Now it’s around March 2023. I’ve finished the map of Tallon IV and there is interest in printed versions of this artwork. I’ve contacted an interested first client who wanted to help me out, so the rest should be a piece of cake, right? Well, not really ... I still had to jump off the deep end, so to speak.
There were several hurdles to take from that point onwards. The first being that most of the expressed interest came from North America, while I was situated in Europe. I had no experience with e-commerce and intercontinental shipping. Setting up a shop in bigger e-commerce platforms proved cumbersome, and a print-on-demand solution didn’t allow me proper quality control.
However, I still had a portfolio website left over from my previous artistic aspirations, and there were some easy-enough-to-use tools to add a webshop. To make sure this wouldn’t turn into an incomprehensible financial mess, I opened an additional bank account. After that I looked into some of the post tariffs and added them to the store. I know all of this sounds pretty obvious, but it was a first for me and you still have to start somewhere, somehow. Â
Then there was the product itself. Since shipping costs outside the European Union was already around €20,-, I felt I had to provide an absolutely high-quality print and not just a simple poster that would cost less than the shipping costs. So I turned to the best print-on-paper that I knew.
Piezography is a printing process that injects the color into the surface of the paper, which gives the colors an unreal depth. It actually looks like a genuine painting.Â
The piezography version of the Tallon IV Map turned into a worthy product that I felt comfortable asking a premium price for, and I contacted my first client in the US…Â
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