THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman:
Well, hey, there passion maker. This is Miriam Schulman, host of The Inspiration Place Podcast. You’re listening to episode number 143. I am so grateful that you’re here. Today, we’re talking all about NFTs. And what the F are NFTs and how do you sell them? But even if you don’t care about NFTs or aren’t sure if you should care about NFTs, I want you to tune into this interview anyway, because in this interview, you’re also going to learn how this artist skyrocketed his career when he became laser focused on his niche. How he used LinkedIn to market his art and how to use strategic gifting of your art to build your collector piece. There are so many juicy nuggets in today’s interview. I can’t wait for you to tune in.
Today’s guest is a pop portrait artists for professional athletes. He’s worked with over 400 athletes and all of the major initial categories, NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS, PLL, basically all of them. And he’s also a licensed artist for Topps. Currently working on his third Topps set. I think those are Baseball Cards. I’m not sure. Early this year, he also began releasing his artwork as NFTs, and that’s how he came to my attention. Recently, he also collaborated with Terrell Owens to bring the TO Museum and Gallery to life. Please welcome to The Inspiration Place, Blake Jamieson. Well, Hey, there Blake. Welcome to the show.
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Miriam Schulman:
I’m super excited to have you. I was looking around for somebody to come to the podcast to talk about NFTs and a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of the profile that, was it CNBC? Did on you and I was like, “This guy is really cool.”
Blake Jamieson:
Thank you.
Miriam Schulman:
In many ways
Blake Jamieson:
It was awesome that project or that feature, I guess, has opened a lot of doors for me, which is exciting.
Miriam Schulman:
Thank you for coming here now that you’re TV famous. Still do podcasts.
Blake Jamieson:
I was just in a local newspaper in my hometown in Marin county, California and my mom was at 7-Eleven yesterday and just like flipping through and she saw my big picture. So to me, that’s more special, I guess, than the more like national coverage I got with CNBC.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. That’d make your mom proud coverage or-
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah. Exactly.
Miriam Schulman:
… show off to the high school.
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah. Hometown hero.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s right. So let’s get started with what is an NFT and I just want to share with you, my husband this morning says, what does it stand for? I said, “That will not help you.”
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah, it doesn’t. NFTs, very hot topic right now. So NFT stands for non-fungible token. What that means is fungible means interchangeable for something else. So if something is non-fungible, it means that it is completely unique and that’s identified by this, consider it like a serial number that lives on the internet. In a particular portion of the internet which is called the blockchain, which is what manages all of these digital items. Could be a picture, it could be a video, it could be music. We’re really just the tip of the iceberg on what NFTs could be. What the technology makes possible is we end up with something that is provable to be authentic, meaning that somebody could go forge the perfect Picasso painting and to get that verified, they would have to take that to the estate or an appraiser or an authenticator.
It’s a process, but it’s still a manual process of somebody looking saying, “This is a real Picasso or not.” With NFTs, we have this serial number that lives on the internet that is on this completely transparent ledger. So you can see every transaction that happens. So we know that it’s authentic and that is one piece of the puzzle. The other part of the puzzle is that it’s provably scarce. That is the one, you know, it’s nonrefundable, but even if, for example, I could do an NFT edition where I do three versions and each your serial number. Number one of three, two of three, three of three. Those again, even though there’s three of them, they’d still have their unique non-fungible token attributes. And so it means that everything is provably authentic and provably scarce. And when those two things come together in the art world, that leads to demand.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. And now that everyone’s thoroughly confused, by the way, it’s very confusing.
Blake Jamieson:
I know. I’m sorry. It is.
Miriam Schulman:
It’s very confusing and I don’t normally drop this on the podcast, but I actually went to MIT and I still have a huge problem understanding NFTs, huge. It’s like even people like me it’s really an abstract thing and what I tried to explain to my husband, and I do think he got it. This is a funny story. So after I said to him, non-fungible token, and he looked at me funny, I said, “Well, basically we have a dollar bill that’s printed, we all agree that that represents a certain amount of value of gold that’s in the bank. So what artists are doing is we’re creating artwork and we are agreeing that it represents a value.” And then my husband said, “Oh, so you mean like Schrute Bucks?”
Blake Jamieson:
It is kind of like Schrute Bucks.
Miriam Schulman:
I was like, “Exactly.” That’s exactly what it is.
