposure for any artist who wants to participate. After a few weeks of submissions, we selected our favorite 10 submissions, then put it back to our followers for a vote to select 2 grand prize winners (who won artwork and art supplies.)

The first year, over 60 artworks were submitted from all over the world. Some from our local community and others all the way from countries like the Netherlands and New Zealand. It’s truly a thrill seeing how different creative minds interpret the same concept, which highlights each artists’ uniqueness and helps connect them to an audience that appreciates their individual style.

After such a positive response last year, we were compelled to host Flux Flow Your Style again in 2023 and received over 100 submissions in an even broader range of styles and mediums. Along with a big stained glass turnout each year, we have seen embroidery artists, ceramicists, painters, poets, photographers, mixed media, and even tattoo artists participate! We added a charity component this year as well, donating the proceeds from an original piece of our artwork and encouraging participants to do the same with their contest entries.

“Flux Flow Your Style” is a not a money maker for us. Period. We end up putting considerable time, effort and materials into it as a matter of fact. But we think building creative community and fostering spaces for people’s artwork to feel seen is important. Artistic non-exclusivity is important. We’re just glad that we can use our platform to uplift and “market” the creativity of others.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fluxflowglass.com/
• Instagram: @flux.flow.glass

Image Credits
Copyright Flux & Flow Glass