We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mia Oatley a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Mia, appreciate you joining us today. Do you think folks should manage their own social media or hire a professional? What do you do?

I manage my own social media, and it’s always been a really important part of my business especially instagram. While social media, trends etc have changed over the years, Using social media to build a community, give people an insight into who you are and what you stand for, and what makes your business different hasn’t changed.

It’s the ideal space to share new idea’s and receive instant feedback and really understand your client’s and followers and what would motivate them to purchase from your business.

If I had any insights at all it would be that as a business owner I try my best to achieve good organic reach with engaging content, but don’t rely on it. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope for a viral reel every time so advertising is a must!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I began my journey as a professional artist and have been a practising professional artist for 22 years. During the covid years a lot of artist’s began selling small pieces direct onto their instagram feeds, and I started imaging what a platform for the very best of this work may look like. I wanted to do something very niche and that would be a lot easier for client’s to navigate than a huge site with thousands of offerings of art.

We’ve worked with 200 of Australia’s top emerging and established artist’s who regularly show their work in prestigious galleries and they all find us an affordable alternative as we charge less commission, pay for their freight costs and release their work back to them in general after one month’s time if not sold. Our client’s are worldwide and we work with a number of excellent freight services to deliver their work in a speedy and safe way.

I’m most proud of the feedback that we’ve received from our client’s and artist’s.
As a professional artist myself I wanted a business that really looked after the artist’s as much as the client’s and I feel that we’ve achieved that. Petite Collection is a business that’s gone from strength to strength in the last 2 years and we’re all really excited for the future!

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I began Petite with almost nothing, basically just a website that my site developer created for me, I also had a lovely friend who is a graphic designer who helped with the admin so had a little bit of money to have these two really experienced people on my team but that was it. I had to make Petite generate income immediately otherwise it would have died. Lucky that’s what happened!

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I began Petite Collection just at the end of Covid and the people were still in a spending frenzy, as this started to wear off and people tightened up I had to think of how to create something new and different at Petite to get people excited so we’ve created the MINI SOLO’S with our most popular artist’s and these have been selling out so far.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.petitecollection.com.au
• Instagram: @petite_collection_au
• Facebook: petite collection

Image Credits
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