How are we really doing?

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful individuals with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Perisistence and determination alone are omnipotent".
- Calvin Coolidge

A loyal customer, who is also a friend, wrote and asked me how I was really doing. She noticed that I haven't been doing much of the diary part of our re-invention and I've been thinking about her question all weekend and realizing a few things.

The first thing is the whole nature of blogs, which can be interesting to the person who writes them, but also feel like a bit of a shot in the dark to the writer, a bit of self-indulgence,as in," will anyone really even read this, or want to"? I do appreciate that people have been keeping up with us, and apologize for not providing more information on our progress. The truth is we've been having a really rough time, an important, valuable, growing time, but a hard time. I haven't wanted to burden anyone with our woes, our struggles.

The old cliche of being artists and not business people causes eyes to roll and I don't blame anyone for eye-rolling. Our own eyes are rolling, believe me, but the absolute truth is that if I were an artist with a big money making potential like we had, and I didn't have a business background, or a dad with a business background.....the FIRST money I'd spend, before going another step, would be on hiring a good accountant/book-keeper with a background in retail and/or art, who likes you, is smart, likes your work and is willing to tell you the absolute and sometimes unpopular truth about the money and what you should and should not do with it.

Dot those I's, cross those T's, go forth with all of your little ducks in a row. We really did not know what we were doing with the riches of our success and unfortunately we didn't get the right help until it was too late for our beloved store. Would we have actually accepted the help? Another question entirely.

So how are we? I am still, 18 months after closing, mourning the loss of our store. We closed in November of 2005 after 4 hurricanes struck in 4 months. I'm still reconciling what doesn't seem fair to us, a risk that is part of life, that it was too late to save the store, after we had finally overhauled and streamlined the business making it smaller and more efficient. We had whittled our staff down to a very tiny, handleable crew (2 people besides Markel and I), moved out of a large, expensive studio into a house where we could work for a third of the price of the studio. We were so excited to make it work. The amazing and wonderful thing was that a smaller operation was going to make us more money and be so much less to handle greatly decreasing our work load. Our store was a little cherry and it had been the biggest money maker in our bloated venture.

We had finally found a talented mentor/business manager who was very hands on and had shown us that we could be out of debt within a year if we made radical changes, persevered, worked hard, stayed focused.....but as fate would have it, the 4 hurricanes struck, knocking us down and oooooooout.

It's now May of 2007, 18 months later and 12 months after writing about why we closed our store. It has been an extrememly tough haul. We moved from the Florida Keys last August, back to Ann Arbor, MI to be near our grandchildren (which has been of paramount importance), family and old friends. We are running a smaller business, picking up and starting over. We know we have to move on and I have been trying. I know it does no good to keep on mourning the store and I am working at moving on.....In these 18 months Markel and I have uncovered every stone, examined every mis-step going back to our beginning....(and even before our beginning to our individual beginnings). We have suffered from our loss and our deep financial debts....and here is where I am tempted to erase all of what I've written, but I won't, because this is what is honest.....it hasn't been easy and we've been discouraged, humiliated, grieving, worried, reclusive. We still owe a lot of money to people we love, who believed in us. That has been the largest sorrow, disappointing people who counted on us and trusted us.

We, mostly I, admittedly fell down for awhile, unable to see the way, paralyzed by stress and loss. Our good friends and family have helped us and we are back to struggling the good struggle, doing our artwork, working on our inner selves, the important kind of internal work that is honest and searing, that reveals new growth making positive steps forward possible... We absolutely know that in the scheme of things we are so blessed.

Markel and I are clearer now about our future than ever before, our vision as a team, our direction forward. We are both, as a team thankful for the design line, which sells so well and has been so good to us and has such devoted followers and collectors. Now that we are making it all ourselves we see it improving and continuing to evolve. We are fortunate to have the design line as our "day job', with our original work an arm's length away.

When our operation was so big and unwieldy with the store and art fairs, wholesale, a big studio, 20 employees, everything felt so out of control. Being small and concentrated has brought us back to making work for a very few galleries, looking toward to doing some art fairs, working on our original pieces, maintaining a smaller work life that is easier for us to handle and control. In summary, we're ok, still a little battered, definitely wiser, still not quite over the loss of the store, but knowing that we have to move on for our own good and those who depend on us. We haven't given up, that's the important thing and our strongest intention is to set things right, repay our debts even if it takes the rest of our lives to do it, and do it all better this time.....I'm even allowing myself to dream that another store might be in my future someday....we'll see,

Thank you so much for all of your kind words and for the show of support to everyone who has written to us. Thanks for wanting to know how we are.

"I bend, but I do not break" -Jean de La Fontaine

purplebabydaddies: Hurricane Wilma- October 2005

Top picture: Our god-daughter, Marisa, pointing to how high the water came up during the flood.

