- An artist herself, Alix Greenberg begun a enterprise to assistance other artists promote their perform.
- ArtSugar is an art gallery and shop the place millennials can uncover new, up-and-coming artists.
- Greenberg shared the pitch deck that served her elevate $500,000 in seed funding.
- See much more tales on Insider’s small business webpage.
“Do you want to be a freelancer or do you want to be an entrepreneur?”
This was the question a good friend questioned Alix Greenberg that transformed the trajectory of her small business from a scrappy Instagram account where by she marketed her drawings, into an on the net gallery and ecommerce web site geared towards millennials, identified as ArtSugar.
Just after doing work in fine art galleries and museums for seven a long time, the Christie’s MA and Cornell BFA graduate obtained back again into portraiture on a whim. Greenberg started out “Portraits for Fantastic” where by she donated to charities for each individual portrait she sold.
“No one had at any time paid me for my artwork before, so this was a novel form of plan to me,” she informed Insider.
But when confronted with the foreseeable future of her job, she determined she’d rather be a startup founder serving to other artists make income than being an artist herself. So she recruited some artists to provide on her web-site, continued to husband or wife with charities, and designed her business although performing a 9-to-5. After two many years, she hired a buddy to support her rebrand and took the enterprise comprehensive-time.
Today, her company’s yearly revenue has enhanced 80% considering the fact that last March, in aspect mainly because extra folks acquired artwork on the web for the duration of the pandemic. Online artwork product sales in 2020 doubled from 2019, marking the very first time the ecommerce share of an believed $50 billion market place exceeded that of retail, in accordance to a report by expense banking company UBS.
ArtSugar
Final month, Greenberg secured $500,000 in seed funding as a result of Curate Funds, a organization that focuses its investments on female-owned businesses.
Curate’s founder, Carrie Colbert, to start with learned ArtSugar on Instagram as a collector herself, ahead of achieving out to Greenberg about investing. Their marriage grew around time with regular and weekly test-ins right until Greenberg felt Colbert was the appropriate individual to enable her scale her corporation to the subsequent degree.
“A great deal of VCs would inquire me about my exit system and it was incredibly hard for me to describe what I wanted to do with it,” Greenberg claimed. “But Carrie was not so centered on that. She just realized if we grew some thing astounding collectively, the exit would just show up.”
Look at out the pitch deck Greenberg despatched to traders past year to master how she landed her to start with round of funding.