MY PATH WAS definitely not planned. There has always been a sense of naivety to everything I’ve done along the way, which I think is a bit essential.
I came into the entrepreneurial world from an art-focused background and studied for an MA in art history and contemporary art but ended up navigating into this world of business and technology.
I am not a tech person at all and it was a real learning curve to get to know the space, the language and learn how to mingle within the startup world. I had spent my time learning about feminist art theory, so it was a very different environment. Then again, I’ve grown to find it very exciting and infectious.
It’s been accidental and I’ve made a lot of decisions not thinking about the full consequence of things, but I think that’s almost essential to have that bit of naivety when you go into these things. If you really knew what you were taking on, you might think twice about it.
Commercial world
During college, I worked at an art gallery called the Rubicon in Dublin. It was run by two sisters and working at the gallery opened my eyes to the commercial side of the art world.
After I finished my masters, I interned a little bit more in Dublin and London while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do. The jobs market was really tough because I had graduated when everything had gone south around 2008.
I had an interest in opening my own commercial gallery. I thought it was something I would do way later in my life, maybe my forties, but my mum, Patricia, suggested I get a pop-up space, set up a gallery and do some curating.
That’s all I really wanted to do and myself and my mum had this idea that there was no one selling really well-curated emerging art at an accessible price point.
It was very hard to find up and coming artists that weren’t going to break the bank and because of the recession, people didn’t have the money to spend on art that they did previously.
So I got a space in Donnybrook in Dublin. It was very rough around the edges, but we made it look the part. I was only supposed to have it for six months initially but I ended up having it for two years and put on about 20 exhibitions in the space.
From there, the whole business kind of translated to online. My mum and I had a discussion about what was happening in the art world and we didn’t think there was any well-curated marketplace on the internet for up and coming artists to showcase their art.
One step at a time
My mum and I started together with the idea, which became Artfetch, in 2013. We created the brand, launched the blog and started signing the artists.
We approached everything just one step at a time because we didn’t know anything about setting up a technology business, however, we did know the art industry very well and had done a lot of market research, so it was by no means guesswork.
Focusing on one thing at a time was the right approach for us because it meant we didn’t dwell on problems and think too deeply about things, we just got on with it.
I had never hired or managed a team before. I didn’t know a lot about the technology behind a website, building a wireframe or the kind of UX involved, but we worked through it.
Managing the relationship between myself and my mother was probably the biggest challenge of them all. I think if you can do that you can do anything.
A friend of mine once told me, “you need to be prepared to hate your co-founder”, but I can’t hate my mother and a mother can’t hate her daughter.
We founded the company together and it is a very rare thing for a parent and their child to do that. My mum and I are very close and we always have been.
I’m an only child and we do a lot of things together, but running a business together was probably not one of the best ideas we ever had. It is a very difficult thing to separate sometimes.
After a day of work, it can be tough to go home in the evening and just have a meal together as mum and daughter and not co-founders. It is a unique situation and every co-founder couple will find these problems along the way.
We realised that for us to overcome it, we simply had to figure out what our roles were and eventually it became very clear that it made sense for me to go out and run the business on a day-to-day basis and for my mum to lend her expertise in an advisory way.
But that said, we had a wonderful experience and enjoyed the journey. I think it is a really special thing to look back and say that we were able to build a company from scratch and eventually sell it on to Rise Art earlier this year.
There were some benefits to having my mother as a co-founder. I know her very well and it can be easier to be blunt with her than I could be with other people, but it is very tough to establish that line of professionalism that I think is necessary.
We did such fun things like shoots for magazines and we were able to sit down everyday and talk together about what we are passionate about. Not every parent and child is that lucky.
Biggest achievements
Every single customer we got felt like a milestone, and every time we reached a new country and made a sale was exciting.
I knew customers were always going to come through, but, like any company, we had good weeks and bad weeks. You just have to make sure the bad weeks don’t come straight after one another.
Once the chance to sell the company came up, however, I knew it would be the right decision for me both personally and professionally.
Selling Artfetch to Rise Art gave us the opportunity to join a company that is bigger and has a larger market and meant I could continue to do what I was doing and also have greater support and structure in place.
Personally, I felt like that was something I really needed. I had taken the company as far as I could and by selling it I got the best of both worlds. There are always moments where it is a little bit sad, but being an entrepreneur is tiring.
I was young and had thrown myself into the thick of it all and it was quite isolating. You feel alone and I was getting to a point where I was getting a little older and you crave a bit of routine and normality. However, I don’t think I’ve lost the entrepreneur bug at all.
Katie Tsouros is the co-founder of Artfetch and brand marketing manager of Rise Art. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on unlikely entrepreneurs.
If you want to share your opinion, advice or story, email opinion@fora.ie.
Written by Katie Tsouros and posted on Fora.ie
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say