We were lucky to catch up with Smock & Roll recently and have shared our conversation below.
Smock & Roll, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
We both have an entrepreneurial spirit and what it’s boiled down to is having a vision, doing what you enjoy, and consistency. So many times, when we’ve gone through lulls in business or worked on projects we weren’t super excited about, our consistency paid off, as well as having each other to make any labor worth it. When you’re working with a partner you not only trust, but enjoy, work can be like play. We sit down together every six months to vision board where we want to be and very specific goals. We credit a lot of our successes to having very specific goals and benchmarks to aspire to.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We “accidentally” got into professional muraling because we just enjoyed the activity! We each had goals to paint on a larger scale but didn’t mean to pursue it as a full-time gig. But, between word of mouth and a professional approach, it turned into a full-time business in under three years. We enjoy expressing brand identities and mission statements in colorful, creative ways. We want to design a mural that tells the story of our client and promotes conversations and imagination.
We have formed close, consistent relationships with our clients because of our balance of playfulness and professionalism. Because design is an empathy driven career, understanding our client’s goals is our number one priority.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
We don’t have the biggest social media following, but we do have really wonderful supporters, and if we were to wager a guess, we’d say a lot of our business does come from our Instagram traffic. We are both silly, grungy, artsy girls who don’t take ourselves too seriously. Though we handle every aspect of the business professionally, when we’re at a wall to paint we are there to also enjoy ourselves. After a particularly long day of painting, your body can get pretty sore and you can get kind of loopy (especially if its a hot summer day!) We like to end these particularly long days by filming ourselves doing lazy dance movements that require as little energy as possible–we’ve named this micro-dancing. These videos tend to be some of our followers favorites! We also have leaned into just making videos out of the things we discuss while painting…muraling is a LONG day and we are essentially spending 5+ hours standing side by side, so hot topics, inside jokes, and hot takes become fodder for instagram reels. We love to laugh at ourselves and get a reaction from the crowd. We often get contacted from potential clients who point out that they feel they’d just enjoy working with us, and we’re glad that that shines through on our media pages.
How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?
Building a solid rapport during initial contact is super important. Right off the bat we aim to understand our client and their design needs. We have a lot of creative and professional integrity, and that is clear from our website, verbiage, and communication. We have transparency on pricing as well as policies so clients know what to expect from start to finish on any given project. And the design we draw is the exact design you get on your wall, no surprises.
How we keep in touch varies depending on client. We sometimes send follow ups to see how the clients are enjoying their piece, or tag them on instagram if its a particularly photogenic or pose-worthy mural. We’ve created comedic souvenir tees in the past, and this year plan to send out Christmas cards that reflect our company’s personality.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.smockandroll.com
- Instagram: @SmockandRoll
Image Credits
Photos provided by: Smock and Roll, Mike Swim, Andy Bourne, Alyssa Powers