One Hundred Conversations
On a challenge I have set myself, the hundred business cards in my bag, and the first conversation — which turned out to be easier than I had any right to expect.
For most of my adult life, when someone asked what I did, I said "I work in sales." It was an honest answer, and it ended the conversation politely, and it never quite mentioned the thing I had been doing for years on weekends and evenings.
I wrote, in an earlier post, about the afternoon at the British Art Fair when I introduced myself as an artist for the first time. What I did not write — because it had not yet happened — was what came after.
What came after was the slightly uncomfortable recognition that one sentence, said once at a contemporary art fair, however meaningful to me at the time, does not change very much in the world. If I wanted to be an artist out in the world — in shops, on walls, in people's lives — I was going to have to have a lot more conversations. Not just the one. Many of them.
So I have set myself a challenge. One hundred conversations with local shops, galleries, cafés, garden centres, and creative spaces around Sunningdale and the surrounding villages about stocking my work.
To seal it, I have ordered one hundred business cards. One for every conversation I plan to have. I designed them in Canva over a long Saturday afternoon — DM Sans for my name, Cormorant Garamond for the line beneath, the colour palette pulled directly from my website so that the card and the work feel like one object. They arrived in a tidy stack last week. They are in my bag now.
The maths of it has been clarifying in a way I did not expect. Even at a very modest hit-rate — one in ten, say — a hundred conversations becomes ten retailers carrying my work. At one in twenty, it is still five. At zero in a hundred, I will have learned something it might otherwise have taken me years of guessing to learn: that what I am making is not yet right for the shops I had pictured it in, and I should rethink either the work or the audience.
You miss one hundred percent of the shots you do not take.
The first conversation was easier than it had any right to be. I walked into Egham Artisans — a creative space in the next town over from mine — already braced for a polite no. What I got instead was warmth. Two members of their team showed me around, asked about my work, looked at images on my phone, and started asking about timings. By the time I left, I had been booked as their featured Artist of the Month for March 2026. One conversation in. Ninety-nine to go.
There is a particular kind of recalibration that happens when the first attempt at a new thing goes far better than you expected it to. The voice in your head that has been quietly telling you the whole plan is foolish — the one that has been recommending, very reasonably, that you remain in the comfortable middle of your competence — goes briefly quiet. You realise the loudest objection you had been carrying was not, as it turned out, the world's. It was your own.
The next conversations on my list are quite specific. I would love to combine my passion for gardening with my work, so the names at the top of the list are local garden centres and gardening publications — Longacres, Hillier, Lavershot Barns, Oak Tree, Squire's, and the magazine I have been reading for as long as I have had a garden, Gardeners' World. I can already picture my floral postcards on those shelves. Whether they want them yet is, of course, their call.
But you do not get if you do not ask.
If you have a local shop, a market, a café with a wall, a small gallery — anywhere you think my work might belong — I would love a name. Drop it in the comments or send me a message. I have ninety-nine cards left and a year ahead of me.
Wish me luck.