Blake Jamieson:
It totally is. Yeah. I mean, it is. It’s interesting because like I said, we’re so new to this space that we don’t know what it is and right now people are thinking, “Okay, it’s a JPEG.” It’s a picture of my art and that could happen in many forms. I’ve done NFTs where like whoever buys the NFT gets the physical painting. And part of that is to onboard people because people have a hard time grasping what is this new thing and why is it worth owning? There’s a couple of comparisons that I’ll make, depending on where people are coming from. So if they’re young and they play video games, I’ll talk about buying skins. Counter-Strike for example is like a shooting game and you can buy skins for your guns so your gun could look like it’s purple or something like that.
It doesn’t change what the item does in the game, it just makes you look cool. Anyway, the younger generation get that of like, if they want to go and purchase these digital items so that they can flex with their friends in their digital world. And as all of us are becoming more and more digital, now people are saying, “Okay, I’m going to have a digital art collection.” I think in the future, you’re going to walk into a hotel room and you’re going to have an app on your phone and all the walls are going to be covered in monitors. And you can pull up the app and you can click a button and set up all of your favorite art in your hotel room and feel like you’re at home. And so I think that’s going to be really interesting when NFT start mixing with the real world.
I also think that NFTs are going to shake up the way that we do ticketing and access to events again, because of this provable authenticity and provable scarcity. I think a company like StubHub is going to move completely over to NFTs. There’s no reason that you need to hold a ticket anymore. We don’t need to print them.
Miriam Schulman:
Oh, interesting.
Blake Jamieson:
I think. And they’ll probably offer physical tickets for a very long time as an option, but you might even have to pay extra like getting a bag at the grocery store cost 10 cents. Like, “Oh, you want an actual ticket? Okay. You have to pay a little extra.”
Miriam Schulman:
You can explain how you actually sold your NFTs. I remember in that CNBC clip, you said, “Hey, I took this piece of artwork.” So could you explain what you did and maybe how much you made?
Blake Jamieson:
No problem. There’s a lot of different platforms to sell your NFTs on. I was fortunate that I was tipped off to a platform called SuperRare about a year ago. A curated platform, meaning that they’re extremely, especially now the NFTs are blown up, it’s hard to get approved as an artist, no matter how awesome your artist is, they just have such a backlog. So I got in there really early and that was like a stroke of luck I think that helped with the numbers that we’ll get to and such. But I essentially just started taking pictures of old art from my archives. And in the case that you’re talking about, this was a long, skinny abstract piece that I had made in 2018. Actually is a collaboration with a fellow artist, and a friend of mine.
I never really did anything with the piece so when NFTs came out, I was looking at what was popular or what I thought was popular, which isn’t necessarily the best way to do things. I was just doing that because I was curious, and I saw this a lot of this surreal trippy abstract vibe. And so that made me think of this piece and so I pulled it out and I took high res photos of sections of it, because again, the piece is like six feet long by eight inches tall. And so it’s hard to get like a photo that captures everything. But if I really zoom in and get macro shots, I was able to get like 10 sections of it.
Miriam Schulman:
And that created 10 pieces of artwork with separate sales for each one.
Blake Jamieson:
Correct. Right. So I mean, each of them end up being different artworks, but all abstract, same colors, same vibe, because they’re all from the same piece. And then I started putting those out one at a time. And the way that it works on SuperRare is you can put up a piece and then people can just bid whatever they want, and then as the owner, I can either accept it or I can just wait. And if I wait, there’s a little bit of risk that they could withdraw their bid, but also other people will see it and could bid higher. And so usually, I’d be putting something up. If I get a bid quickly that I am happy with, and at that time it was 0.5 Ethereum which is crypto.
The currency basically that we’re using on SuperRare and for most NFTs is called Ethereum. The interesting thing there too, is that Ethereum’s value changes. So when I accepted half an Ethereum then, that was probably only worth about $800 US. But to me, that was a good price. Now, where the Ethereum at $3,500, that same half Ethereum is worth $1,700, $1,800. Since I keep as much money as I can in Ethereum, it means that this piece that I sold two, three months ago for what at the time was $800, now is actually worth $1,700 to me. So that helps even more.
Miriam Schulman:
So Ethereum, that is basically like Bitcoin?