Middle: My friend Martha's (Marisa's mother's) house where we weathered the storm

Bottom: Leslie, photo taken on May 10, 2006

We were very lucky.
Markel and I had evacuated to that house, my friend Martha's house, after putting our cars up on high ground at the local middle school. We didn't want to leave because if the storm bypassed us, as they often do, we needed to be able to open the store right away. We had already lost so much money with the 3 other storms that had hit the Keys before Wilma last summer.

We had weathered the whole night of the storm,wide awake and finally fallen asleep when Eva woke me up at 9am to ask how we were doing-
When I opened the front door to look outside, that's when I saw the floodwaters, which were still rising! What a sight; I couldn't believe it.

The houses on either sides of Martha's house are at ground level and they were full of seawater, boats driven by teen-age boys were going down the middle of the street trying to help people in trouble, and cars still parked out front were filled with water. We had no idea how much higher the water was going to go, but fortunately it stopped rising where Marisa is pointing.

Martha (who evacuated to Michigan with her family) had a storage shed in her backyard which had come loose and impaled itself on the fence leading to the back. All of the contents of her shed were ruined and belongings were floating all over the back, bobbing in the water.......all of her stored antique and new Christmas ornaments, books, artwork by her parents, photographs, paperwork....it was heartbreaking to see.

Our own house on Ramrod Key is also at ground level and we just assumed that it had been flooded. When the flood waters receded later on that day, we managed to drive to our house to survey the damage we were amazed to find that our house hadn't flooded. Apparently our property is on one of the highest parts of Ramrod Key. The water rose two inches according to our next door neighbor. Our storage place was also dry and our cars were safe. Our store didn't flood either. We were very lucky! Some people lost everything, cars, furniture, photos.....you name it. We were very lucky, because like many others down here we have no insurance.....for those who did, there are a lot of car dealers and furniture store owners who had a very good year.

purplebabydaddies: Why we Closed the Store.

The photos above show a painting in progress, still unfinished, and a photo of the actual still life that I was working from.

WARNING: The following blog entry is the longest writing I will probably ever do on this blog. It is the story of us closing our store. It is long and boring, an exercise in self-indulgence, interesting probably only to people who wondered what the heck happened to our store in Key West. Beyond it are more photos of art work, so feel free to skip this long writing and view the ART!

After delivering artwork to Island Style in Key West on Friday evening, we took Saturday and Sunday as days to work on our own pieces. We are dividing our time between making design line art work for the three galleries that carry the purplebabydaddies design line and working on a body of work to present as a gallery showing in a fine art gallery.

Do people really spend a lot of time reading blogspots? I guess I see myself gearing this toward the people on our mailing list who lost track of us when we closed down our store and went into seclusion.

We went into seclusion to regain our composure, get over the loss of our store, and figure out what we were going to do with the mountain of debt that we were left with, after 4 hurricanes hit us last summer, and we suddenly had a store full of merchandise and display furniture that we had to pack up within 3 days.

We were already fragile due to the hurricane season the year before. Two bad years in a row seemed impossible. Key West wasn't affected directly, 2 summers ago in 2004, but almost all of the rest of Florida was, and instead of coming to the Keys on vacation, like they usually did, a majority of Floridians were busy putting roofs on their houses. Retail sales were already down going into the hurricane season last summer.

.....Ironically, we had finally and gratefully, given up on our dreams of a big purplebabydaddies operation with a store, a wholesale design line selling to galleries nationally, a website, all being done with no reserve capitol. In fact, we were in debt, bailing water out of the boat as fast as we could. We had hired a bookeeper, finally, who showed us that we could have a pretty good business, a simpler life, pay off our debt, if we just did it all ourselves. As an artist friend from Ann Arbor used to say, "Keep it small, keep it all".

So, we whittled down our employees from 12 people to 1 person, which was emotionally wrenching in itself, letting long-time faithful employees go and others who depended on us for a job. If we wanted to save the business and pay our bills it was the only way and at first, it was going pretty well.

I was able to paint in the store, Markel and his 1 studio assisstant were able to make enough to keep the store stocked. We were planning on making a lot more of our original pieces. Out the window went the website and wholesaling to the 30 galleries who bought from us. We were concentrating on the store and wholesaling to 2 galleries, Island Style and Dennison- Moran. The store was capable of making good money all on it's own, and I LOVED my store.

We weren't out of the woods financially, we owed a lot of money, and we were consistently late paying the store rent, but we could see that by the end of the season in May 2006, we would have the bulk of our debts paid off if we kept our nose to the grindstone and worked really hard all year and kept our overhead low.

