Episode 35: Mixing Art and Business with Reed Epstein and Brenda Galvan of Smart Art Box

On this episode of the Subscriptions: Scaled podcast, host Nick Fredrick from Rebar Technology is joined by Reed Epstein and Brenda Galvan of Smart Art Box, a subscription-based art box service that encourages artists and art lovers to think outside the box by trying new artistic mediums supplied through their subscription.

Flexible Beginnings

Reed and Brenda started Smart Art Box in 2014 with the plan to be flexible with their work situation from the beginning. Both of them enjoy traveling, and Reed was living in Spain at the time. They wanted to start a business, but continue to be able to travel and work remotely. 

Reed was coming across all kinds of different art in his travels, in different artistic mediums, and grown out of the local cultures where his travels took him. Brenda is an artist, and was volunteering at a non-profit organization that uses art to help children from low-income families deal with trauma they may have experienced. This combination of Reed’s discoveries and Brenda’s background is what led to the foundation of the company. 

By bringing different cultural influences and different artistic mediums together in a subscription business, they still had the flexibility to travel while they worked, finding new ideas for art boxes wherever their travels took them. 

Researching Trends

As an artist herself, Brenda keeps an eye out for new and emerging trends in the art world to inform her choices on what to include in the boxes. For example, lately artists have been moving away from acrylic paints being brushed on a canvas in the traditional technique, and more artists are thinning the paint out and pouring it on the canvas to get new and exciting results. 

By keeping her eye on the art world, attending trade shows, and having conversations with her suppliers, Brenda can stay on top of what is trending, which leads to keeping their subscribers engaged and enthused. One month their customers may paint on glass, and the next month they might try something completely different, like a body art project. This way they help their customers explore outside of their niche and grow as an artist. 

Additionally, the company offers follow-up supplies on their website for any customers who may become interested in a new medium or technique. They keep inventory of each art box they send out for those customers who want to create another project. After the life of each box has played out, usually around six months, those supplies are donated to charity. 

Inventory and Fulfillment

Smart Art Box has been a subscription service from the beginning. When they started out, they used fulfillment services to allow them to maintain the flexibility of traveling and working remotely that they were looking for. As they grew, they decided to bring fulfillment in-house. This coincided with bringing their first employees on board and renting their first warehouse space. 

Doing their own fulfillment allows them greater flexibility with their processes, and speeds up overall fulfillment time. They found that fulfillment centers were too rigid in the timelines that had to be followed, and by bringing those processes in-house in 2019, they could do quality checks and get boxes shipped out very quickly. 

Reed says that moving fulfillment in-house really paid off when the pandemic hit. If the pandemic hit a third party warehouse and they lost all their workers, Reed and Brenda would have no control over the situation. However, since they had made the move the year previous, they were able to keep things running by taking care of it themselves. In fact, they’ve moved to bigger warehouses twice due to continued growth.

Identifying A Target Market

One surprise Reed and Brenda came across was finding out who was going to be their target market. Their assumption from the beginning was that their top priority customers would be seasoned, established artists, followed by artsy people and lastly, hobbyists. 

It turns out that the opposite was true, and their biggest customer base is the hobbyists who don’t already have a lifetime’s worth of art supplies. This group appreciates the fact that they get a comprehensive, cohesive box of supplies to create specific projects. Many of the artsy people such as art bloggers were finding that Smart Art Box was sending them many supplies they already owned. 

Finding The Right Tools

Reed has a background as a scalability and efficiency consultant, and he uses that experience to constantly monitor programs and software services that are available to help him streamline the company’s processes. One piece of advice he offers to others in the subscription world is to not get too attached to one particular brand or model of software. And he says to be wary of companies that claim they can do it all. 

As he says, most software is designed to do one thing really well, and the other features that are added on don’t work nearly as well. So he says to always be monitoring the marketplace and don’t be afraid to make changes if better solutions for things like payment processing, inventory management, or customer management become available. 

Even he can fall into the trap of not keeping up with things. For example, he took his eye off of the CRM software market for a couple of years. “It had been a year or two since I last looked into it. So now all of a sudden, there's a whole new type of software out there,” he says. “Without constantly doing research you're just going to fall behind. And the software that you use a lot of the time, it could start falling behind, maybe the data that you're having isn't so accurate and can just really affect your company overall.”

Similarly, Reed says don’t be afraid to renegotiate terms with your vendors to get a better rate and save the company money. He gives an example of getting new terms on merchant services. His volume increased and he renegotiated with his existing vendor by finding a new vendor that wanted to steal him by offering a better rate. “It's just like negotiating for a car,” he says. “You just negotiate with a bunch of different car dealers and then pit them against each other.”

The last bit of efficiency advice Reed gives is not to always go for the cheapest software or service available. Sometimes the old adage “you get what you pay for” applies, and when you buy inferior products or services, you can spend a lot of your own time on troubleshooting software and figuring out ways to get broken software to work. This is time that would be much better spent on running other aspects of your business.

—

Ready to get started with Rebar?

Head to rebartechnology.com or email info@rebartechnology.com to schedule a call today.