Blake Jamieson:
Yes. Think of it just like Bitcoin. It’s just a different, like a dollar and a peso or a dollar and a Canadian dollar, whatever. I mean, they have their own values.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. And then once again, I just want to reiterate that the way Bitcoin, Ethereum, the currency works, it’s really the same thing that we have now. We all agree that a dollar is worth a certain amount and the same thing with these digital currencies is that money is an abstract thing that we’ve all agreed has a certain value and that value changes.
Blake Jamieson:
Totally. Especially as NFTs started to become more and more popular and at least maybe not understood yet, but people were aware of. I was just in the right place at the right time where I kept putting up art and it was pretty consistently selling between a half an Ethereum and one Ethereum peaking at a piece that I sold for three Ethereum, which also came with the physical painting. And so that’s great. Three Ethereum is about $10,000 right now.
A painting that size I would normally sell for probably $6,000 or $7,000. So I was able to increase the perceived value of my physical artwork by attaching an NFT to it as well. And I think that’s a great place for artists to start, especially with getting your collectors excited about it, because even if you get a really good grasp on it and you’re ready to go for it, it’s still really challenging to explain it to collectors and get them to also figure out how to actually be able to buy your NFT and support you.
It’s not an easy process and that’s why it’s not a widely adopted thing yet is because there’s too much friction to bring on the consumers. And so I think if you do it and you are just getting into it and your customers are used to getting your physical art, I would recommend putting as much physical art tie-ins into your NFTs and you can get your feet wet that way and also have enough of a cool offering to get your art buyers to actually sign up for an Ethereum wallet. I think that’s a whole separate conversation that we can get into, but…
Miriam Schulman:
I’m scared to get into it. I really am.
Blake Jamieson:
I know.
Miriam Schulman:
All right. One thing that I really like about what you just shared is Blake, as I said in the introduction also has a digital marketing background. And one of the things that makes you successful as an artist is how you’re able to pull in these concepts from the marketing space. So for example, the way you said, “Oh, you buy this NFT which is, as we talked about, it’s basically a representation of currency, you get this print or a original as a bonus.
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah. And there’s a flip side to that. My plan as this 2021 continues, eventually every single person that buys a physical painting from me and has one of my artworks, is going to get a parallel NFT, which will be the certificate of authenticity. And so that’s going to be a little bit different because right now I have a physical eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper that has all the information. It has a photograph of the painting. It has my signature, it has my little, I actually call it the clampy stamp. It’s a paper, but I’ve had people lose them. I’ve had people spill coffee on them. I’ve had people tell me it never arrived with the painting, even though they’re taped to the back of every painting. All kinds of stuff.
If I have an NFT version of it, it’s that’s it and that’s provable authentic. If I become wildly popular and somebody wants to try and copy my artwork, it’s not that hard because I’m an open book. Everything I do, I do on YouTube. Everybody that asks me questions of how do you do this? How did you make this line? How did you make this texture? I just tell people. I don’t have any trade secrets. Same thing with certificates of authenticity. I think my paintings are cool, but they’re not like… I don’t spend years on a painting that somebody could practice and replicate my work. I’m excited that NFT is going to protect my brand even if I get so big that my art is actually being forged, which I would consider flattering, I suppose. But could actually be a problem if I didn’t have a way of dealing with it, I guess.
Miriam Schulman:
Trust me, Blake, there are already artists in China copying your art. You may not have found them yet, but they’re out there.
Blake Jamieson:
If I could meet people, I’ve thought about doing a contest where I give people all the files that I’m using to make something to cut my centrals and say, “Whoever can do this is close to the way that I did it can have a job, basically.”
Miriam Schulman:
It’s not a bad idea. I mean, that is really how many of the biggest artists we know of in art history built their careers because they didn’t do it alone. They had a studio workshop even Leonardo, Salvator Mundi was most expensive painting. They say most of it wasn’t done by Leonardo. It was done by his students.
Blake Jamieson:
Yup. I mean, my art business is growing now and I have a lot of help that I didn’t have. I was a one man shop for a very long time. Now I’ve got a half a dozen employees. Some part-time, some full-time and some of them help in the creative process. I’m pretty particular. I’m definitely doing the lion’s share of anything that’s being shipped to a client, but I’m also starting to realize the power of delegation and more of being an art director and being a curator of a project. And I’m really interested in doing projects like that. And so, even with recent NFT projects, I did one that it was a NFT gallery and museum for Terrell Owens, who is a hall of fame, football player.
