My husband and I have spent the last year and a half developing and growing a self-financed company based on my art. One thing that became clear to me through the years of dealing with art galleries and other kinds of vendors is that most companies consider artists unsophisticated and bad businesspeople, and the exploitation I experienced and witnessed was incredible. One art gallery (brick and mortar) never paid me for prints they sold, and I can tell you many more similar tales of woe. Other companies wanted to buy my work and the rights to it for an insulting amount, and when you are unsophisticated or desperately need to pay your bills, it's quite easy for artists to get taken to the cleaners. I saved a contract that one architect sent to me to reproduce my work, and an attorney who looked at it said in all the years in law he'd never seen anything so blatantly unfair. He told me to burn it in a bonfire.

In my opinion, companies like Cafe Press take extreme advantage of artists, not only providing substandard merchandise but they are the ones who make the profit---not the artist. Yes, there are a few exceptions who do well with CP, but for the most part, once the artist adds a decent profit margin to their product they've priced themselves out of the market. So they are forced to do volume. And how many people are going to find you on such a large site? The most unforgiveable business practice from many of these companies is that they don't supply the artist with the names/contact info for the artists' customers. They bought your work, but yet you have no right to their name. I think that's outrageous and it galls me that so many get away with it.

When we started Dreaming in Color--and then, Color Bakery---after a series of powerful spiritual experiences, I saw what the business community does to artists or to anyone trying to market a new, artistic product. It's not pretty. My husband and I decided that, when we could, we'd try to make services available to artists so that they could bring their work into the market without dealing with huge print runs, high minimums, or worse, a publisher who would gladly rape them financially or compromise their work. (I saw this a lot with artists who published/designed oracle/tarot decks).

We are now printing art on ceramic and glass tiles, coffee mugs, decorative plates. We are making our printing and production available to fellow artists who would like to resell their work on coffee mugs and similar items without having to buy huge minimums or mortgage the house to buy merchandise each time you order. If anyone is interested, please feel free to PM me.

Mindy

I just wanted to add my url after having some PM's about where folks can view my site.

www.colorbakery.com

Very impressive Mindy. The site looks wonderful and the possibilities, indeed, endless. 
Every year in September my husband and I visit a ceramic marketweekend and I nearly always end up buying a mug. lol. But mugs with your own work.... oohh... that is very tempting ;-)  
I hope you will do well with your color bakery. Good luck!

Yvonne

Hi Yvonne,

Thank you so much. It's funny you posted, I was going to PM you because your newest pieces are just scrumptuous. I really enjoyed them.

Thank you kindly for the kind words about Color Bakery. The mugs are definitely our best sellers right now, people just love mugs. Artists do very well with them. I think fractal art in particular lends itself very well to ceramic printing.

Warmly,

Mindy