Artistry in Business: Interviewing a Business Owner Making Artistic Homeware

Hi, I’m Tom, an artist based in North East England and I sell my own range of art prints, homeware and gifts. I started out in December 2020 by selling a small range of greeting cards and prints at a local pop-up shop. Since then, I’ve grown my product range to include textiles, kitchenware, and other items featuring over 50 of my own unique designs. I now attend regular monthly markets around North Yorkshire as well as selling my products in shops and online.

I think my main inspiration is probably just the fact I really enjoy creating things. Art and drawing have always been something I’ve enjoyed doing pretty much since I could hold a pencil but I’d never really considered turning it into a career. It wasn’t until I was working in marketing after university and saw the process of turning a concept into something physical that I first started to think that I could create my own business around my love of art.

I actually don’t pay that much attention to trends at all. One of the things I find most enjoyable about what I do is the freedom to design and create things that I’m personally interested in or that I would like to own myself. I think this allows me to really get behind the products I’m selling but also makes it quite nerve-racking when I share new designs with the world for the first time! Luckily there are other people out there who like my artwork too, which is always a great feeling and something I’m very grateful for.

I suppose the answer to this sort of links back to what I was just saying about people liking my designs. A lot of my day-to-day attention is spent focusing on ways I can improve and thinking about what’s next, so I don’t often stop to think about this in a wider sense. When I do actually take a step back and look at what I’ve managed to create so far, it does fill me with a sense of achievement at how far I’ve come and also makes me excited for what I could do in the future. I think I’m really lucky in that I have lots of little ‘achievement’ moments each day. Whether that’s seeing my latest design on a product for the first time or when somebody likes one of my products enough to buy it. Moments like these all contribute to why I really love what I do, so I suppose my personal definition of success is being able to keep on doing something that makes me so happy.

Probably the biggest piece of advice I’d give is to just start. You’ll always find reasons to delay or things that aren’t quite right yet, but I’ve found that the best way to learn is by doing. So, whether it’s ordering your first prints or booking your first market it’s always better to have actually started doing it and to learn from your inevitable mistakes along the way. I’m constantly making changes and learning new things that I would never even have thought about before I started.

You can find me online at www.tommankin.co.uk, where you can shop my full range of products as well as find out where and when my next market will be.

I’m also on Instagram and Pinterest @tommankin