Awesome guy also. And rather than just saying, “Okay, I’m going to make all the art for this and try to get this credit or get this money or get this anything.” I’m like, “All right, I’m going to bring it all my homies and all the artists that I’ve been wanting to work with for a long time.” And so we have eight artists, each contributing a piece. We all split all the money evenly. That’s been really fun. And so I think that being able to branch out now and do these larger scale projects that have other artists that are all contributing, makes me much more open to saying, “Yeah. I mean, if I can find someone that’s on brand with what I’m doing and I can give them a direction here, and then I do half the painting and they do half the painting, I’m fine signing my name on it.”
Miriam Schulman:
One thing that you said is super important and I want to put a highlight or pen right across it is that you have six people working for you. And so many people have that idea that they have to do it alone, that the artist does it themselves and successful artists really don’t. Can you share with us your team of about, I’m sure some of them are contractors and there are not all full employees. What is it that they do for you and what are the roles, if you can?
Blake Jamieson:
Sure. So I would say the backbone of my whole business is actually my sister, which is awesome. She’s four years younger than me. She lives in California, near my parents. She has two kids. Stay at home mom. Yeah. I hired her to help manage all my communications. So she does my email inboxes, my scheduling, all my social media inboxes. We do Community, which is this texting app, my email newsletter. Any communications, whether it’s outbound to my customers or to potential customers or it’s inbound requests for my time, or my attention is like filtered through her. She is by far the best bang for my buck. I mean, I pay her well because also she gets to work from home whenever she wants. She needs a day off or needs an F, it doesn’t matter. I just know that she’ll handle business.
If I could go back, that would have been the very first hire I made. I think she was the third. Before that, I hired two in-studio helpers. Those guys are part-time. They were full-time for six to eight months last year outside of NFTs. For a little bit of context, I also have a licensing deal with Topps Baseball Cards, and I make art that Topps turns into Baseball Cards. And then I take those Baseball Cards and sign them, then sell them as a separate arm of my business. And so the studio help was primarily managing that workflow, whether it’s inbound orders that I need to sign cards for, or shipping those cards out to customers.
We have my dad also, like I said, it’s a family business. He’s a computer programmer. He built my website, which is completely custom. Now we have a lot of plans of potentially making pay with Ethereum possible for buying my artwork physical, because I really believe in this new technology.
Miriam Schulman:
Son came to me. My son’s in his early 20s and he has this side… He’s 20 actually. He’s just 20. So he has this side gig where he gets people… He makes it sound like it’s a sleazy thing. It’s not at all. He gets people to pay him to do nutrition and personal training things. But he was telling me, “I’m going to build a website and it’s going to be all built with Ethereum and NFTs and there’s going to be no currency.” I was like, “Hey, slow down cowboy. Why don’t you just put out your website first?” But what you’re saying is that, no, this is a legit thing. Why it’s the reason to do it that way?
Blake Jamieson:
Well, if I was doing a brand new website and trying to launch my personal brand online, I wouldn’t do cryptocurrency first. I just have an established site that I’ve already built out and just adding a secondary payment option, I think is like advantageous. I wouldn’t make my painting site only take Ethereum.
Miriam Schulman:
Well, that’s what he was saying. I was like, “Are you sure?”
Blake Jamieson:
Anybody that wants to pay me should be able to pay me in whichever currency they want, as long as it has this agreed upon value that we’ve talked about few times. So I don’t care if they pay me in Yen as long as it’s enough to cover the amount of money I want for the painting, or they can pay me in pesos or Ethereum or Bitcoin or dollars.
Miriam Schulman:
I don’t want to cut off the important conversation we’re having also. So you have your sister, your dad, you have studio helpers, and then to round it out, who else do you have helping?
Blake Jamieson:
I have a full-time accountant. Honestly, my business blew up last year, basically like 800% from the previous year to the next year. It was my biggest year by far and probably last year will be bigger than this year, just because of this pocket I cut with the Topps cards. So a full-time accountant, who also if accounting needs are low, he doubles as a studio assistant. He’s also a painter, which is amazing.
So he’s the closest to if I need hands on help preparing a stencil or something. He can help me do that. And then I have two people that are completely remote. I’ve never met in real life and both live overseas. One is a graphic designer and one is a 3D animator and video editor, kind of does both. What we end up with is a really well-rounded team of a lot of cool creative people and we’re all having fun and making some good money together. So it’s good.
Miriam Schulman:
I love that. You’re creating a village.
