‘Artrepreneur’ program teaches the business of art

By Daphne Jackson

Bitterroot leatherwork artist Olive Parker said she has been working with leather for about 38 years, but didn’t start leatherworking as a business until about five or six years ago.
“I was looking for employment, and even though I have a four-year business degree, I was not able to find a job in the Bitterroot Valley that would pay enough money to pay my mortgage, and bills… and I really was at a loss for what to do,” said Parker. “About that time the Montana Arts Council came along with the first year of the Montana Artrepreneur Program, and they accepted me into the program… and then that gave me the skills that I needed to have this become a fulltime business.”
Now, Parker operates a thriving business selling a wide variety of items. Her products range from inches-long feather-shaped dangle earrings to belts to a 30 and 1/2-foot leather painting commissioned by the Ward Hotel in Jackson Hole. She started selling leather bracelets with handmade beads about a year ago, and she said that she is also planning to start making artists’ journal covers to hold sketchpads and supplies in the future.
“You could focus on one thing, but I think it’s good to be diverse, because… like these bracelets, for example; at some point, they’re not going to be as popular,” she said. “And then, I need to have something else in the works. I need to kind of stay ahead of the market if I can.”
Parker said she and a small group of other local artists met once a month during the yearlong program. During this time, she said they completed weekly assignments designed to help them start their businesses, such as an artist’s mission statement, and lists of goals and objectives.
“We also had to write a business plan, a marketing strategy, build a portfolio, learn how to approach galleries with our works, and also learn how to approach banks, if we needed help with financing our businesses,” Parker said. “We had to learn how to build a booth and show our work at art shows, wherever we decided we were going to show. There was a lot to do in a year, and we all kind of encouraged and helped each other, and the program helped me immensely, and I know many other artists that have benefited from this.”
At the end of the experience, Parker said the Montana Arts Council took a busload of 50 Montana artists to the Western Design Conference in Jackson Hole, to help the artists get experience in showing their portfolios to the desired clientele.
“All of us artists went out through Jackson Hole that weekend, and made as many connections as we could,” Parker said. “And I took my portfolio in with me, into the Western Design Conference, and I showed it to a leather artist there who was making incredible leather clothing. And I said to her, ‘what do you think of this?’ you know, like ‘am I good enough to be here?’ kind of approach, and she loved it.”
Parker said she showed her portfolio to the show’s manager, who encouraged her to apply for the next year’s show. A year later, Parker won the second-highest prize in the show: the People’s Choice Award, which came with a cash prize of $4,000.
“I sold a sapphire piece there, and a very complicated table runner that I made, and came home with $11,000. And I thought, ‘maybe I can support myself with my art,’” she said.
Since then, Parker said she has picked up more store accounts, and now sells her art at more than 80 boutiques and galleries across the US, with 35 or so in Montana.
Despite her large number of store accounts, Parker said she only sells to one store in the Bitterroot Valley.
“Art Focus in Hamilton is carrying my work on consignment, and they request an exclusive,” she said. “So a lot of stores will not want you to sell to any other store in their town. Because if your work is everywhere, it starts to lose its special uniqueness, because people see it everywhere. So that’s why stores and galleries limit the amount of spaces. And I want to limit too.”
Parker said her business has grown so much over the past year that she has had to hire an assistant to help her make the leather bracelets. She said her assistant, Nikki Elvig, has helped lighten the workload involved in operating the business.
“She’s very patient with me. I’m pretty scattered, just trying to keep it all running,” Parker said. “We order in the materials, we build the bracelets, we ship them out. I have some I reserve for inventory, for anyone who might visit the studio and want to buy a bracelet, and to make sure I have some for my shows. My show season starts next month, July, and I will have a show almost every weekend all the way through the middle of September, and then in October we start the Christmas shows. So if we can just keep up with our store orders, and have enough to take to shows, that’ll be the goal with the bracelets. In the meantime, I need to find the extra time to make more earrings, and to make those other projects that I was talking about.”
One of the challenges Parker deals with frequently is keeping track of her inventory, and sourcing her materials, which she gets from different locations all over the world. She said she started out with four designs for her bracelets, but she has now expanded that to about 30 different patterns that use different materials.
“I’ve got to fill these fifteen orders from this show, and all the clasps are on backorder,” she said. “So what I’m going to do is scramble and search for another source. Spain, Italy and Greece are the countries I’ve been buying from right now, but I think there might be a source in the Netherlands. So, bring that stuff into Montana and into our county, make our product, and then market it outside of our county, outside of our state, to get some interstate commerce going, or international even, if you’re buying them from overseas.”
She said one of the things the MAP program taught her was the necessity of pricing things highly enough to pay for operating and inventory expenses. Parker said leatherworkers have often underpriced their products by quite a bit, considering the hours spent on each project.
Parker said one of the reasons she decided to make the bracelets in the first place was because her other items all cost more than $100, and she wanted to make something at a lower price point.
“Here we are living in the Bitterroot Valley,” she said. “Not everyone here has a lot of money, but I’m also selling in other places. So I price my work at a certain point, and then I start selling wholesale to places like Jackson Hole and Park City, and they triple the price, and they can. So then, I have to worry about underselling them, because… when they buy it wholesale, which is significantly less than buying retail, I still have to make enough of a profit to be able to keep investing in my company… There’s so many little costs that go into a business that, in the beginning I didn’t even think about those things, and that’s what the MAP program helped me with.”
For more information about Parker’s art, visit her website: montanaleatherdesigns.com.
For more information about the Montana Artrepreneur program (MAP) visit http://art.mt.gov/artists/artists.asp.