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

Thomas, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?

I have been a commercial photographer for over 35 years and have weathered many disruptions to the status quo. I have always strived to stay up to date on new technologies and actually was one of the first photographers to have a website. I transitioned from film to digital and soon after incorporated video into my workflow. The latest technology to wiggle it’s way into the commercial photography realm is AI.

In a desire to stay on top of this technology I began experimenting with it. My first work produced was a series of victorian era dog portraits in the streets of London. I volunteer on a regular basis for a rescue in Minneapolis, Secondhand Hounds, and thought I could possibly start incorporating AI into some of the rescue portraits. People responded favorably to the images and began asking if they could purchase prints. This was the seed that led me down a six month path to creating my eCommerce store Pigment Plus Canvas.

After several stops and starts including transitions to three different eCommerce platforms Pigment Plus Canvas finally officially launched on Black Friday 2023.

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 am going to focus on my store Pigment Plus Canvas for this question.

There are several factors that led me to believe I had something to bring to the table in this new business. I have been a business owner for over 35 years, I understand image files and the printing process, and I am absolutely committed to quality. The later has been my biggest hurdle. Competition in the online canvas art market is fierce and pricing is extremely competitive. I made a decision at the start that if I could not bring the highest quality art to the consumer I would not move forward.

Obtaining a quality product in the print on demand business has been tough. I considered and tested many print suppliers and unfortunately had to rule out any that would allow me to market prints at a price point competitive to the larger online shops. In light of this I have opted to market based on quality. Although other shops sell at a lower price point it is reflected in the quality of the printing and framing. There is a lot of poor quality art being sold online.

At Pigment Plus Canvas we curate art by seasoned and emerging artists and create stunning canvas prints. What I am most proud of with this business is the quality of the art and the caliber of the artists that we are bringing into the fold.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The quest to start this business has faced nothing but obstacles.

In the beginning I thought my Instagram page paired with a link to Fine Art America would suffice. People were already requesting prints so the path seemed pretty straightforward. However, no one followed through on purchasing. This was my first indication as to how fickle art buyers are. It forced me to really think about the buyer and I realized that art is incredibly personal and although the initial reaction to the dog portraits was positive when it comes down to it who wants a print of a dog that they have no connection to on their wall.

I kept experimenting with AI and moved away from photo-realistic images to art that was based on paintings and classic painters. This led me to a series of works depicting cowboys and horses. They were more abstract and generic and really cool. So, I decided to step up my eCommerce game and started a shop on Etsy. At the time I also discovered that there was a lot of art in the public domain and images were available online. So, I added some classic art to my store including works by Van Gogh. Etsy is a tough marketplace though. You are at the mercy of their algorithms and there were so many shops based in foreign countries undercutting prices and selling unauthorized work. I decided that if my shop failed I did not want it to be due to the fact that I could not beat an algorithm. I considered Squarespace and Shopify. I settled on Squarespace because of the design quality.

I spent months learning the quirks of Squarespace and designing the website. All the while I was testing printers and looking at competitors work. As I finally neared a launch point I made the step to add a storefront to Facebook and link my Instagram page. Facebook promptly disabled my ad account essentially freezing me out. I spent about three weeks trying to resolve matters with Facebook to no avail. Without Facebook your eCommerce site is dead and this was not a good situation. This was resolved my moving the accounts over to my wife’s, and now business partners, Facebook page. It is not an ideal situation but it is working. It is also a constant reminder of how dependent every eCommerce shop is on their advertising platform.

So, we finally launched the site. I hired a Facebook ad expert to help implement the initial launch. Shout out to Jason Gan. I just did not have the bandwidth to learn the ad setup in Facebook. It is incredibly complicated and seems to change every time I log into the Meta Ad manager.

We received “Add to Carts” but no purchases. I sought out more advice. Buyers are fickle. You need social proof on your site or they will not trust it. How do you get social proof(reviews) without sales? How do you make your potential buyers trust you? After dealing with several eCommerce experts it also became apparent that Squarespace lacked some of the eCommerce features I really needed. The move to Shopify was better done now than once the stores inventory grew. I also started to realize that representing established artists would bring some legitimacy to the shop.

As I transitioned over to Shopify I was entering in to licensing agreements with artists reps. This was a whole new learning experience for me but also very exciting. The shop was becoming something much bigger than I had ever thought, The learning curve in designing the Shopify store was much steeper than Squarespace but I was figuring it out and very happy with the site.

We launched anew on Black Friday with much excitement. One of my ads finally popped up on my Instagram feed and when I clicked on the Shop Now button I received an error message. What? Another Facebook glitch. We have not resolved that issue yet but I was able to successfully launch a new ad for Cyber Monday and now it is really about just getting our name out there.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I learned in this journey is that I should have slowed down in the beginning and really researched before ever launching any of the shops. I should have talked to some experts and watched many more You Tube videos.

Launching this store has been a huge learning experience and at this point I am not entirely sure if it will be successful or not. But I am tenacious.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://pigmentpluscanvas.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pigmentpluscanvas/

Image Credits
Annie Warren, Danhui Nai, Farida Zaman, Julie Purinton, Melissa Wang, Thomas Strand