Blake Jamieson:
Trying. Compound.
Miriam Schulman:
You came from the digital marketing background, what I was really impressed with was how you narrowed in on a niche and then you switched to an even better niche. I don’t want to tell the story for you though. So I want to talk about that and then I also want to talk about how you market on LinkedIn, because I think that is huge.
Blake Jamieson:
Yep. For sure. So I quit my corporate marketing job at the age of 30. I was doing very well financially, but not happy looking forward to Fridays, dreading Mondays, that kind of thing. So I quit my job, ultimately started painting full time. Since I didn’t go to art school, it took me a while to feel comfortable actually selling my art. And so for a long time, almost a year, I just painted every single day, tried to get in my 10,000 hours as fast as I could and posted my work online.
And as people would say, “Hey, I want to buy this.” I’d say, “Oh, I’m not ready to sell it yet, but I’ll let you know when I’m ready.” So eventually when I was comfortable, I put up 10 paintings for sale, 500 bucks each. Those sold out extremely quickly, which was very encouraging to do 5K on my first day ever selling art online.
Miriam Schulman:
It’s incredible.
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah. So that was super encouraging. And then I continued to sell work here and there. I’ve always treated this like a business and wanted to be running a business, not just like a solo artist and not that there’s anything wrong if that is your ambition to be a one man shop solo artists and do that full-time. That’s that. I wanted to grow a brand and build a business.
Miriam Schulman:
I highly discourage people wanting to be one man anything, by the way in case you haven’t figured that out. Get an assistant. Even if it’s a teenager. Those ones in your neighborhood.
Blake Jamieson:
For sure. I mean, I spent a long time solo and this was during that time. And so, because I knew I had these bigger ambitions, I wanted to focus my art in a particular niche. And so what I did is, I looked at all of my existing sales, which at the time was probably 20 paintings, 10 of which from that very first initial sale and then the other 10 may be dripped out over the course of the next few months. I looked at each of those customers and then I made a spreadsheet of what do they do? Where do they work? Where do they live? How do I know them? It was pretty like very consistent where it’s they work in some type of tech company, usually marketing, PR, advertising and I know them through social media.
It just clicked to me like, okay, well, these people all work in offices. So I’m going to be the guy that makes super dope office art and my ideal customer is going to be a company who’s going from maybe just raise a series a round, they’re moving out of a co-working space into their own office for the first time. They want some cool artwork on the wall. It’s not just like buying it from Ikea. They want to show that they have cool culture. I thought I could be that guy.
Miriam Schulman:
Blake, let me ask you something. I mean, I know that you analyzed your customers. I trust you that is the information you got, but were you sure that they were all putting the art that they were collecting from you in their office?
Blake Jamieson:
No.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. You just decided that.
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah. I just decided it. I do know that some of them put it in their actual office and some of it were solo entrepreneurs to put it in their home office. I also realized that it’s not like those were my customers because I had this pool of… I didn’t have a pool of everybody and then those were the ones that liked my work. It’s that was my tribe. Those are my people.
Miriam Schulman:
Those were the people you were already connected with. So it was kind of like had a bias built in bias or whatever it’s called.
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah. Confirmation bias or whatever it’s called. But I recognized that, but I also recognized that like, “Okay, well these are my people. What can I make that’s going to attract them?” And so I pivoted pretty hard and said, “I’m going to dig my heels in and this is going to be my niche.” I updated my LinkedIn profile and all my social profiles to say as such, but also, I know we talked about the LinkedIn thing separately, but this is when I use LinkedIn the heaviest is I was thinking, “Okay, now that I’m going to focus on these people, on these customers, where should I find them?”
Instagram seems like the obvious choice for arts related stuff, but I’m thinking, “Well, no if I want to find the decision-makers in the business, if this is where I want to get my art, where do those people hang out?” Those are the facilities managers or building managers or, I mean, sometimes for small companies like the CEO or VP or whatever. It could be the head people at the company. I didn’t think the Instagram or Twitter was going to be the easiest for me to cut through the other noise and competition. And so I really focused in on LinkedIn and was just putting out content there, engaging in other people’s content and just making it really easy to see what I do. Not because I tell you what I do, but just because you read it in my description.
Miriam Schulman:
I love the way you like zigged or however that expression is used. Zagged or zigged everyone’s doing this, but wait a minute, there was this huge opportunity you notice and I’m going to ask all the questions I know my listeners are going to have now. There’s two things you said here that was really important. One was, you said you created content for LinkedIn.
