It’s been about three weeks since I last posted anything to my blog, but I wouldn’t have changed those last three weeks for anything. Opportunities, vacations and just tons of awesome client work have been eating away at my time. I know it’s a terrible excuse but it’s a valid one. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been presented with some incredible opportunities. I helped one client launch a highly successful podcast series that reached number one on the Canadian iTunes charts within a day. The people that they’ve gotten for the podcast so far have been incredible and have amazing insights and definitely worth listening to as they are all leading experts in their fields.
I’ve also had the opportunity to do some publication writing. This is always mind blowing to me and scary. Sure I write on my blog but those posts are usually just rants about what I’m currently learning, irritated with, or something interesting in the design world. Then when you’re asked to write for a publication, your arguments need to be focused and smart. I’m always terrified I won’t be able to deliver. By the way, if you haven’t yet pick up the latest issue of Web Designer Magazine (Issue #222), you’ll find me hanging out in the portfolio section.
Beyond that I started to formalize an idea, a side project if you will. It’s a project I’ve come back to time and time again. It’s a side business called Arrtistic Themes. I initially launched it in early 2008, but with little success. The failure here was a combination of a lack of skills, focus and experience. I was still relatively new to coding themes and struggled with creating them from scratch plus I looked at companies like Obox and Woothemes who were dominating the market at the time and in fact, still are and thought “I’m never going to be as good as them, especially in the WordPress world”. This self defeat lead me to put Arrtistic on the back burner for years. Every now and then, I’ve tried different things with Arrtistic. At one point, I thought about using the domain to curate and sell art through it and build a platform around it with QR codes. As you can imagine that never panned out. The problem there was I didn’t know enough about fine art or how to build a platform that would work for that sort of thing. It’s now 2013. That’s right 2013 so a year ago. I was talking with the team behind Shopify. They were showing me the ins and outs of what their platform could do and got me re-energized by possibilities and growth in ecommerce. I wanted to me a part of it. As a quick side note, the Shopify team is full of the coolest, nicest and smartest people I’ve ever met. If you have the opportunity to hang out with them, I highly recommend you do.
While talking with the team, one thing became clear to me, this was space that was being under utilized and something that I could own. They had this amazing platform but still not a huge amount of quality, user-focused themes for their store. At first, I didn’t do anything about it. However, this idea kept nagging me in the back of my mind. Then three weeks ago, I couldn’t contain it anymore. At that point I was starting to get a lot of calls from Brick and Mortar retailers who were ready to take themselves online with ecommerce stores. However, they didn’t really have any sort of budget that could accommodate their needs and they were all asking for relatively the same things. I hate to turn people away just because of budget but sometimes you have to. However, before I did this I started to do a little research into their needs, objectives and considered success. I realized during this process that I could still deliver on those goals as a lot of the answers were along the same lines. In fact, the answers screamed user-centered themes to me. I looked back at my domains (I usually hold on to a few…you just never know) and thought “Why can’t Arrtistic themes answer this need?”. So over the last three weeks I’ve been creating a series of themes that will be available to retailers needing high quality, user-focused, flexible ecommerce solutions.
The beauty of all this is that ecommerce isn’t something that is new to me. Several of my clients over the years have asked for ecommerce implementations. I’ve worked with many of the available platforms, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and of course Shopify. In fact, over the past two years Shopify has been my go-to for answering ecommerce problems. I’ve spent countless hours analyzing analytics, conducting user research and A/B testing different approaches to making these ecommerce stores convert with their users so working on themes for Shopify isn’t something new to me, but definitely a passion.
Working on this side opportunity has given me a boost in my productivity and creativity. It’s been a wonderful change of pace. I’ve been warned that running a theme company is all about the customer service. It’s a good thing I like to help people. One thing that I’ve realized is that I can’t do it alone. The Shopify platform and the Liquid framework is extremely powerful and at this point, I’m only scratching the surface so readers if any of you are as excited about the future of ecommerce as I am, I would love to talk. Arrtistic’s success or failure should never be limited by my skill set. Even if Arrtistic does fail in it’s ability, it won’t stop the need or my desire to build themes to help retail companies grow their businesses online. The need for quality ecommerce stores are only going to become more intense over the years and I’m going to be a part of it.
Recently, I watched Jared Spool’s talk at AEA about it being a great time to be a designer, but I think it goes beyond that and I’m willing to say that it’s a great time to be a creative thinker. I don’t think you have to be just a designer to change the world but you do need to have creative confidence. This is how I feel about the opportunities with online retail. I believe that we’ve tapped into some interesting and better ways to accept payments and deliver goods but I think we can do even better.
Staying open minded to new opportunities has been a blessing which sometimes feels like a curse. Keir Whitaker gives some great examples of how he and Elliot Jay Stocks built a side business that pays in his talk “A Pragmatists Guide to Making your Side Projects Pay”. His takeaways and my own curiosity have allowed me to continue to learn and evolve as a designer which in turn has increased the services that I can offer to my clients but it’s also made it difficult to balance everything that life has thrown my way at the same time. Would I change anything about that? Nope. Definitely not. It’s a level of stress I enjoy and use to motivate myself during the rough times. Having great organization skills has helped keep it all from being too overwhelming. I’m looking forward to pushing Arrtistic forward and delivering on a better ecommerce experience for online retailers.
What side projects do you work on that could become businesses? Want to chat about joining Arrtistic? Leave a comment below.
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