Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lanae Knight. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Lanae, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

The idea for my business was a long time in the making. I have always wanted to find a way to sell my artwork, but didn’t know how to go about it. When I was younger, my family was not supportive so it didn’t become something I pursued. A few years ago I was getting back into art more regularly for fun and found a new style. My husband kept showing off the art pieces I made for our new home and kept talking about how others would love them. This got me looking into things again and gave me the courage to put myself out there.

I started looking into Etsy and realized it wasn’t all that difficult to set up a shop and was something I could financially support. Between family and my day job, I decided it wasn’t practical to sell original paintings so I looked into how to create prints. I fell upon selling digital files of my artwork that the buyer could print and frame themselves. This is where I created an Instagram account specific towards my art and shop to use for marketing and to get fans. I continued to look for ways I could provide prints and physical products to my customers and found Print on Demand. This opened up so many doors as I didn’t need to keep any inventory on hand and could really provide a variety of products featuring my art such as mugs, mouse pads, canvas prints, tote bags, socks, etc. After a few more months, I really got into looking at what else I could do. Now, I do have some stock in house, such as stickers and cards that I either order in bulk or print in house to order in addition to my digital options or print on demand products.

All this allows me time to create without some looming deadline to get a piece out to the customer. There’s a lot less pressure this way as I don’t have to worry about most of my stock or shipping out packages timely, especially since I’m just one person running the whole show. New stuff is released as I finish new products, but my old stuff is always around..

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a wife, mom, accountant by day, and artist by night/weekend. I’m a primarily self taught artist having only taken 3 years of art classes in high school. I learned lots of different styles and loved doing abstracts with stippling effects in colored pencils or graphite. I also enjoyed painting with acrylics creating vibrant colored scenes featuring animals or fan art. In the last couple of years, I discovered the chibi drawing style and it just felt right. After testing out some sketches, I created my first few paintings using acrylic on wood canvases and they turned out better than I could have expected. The paintings came out fun, cute, playful and are an absolute joy to look at.

With my business I want to spread joy and happiness with the world. When I first found my style, my husband constantly shared how much happier he was seeing my pieces first thing in the morning. He suffers from PTSD, severe depression, and severe anxiety and to be able to lessen that pain and suffering with my art is the best feeling in the world. I want to provide the same feelings he has to others that may also suffer from similar mental health issues, are just going through a rough time, or even just enjoy cute art.

My business is selling my illustrations on a variety of fun products that can used as home decor or sticker decals to functional notebooks, mousepads, and can holders. I utilize the use of a print on demand company, self producing, and bulk orders from a printing company to create my products. Print on demand allows me to offer a larger variety of products without a large up front cost or inventory that may not move. This allows me to test out designs and see what people like without a huge loss if something flops. I bulk orders smaller items like stickers, magnets, pins, and keychains as print on demand doesn’t provide cost effective options to be competitive. I self produce items such as greeting cards and bookmarks as they are simple enough to print to order and ship out and again print on demand doesn’t provide cost effective options. For all my products, I constantly look for an affordable cost to produce that also allows me to price my items competitively and desirable for my customers.

I also offer customized or commissioned illustrations. I love helping bring others ideas to reality and pleasing my customers. So far, I’ve created 2 illustrations that my customer plans to use to embroider kids clothing and this customer has asked about other ideas as well. With this service, I hope to build a relationship with my customers so that we can continue to work together. Transparency, flexibility, and timeliness are super important to me, so I make sure to keep in constant communication and providing drafts to be sure you get what you are wanting.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Navigating and learning how to advertise on social media was a huge struggle starting out. For me, there was a huge learning curve about what kind of posts to make, how often, tags to include, etc. I’m still constantly learning and improving my presence on different social media platforms. I mostly focus on Instagram, but am working on branching out to others such as a Facebook Group, Threads and Pinterest.

For instagram – I tend to focus on my actual artwork and the creation process versus my actual products. Going into this, I really just wanted to showcase my art and hoped that if you loved that enough, you’d want to purchase something with those illustrations on it. My instagram profile is full of other artists and crafters and we share and promote each other’s work. I’ve also participated in a couple of art collabs which then gets me in front of more audiences.

For Threads – I tend to just have it linked to my Instagram account so you see the same posts. However, here you can find lots of posts asking to share your art or share your small business links. I definitely do both, again hoping that if you like my art enough to follow me that you will also appreciate my merchandise and be more likely to buy from me. Sharing your links and profiles this way has definitely been a HUGE help in getting more followers and more store visits and traffic which has led to new sales. I’ve gotten a lot of positive results by utilizing Threads with Instagram.

For my Facebook Group – again I have it linked to my Instagram account so posts/reels/stories are shared across both platforms. This just makes it easier to manage my social media presence being a one person small business shop, I’ve only got so much time to get everything done. My facebook group led to my first custom illustration booking. I tend to get more inquiries about customs and commissions through Facebook than any other platform. With Facebook’s marketplace, this platform is definitely geared more towards selling products than focusing on sharing art (at least in my experience).

For Pinterest – I’m honestly still working on this and decided to recently revamp everything (so I’m basically starting over). I plan to use this platform to focus on what products I have available. Hopefully when people are creating their boards, I’ll get those pins that will eventually lead to sales. This platform is definitely more of a struggle for me to navigate as it’s different than what I do on the other platforms.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

I started out by opening my shop on Etsy, which is still currently my main shop. However, just this year I launched my own website!!!

Etsy is definitely a great platform to get started on as they help with getting people to visit your store without external marketing. Before starting an Etsy shop, I definitely recommend doing thorough research into SEO (search engine optimization) and signing up for sites such as ERank to help with listing titles, descriptions, tags, etc. You can also use sites like ERank to do market and trend research. I did not do these things early on, so I really struggled to get seen at first. Now that I understand these things, I’m getting more views, more favorites, and more sales. With Etsy, you do have to pay them fees to use their platform, there is an initial listing fee when you post a new product or renew it then there are fees for each sale. Many on social media complain a ton about these fees, but since I also work in accounting for a retail business, I know these fees are definitely reasonable for all that you get by using their platform.

With the launch of my new website, I actually use SquareUp as it links with my Etsy account so that they share inventory and listings. This allowed me to work on the site itself during setup without having to redo all my product listings, which was a huge time saver. I am finding it more difficult to drive traffic to y website than Etsy, but I hope with time this will change. My biggest difference between my Etsy shop and my website is that my website has a gallery where I show off all my illustrations, I have a page specific to getting a quote for custom illustrations, a more descriptive “About Me” section, and links to my different social channels.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.blackswancreationsus.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackswan.creations?igsh=NWg0czRhYXZqcHp6&utm_source=qr
• Other: https://blackswancreationsus.etsy.com/
  https://pin.it/3COErXyIE