Blake Jamieson:
So the content that I was putting on LinkedIn was similar to what you would see artists at the time putting on Instagram or Twitter or YouTube. So it was time-lapse videos of me painting. It’s here’s me in the studio working. It’s a photograph of my art. I mean, definitely there were some people that were like, “What are you doing this on LinkedIn?” But there’s also like 20 other comments to be like, “That’s dope. I never see art on LinkedIn. Really cool to see this here.”
Yeah. I mean, the content was all the same stuff that I would be posting on Facebook. I just really focused on LinkedIn. People say, “Oh, you should post once a day on Instagram if you want to be successful and tweet three times a day, if you…” Or whatever, there’s all these quote-unquote best practices. Nobody’s saying, “Go put your art three times a day on LinkedIn and so if you do that, it’s really easy to actually stand out.” And people are like, “Whoa.”
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. I can see that.
Blake Jamieson:
And then you get more attention. And then it’s all this funnel where it’s not pushy at all. I never asked for sales on LinkedIn. I just put in my bio, I make art for offices, DM me for commission requests. You can have your featured little things. I would have like pictures of art related to offices. So I had a Steve Jobs portrait that I’d done. I had a Gary Vaynerchuk portrait that I had done. I had a motivational quote that says, “Hustle never sleeps.” Kind of thing. A painting of that. All of those conversations that ended up, some of them turned into collectors were started because they reached out to me over DMs because I engage with them in the public sector without doing any selling. Just saying, “Congratulations on raising your a round.” It could be something as simple as that.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. That was my second question because you had said that you engaged in other people’s content. Well, you just said what that looked but how much time did you spend engaging with other people on LinkedIn?
Blake Jamieson:
I mean, less than an hour a day, but sometime every day. It was intermittent. It was good timing because LinkedIn was out of style for a long time and then came back into style a few years ago. They had redone their mobile app. This is all right around the same time. LinkedIn was just starting to become cool again. And so, yeah, I mean, I was just using the app and I’d be in the studio, just like you would do on your Instagram story. You’re in the studio, you’re working on a piece. You like where it’s at, you take a picture, you put it on your story, you say, work in progress. I would just do that on LinkedIn, and then anytime that I uploaded content, I would just go to my feed, like a few posts. I see something cool, I comment. I see a cool achievement, I congratulate them. Just basic stuff.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s awesome. Yeah. I noticed the shift with LinkedIn because my husband thinks he’s too good for social media. Actually, he’s recently added a few accounts simply because my son is on there, my daughter’s on there, but he has no Facebook. I think he has Instagram. He maybe got Twitter just to follow my son when he was in wrestling.
Blake Jamieson:
Oh, wrestling. I was a wrestler too.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. My son is a wrestler. Really? Oh, weight class.
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah. So I was a little guy. I was a 103s freshman year, 112s, and 119s and 135 senior year.
Miriam Schulman:
So my son was a wrestler for NYU right before COVID and then now he trains wrestlers with nutrition and helps them put on muscle and get into their weight class. And he designs weight training programs for his wrestling club.
Blake Jamieson:
That’s awesome. I wanted to wrestle in college. I went to UC Davis and they had a D1 wrestling program at the time. I mean, I was set up. I should have been on that team and I tore my MCL senior year. Basically, like the North Coast Section championships, like second day. It was ridiculous.
Miriam Schulman:
I’m sorry [crosstalk 00:29:49]
Blake Jamieson:
It’s okay. I mean, I ended up getting surgery, made a full recovery and ended up playing college Lacrosse. The way that college wrestling tryouts worked, I missed it. And it sucks because there was a guy that was in my district and I would just crush him every time. He was still a good wrestler, but I felt like I was very good wrestler because it’s all size adjusted and I was so small. Anyways, I would always crush him and then he walked onto the team and I’m like, “Aw, man, what could have been?” But no regrets.
Miriam Schulman:
But this is a good segue for how you… Now maybe my son will actually listen to this episode.
Blake Jamieson:
Good.
Miriam Schulman:
We got NFTs for him. We got some wrestling in here.
Blake Jamieson:
Tell him that I’ve painted a portrait for Jordan Burroughs.
Miriam Schulman:
Oh, no way. See, even mom knows who that is.
