Full Circle
On a quiet launch, a brand of one, and the small shop in Egham where I sold my very first painting in 2012.
For the past few months I have been working on something I have not quite been ready to talk about.
This March, my paintings will be in a proper retail shop for the first time. Egham Artisans, in the town next door to mine, will be carrying original work, prints, and postcards as part of my featured Artist of the Month residency. I have rebranded, restructured, and — somewhere between the day job and the studio — quietly turned what has been a hobby into a properly run small business.
If that sentence feels small to write, I promise it has not felt small to do.
The detail I keep returning to — the one that has surprised me more than any of the work itself — is the full-circle of it. I sold my first ever piece of art in 2012, at the Royal Holloway Students' Union Artisans Fair. That fair was in Egham. The work was modest. The buyer was someone I did not know, paying ten pounds for a small piece on paper, and I do not remember the price more clearly than I remember the feeling. Fourteen years later, the first proper retail shop my work will appear in is also in Egham — a town of ten thousand people that has, somehow, bookended both ends of what I now realise has been a much longer journey than I noticed it being.
A few honest words about what this actually is, since I want to keep it that way.
This is a small business. A one-person business. The CEO, the head of sales, the marketing director, the studio manager, and the person who packages postcards on the kitchen table are all the same person. I am running it alongside my fifteen-year career in commercial work — an industry I genuinely love and am not leaving — because I have come to believe that the commercial skills and the creative ones are more useful together than either one is alone.
What I am most curious to learn from this is the very small-scale version of what I think about all day in my day job: pricing, margins, footfall, seasonality, customer behaviour, stock risk, the unpredictable weather of what people actually want to buy. I have spent years discussing these things in meetings. I am about to feel them, on a scale where every decision matters and every margin is one I have set myself. I do not expect it to be easy. I am very much looking forward to it.
For the record, the CEO (me) has approved a special incentive scheme for the sales team (also me): hit target, win a greenhouse in time for the spring gardening season. I will let you know how it goes.
If you are local to Sunningdale, Egham, or anywhere within reach — I would love you to come into Egham Artisans this March. If you are not, a follow on Instagram or a sign-up to the newsletter would mean a great deal.
Thank you, quietly, for being here for it.
