FFF: From a $100 First Sale to Selling Out a Collection in 4 Minutes with Artist Brittany Smith

This week's Friday replay is with Brittany Smith, and it's one of my favorite conversations about what actually happens between "I started painting again for myself" and "I have a thriving art business." Brittany's path wasn't linear. She turned down a scholarship to SCAD to stay close to family, had a life-altering year in college, once planned to move overseas to teach jewelry-making to women coming out of human trafficking, and ended up instead raising three young kids, one with special needs, before she ever opened an Etsy shop in the summer of 2019. Her first sale, to a total stranger in Texas, arrived damaged because she had no idea how to ship yet. Everyone starts somewhere. We talk about the floral collection she painted in June 2020 that sold out in four minutes, and how that moment gave her the confidence to keep going. We also get into the year she poured everything into growing her Instagram, hit burnout, and pulled back the following year to just focus on the work, which turned out to be her best year yet. That's a pattern I hear from artist after artist, and it never stops being worth repeating. The back half of this one is genuinely useful if you're trying to build income that isn't entirely dependent on your own two hands: prints, curated gallery partnerships with a hired designer, licensing deals (including one with a friend who's become both a collector and an unofficial business mentor), and wholesale. Brittany's advice on starting small with licensing rather than chasing the big-box deal right away is worth sitting with. Her closing advice: give yourself permission to just create without the pressure of a launch calendar, and if you're serious about this, invest in a real website. Etsy is a fine place to start, but your own site is your storefront. Find Brittany on Instagram and at brittanysmithstudio.com. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.