Blake Jamieson:
I mean, he’s a legend in wrestling for sure.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. So how’d you switch from doing art for offices to art for athletes?
Blake Jamieson:
I always have believed that everything happens for a reason. The art for offices did a really solid for me in that it taught me that focusing on something does… I was getting momentum, and I think if I had stuck with that, I would probably be the guy worldwide or whatever. In a major way, I really believe that that would have been successful, but fate had a different plan for me and I was delivering art to a client in Las Vegas and met through a mutual friend, this guy named Jarred Fayson who used to play in the NFL. Now he manages NFL clients. He liked my work and suggested that if I do a couple of free paintings for his clients, he make sure that they post and promote it to their teammates and that would lead to business.
Although the art for the offices, I felt like really getting momentum. I was staying busy, but I wasn’t jam packed. Like I couldn’t take on new projects. I was still doing passion projects on the side. So I took that time on the side, I did a couple athletes. He set up meetings where I got to meet the players in person. The first one was C. J. Anderson who was playing for the Denver Broncos at the time, nicest guy ever and literally, I gave him a painting and then like a week later he bought a painting from me for full price. And so what I ended up doing is I called it strategic gifting where I would identify players that I thought I could have an impact with and I can get into how I chose those in a second, but I would make a painting for them and I would send it to them and hopefully they would like it and they would post it and then hopefully their teammates would see it and they would buy one.
I basically built that in as my marketing budget. Usually, I would do four strategic gifts per month, one a week. I paint fast. So on a given year, I also track everything I paint very meticulously in a Google spreadsheet and every painting is numbered and front and back documented and signed and dated and everything. But I will basically take… Over the given year, I’ll paint 150 to 200 paintings. And so I’m finishing a painting every one to two anyways and so just to take a little bit of that time and dedicate it as my marketing expense, to the business development and do these strategic gifts. I mean, it’s awesome. That’s how I grew my business. Even to this day, every single opportunity that I have, it’s a really cool opportunity. I can tie back to a specific strategic gift that I worked for free.
Miriam Schulman:
So one of the reasons that you’re able to be so productive in the art studio is because you have this team managing all those other things, like your email, like your accounting, like your packing and shipping the art. You’re not spending time doing things that don’t need to be done by you.
Blake Jamieson:
Ironically though, I got to be honest. That’s how I built the business starting… Three years ago is when I got into the athlete space. I’ve been painting for six years now, total. And so it took some time, but for that first year of doing those strategic gifts, I still felt like I was in only learning mode. I was a one man shop and I was just trying to paint every single day for as long as I could. And for me, that one day a week where I was painting something as a strategic gift and then I would go and mail it out, that was the marketing for the entire… That was the only marketing. I didn’t have a team yet at all. And so ironically now too, I have a way bigger team now. If I wanted to, I could paint 10 hours a day like I used to, but I actually choose to spend my time doing different things.
And so that might be, I never used to do podcasts and now I can make time to have cool conversations with cool people about art. I like that that is all part of the story too. So I do think like, yes, get employees so that you can spend more time doing the things that you love, but it’s okay if that isn’t always painting. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be a painter. It just means that there’s a lot of different things you could do to make you happy.
Miriam Schulman:
I’m really glad to share that, Blake. The other thing that I want to ask questions about with the strategic gifts, was this so that you could say art in the collection of so-and-so, or was more it because the art was going to someone who had an influencer type of presence.
Blake Jamieson:
Great question. So there were some that was, “Okay I want to get my hands in this particular athlete because him having my work is a cool thing.” But usually those people end up being like the mega stars and the mega stars, and I learned this through a lot of trial and error because I also had some failed gifts where I made a painting and then I couldn’t get ahold of somebody to even get the address or whatever. But you know, it’s okay. You shoot your shot. The mega stars don’t necessarily care about getting a painting. Drew Brees has 1,000 paintings of himself. But the way that I was able to work with someone like Drew Brees is I approach those guys totally different. Not saying, “I’m going to do a gift for you.”
I’m going to say, “Hey, I want to do a gift for you that is going to be a painting of you and I would love for you to sign it. And I would love it to be donated to whatever charity you want.”
Miriam Schulman:
Oh, interesting. So you got their buy-in basically before you created the art?
