The new Hilary White; Sacred Art shop
... is going to be delayed, so I'm reopening the old one.
Learning everything all at once
Since the end of October I haven’t been doing a lot of drawing or painting work. This is mostly because I’ve been focused on starting my online shop and learning everything I can about creating and running an online art business. For a while now I’ve had a lot of people asking how they could get prints of my work and printed products that are more affordable than original paintings. So I realised the time had come, and took a deep breath and plunged in by starting the “shop” option on my Hilary White; Sacred Art Ko-fi page which is already linked to my PayPal account.
I made a few little tree ornaments and a set of cards, and offered fine art prints of some of my drawings and paintings, as a kind of test, and was surprised and gratified that people responded with such enthusiasm.
I had learned a bit about the process - involving “dropshipping” where a customer orders from you through your website, then you place the order with the printer and they ship the object to your customer - and realised immediately that it had a lot of potential. I started doing more research and learned that there is a whole world of print-on-demand, e-commerce out there that has become one of the world’s largest industries. It’s become possible for anyone at all to start a small business that actually works and run it from anywhere.
So, the research showed me that the best way to get started was with Shopify, a company that is designed specifically for what I want to achieve and that has a system in place that will take care of all the details in one place. I opened a Shopify account and…
Yeah, Shopify is the right thing for me, has all the growth potential and all the important bells and whistles, good customer support and all that, but it’s orders of magnitude more complex to set up. Especially for someone trying to do it at the ABCs level.
And because it’s so accessible, even for complete newbies like me, to start an online shop, there is a veritable galaxy of different platforms, payment, product-making, shipping and marketing options. It very quickly became clear that I had a mountain to climb. And I figured if I were going to do this, I had to really go all in - no half-assery.
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OK, new plan…
This mountain of information to sift through, decisions to make, all about stuff that is almost totally new territory for me; systems and legal requirements that have to be gone through, reading and hours of YT tutorials to absorb. I realised that what I was really doing was giving myself a crash course in a totally new thing: entrepreneurship and small business management.
A big layer of complication is that I am an expat with Italian legal residence and a Canadian bank. I wanted to do it right, so I contacted an Italian/British firm that specialises in helping UK expats start businesses in Italy - and walks you through all the bureaucratic stuff1. I decided that I didn’t want to do work-arounds anymore, or do the thing that a lot of expats do and “fly under the radar”. I realised during all this that I’m finally really committing myself to staying here, starting an actual, for-reals business, and want to see it grow and flourish. And that means doing everything officially.
And that will take time.
So, in the interests of giving myself enough slack to be able to focus on doing it right, I’ve decided just to keep going for now with the little Ko-fi store.
My “just get started” line-up is geared for Christmas shopping, with a nice set of Christmas cards and tree ornaments, some from my own designs, that you can order now. Prints of my drawings, and one painting, are also available. They’re made from high resolution scans printed on museum-quality 100% cotton archival paper. In the next weeks I’ll be adding some more things, and expanding the options for different sizes and paper types on the prints.
This seems like a better way to start, a baby-step at a time, so I can really get a good solid handle on what I’m doing, minimise errors and find the best ways to give genuine value to all you guys, who have stuck with me through thick and thin so far. The only downside is that we’re stuck with PayPal for the time being, with all the many annoyances that entails. But it will allow me to take some time and not feel pressured to get the thing up and running as quickly as possible, and let me portion out the time spent on it so I can get back to painting commissions and doing more of the actual work I do, instead of obsessing over the shop.
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So, here’s my starter line up:
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A series of Christmas-things with the image of the Nativity from a 15th century French manuscript held by the British Library…
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Prints of my drawings too…
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Click here to see more available prints.
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Thanks for all the support and encouragement lately. I have to say, it’s been a big factor in gathering up the courage to try this and take it seriously.
HJMW.
ie: does it all for you, in exchange for money.
I’m really proud of you!