Blake Jamieson:
Not at first, but yes. Eventually, yes. It took a while to get there. I figured out pretty quickly, those big guys, unless I have a really interesting pitch for them, they’re just not going to respond. After I did a couple pieces of work where I couldn’t get ahold of the person, I just started reaching out to people ahead of time and saying, “Hey, if I do a free painting for you, will you post a picture of it on social media?” Like really straightforward. And then I could say, “By the way, I’ve done this person and this person and this person.” And at first, that list was really short. It was the three guys I started with gifting, other paintings to with Jared. I figured out that the best target for me was somebody that was a well-respected player in the locker room, definitely a contributor to the team, but not the superstar at all.
And also not somebody that is getting hit up to get free painting. I wanted to be the only guy reaching out to this person at the time of saying, “This is the first time that an athlete like that athlete has ever been hit up by an artist that’s at least doing it full-time and making this the focus.” And say, “You’re the guy that I want to paint.” And they’re like, “Whoa, I’ve never been painted before.” That’s the person that you want to find. And then I also learned that, at first I thought it was so cool if I got these athletes home addresses so I can mail them their art and I’m like, “Yeah, I know their home address and nobody else does.” I don’t know. I thought that was cool. But that mail sometimes doesn’t get opened or like I never really know where it goes.
Blake Jamieson:
What I learned is if I send it to the training facility where these guys work out, the training facility vets all the mail, they want to make sure they’re getting some weird, creepy or dangerous package. So they’ll open all the mail. They see that it’s a painting and then they take the painting and they put it in the player’s locker. And so I learned over time that a 24 wide by 36 tall painting perfectly fits in an NFL locker. They’ll put it up and it’ll be below the bar if they’re hanging pads and clothes. It like fits perfect. It looks like a billboard. And so I would find these players, reach out, make sure they’re excited, make as cool art as I possibly can, ship it to the training center.
Usually the way that I would end up seeing that is a post on social media from a different player in the locker room that’s like, “Whoa, look what J.J has got. This is sick.” I would write really big on the side of the canvas. I would write my Instagram handle and then a back I’d put my phone number and then I have a bunch of business cards and stuff, of course too. There were a handful of times where I got direct text messages that are literally like, “Hey, this is Antonio Brown. I saw your work in so-and-so’s locker. How do I get one of those?”
Miriam Schulman:
That’s awesome.
Blake Jamieson:
This is insane.
Miriam Schulman:
You’re such a genius. I love that.
Blake Jamieson:
Thank you. I try.
Miriam Schulman:
You’re like Mic Drop right now.
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah. That’s why I said super transparent. There’s no reason that an artist couldn’t do exactly that, and I think they would be successful as long as they’re committed to that niche. And if you want to jump in sports, I don’t care. There’s so much room for everybody. If you’re a really dope artist and you can paint sports athletes, try this because it will get your art scene with all different crowd.
Miriam Schulman:
I live that you have that abundant attitude. It’s like what I say to artists is somebody who likes Mexican food doesn’t mean they’re committed to one Mexican restaurant. Your website is blake.art.
Blake Jamieson:
Yup.
Miriam Schulman:
Then are your handles on social media all the same?
Blake Jamieson:
Yeah. Blake Jamieson and Blake Jamieson is J-A-M-I-E-S-O-N. That’ll find me on every channel.
Miriam Schulman:
We will put the links to everything in the show notes. So you can check out Blake’s LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, website, all the places. I think I even can embed the YouTube video of that CNBC spot. I’m pretty sure we can embed that into my website as well. All right, Blake, do you have any last words for the listeners before we call this podcast complete?
Blake Jamieson:
I wish that I had spent more of my nights and weekends doing the thing that would ultimately become my full-time job, which is painting. I spent a lot of time watching Netflix or going out to a bar or whatever when I could have been getting better at the craft, even just the technical side of things, because I didn’t go to art school. And so I just encourage like if you like art and it’s not your main hustle, just start spending your free time doing that, instead of all these other luxury activities that are I think time-wasters. Not that a good Netflix session is cool. You’re tired and you want to relax or whatever. That’s fine.
Blake Jamieson:
But as a habit, try to spend more and more of your free time outside of your pay job, doing the thing that you love so that you set yourself up so that when you make the leap, like I did, you’re already at a point where you’re ready to sell your art. Because it took me too long. That eight months was great and I needed to spend that time in the studio, but I could have done that sooner and I wish that I had.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for being with me here today. I will see you the same time, same place next week. Stay inspired.
Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place Podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram @schulmanart, and of course, on schulmanart.com.
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