This was a very significant change for us. We had been trying to go large-scale for about 10 years and had made every mistake in the book- paying too much for materials, not hiring a professional book-keeper and accountant, paying our employees too much, not charging enough for our work, renting very expensive stores, also being two artist types with no business experience, who weren't as organized as we needed to be, and most significantly we didn't have enough capitol.

It's amazing we lasted as long as we did, and it's probably too bad that we did, because the stress we've been under has been horrendous. Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars passed through our hands.

I know this sounds trite, but we did learn so much about the business of art, running a store, about ourselves and our capabilities, and our goals.

We had stopped being artists. We became slaves to our design line, which we love. We are proud of it and it's successful and continues to sell like crazy. but only making the design line is not what we wanted. The original idea, which was Markel's, was that we would make a design line, that could be made by others, bringing in money, so that we could make our original work.

I wasn't keen on the idea in the beginning, I was happy sharing a house and studio with my husband, each of us doing our own work, traipsing off to art fairs to sell, all over the country.

We jumped in to the project together, but before long I was having to run the whole operation. I was adequate at it, and wanted to get some expert help like a bookeeper but Markel is a renaissance man and felt that we could do it all ourselves. He wasn't cut out for managing people at all. It's not that he didn't work hard, he was a very hard worker, continually fine-tuning and improving the design line. He was inconsistent and dis-interested in the nuts and bolts of the operation and ambivalent about the whole big mess, but we had orders to fill and people depending on us for paychecks, and then a store to run.....so began our ten year stint as the stressed out owners of a business that was continually in crisis.

It was about that time that I stopped painting. I think that has been the biggest problem, that Markel stopped doing experimental, push the envelope and stretch art works and I stopped painting altogether.

Markel was doing very edgy, emotionally-charged, raw work that sold incredibly well when I first met him and I was painting my canvasses, when we took this other road. One of the main motivations was that Markel was disheartened by taking work that he had suffered over, some tortured, wrenched out of a deep place, emotionally-charged piece, to a show, and have a person, look at it, say, "Wow, that's fun!", slap a check in his hand and walk away with the piece. It's a little like someone coming and taking one of your children away. Never easy. I think he's resolved that issue. We'll see.

But, I've gotten way ahead of myself.....So, there we were, our new plan in place, working 7 days a week, overhead cut WAY back, just praying to be able to keep our heads above water till the tourist season started again in late October......but then the hurricanes started coming. One in July, then another in August, then September and finally the biggie in October, Hurricane Wilma, which flooded the homes and businesses of residents from Key West to the top of the Keys, AND happened right when our biggest event, Fantasy Fest, a 10 day extravaganza that brings in a huge crowd, lots of money and marks the end of a long, hot, slow season in a huge, blow-out, town- wide, wonderful party.

Every time a storm comes all of the tourists are evacuated, businesses and houses have to be battened down for the impending storm and then residents are asked to evacuate. It is exhausting physically, emotionally it is paralyzing- we knew we were losing money, fear of the potential damage of the impending storm is unnerving......

FOUR STORMS!!! FOUR STORE CLOSINGS!!!
FOUR EVACUATIONS!!!

We had been doing so well in the early summer. Surprisingly, Key West, in June and July, half of August was always relatively good for us; lots of families, international travelers, enjoying balmy nights and warm waters. Both of us sold major pieces in the $2000-$3000 range, I had found a great rhythm in the store and was beginning to make some headway on our bills, but with each successive storm we slipped further behind.

After the 4th storm we were two and a half months (of $5500.00 a month rent), behind in the rent, and had given all the money we had left, $3000, to our landlady, in good faith, promising to pay all of the rent due and the back-rent and late fees by the end of January, by making weekly payments to her, something that was absolutely do-able if she was willing to wait. She took the money, indicating that she would work with us, and then out of the blue, a few days later she came into the store and slapped a 3-Day eviction notice on our counter! Complete Shock!

Later we found out that a store owner down the block had off-handedly mentioned to our landlady that we had mentioned thinking of moving our location to a less hurricane prone place after we got financially stable, which is true, we did say that, but it was in response to the stress of the 4 hurricanes and everyone was freaking out, and we were just having a conversation....and who knows what we would have actually done. In any case, upon hearing the news, our landlady reportedly became very agitated and a day later we had the 3-day eviction notice on our counter. Sigh.

So, we went. Maybe we could have fought harder, but we didn't have any more strength, no one to go too, we already owed everyone we knew money.....we waved the surrender flag and decided to close. With the help of good friends, (amazingly we were out of there in 5 days), the store that I had felt that I could have kept into my old age was gone. Displays that I have been collecting for years were given away, put out on the street, merchandise was packed up and is in storage. Our security deposit of two months covered the back rent we owed, thank goodness.

Divine Intervention? Maybe, maybe not, I still regret losing the store. If it was divine intervention, it didn't feel like that until just recently.

My feelings of loss and failure, worries about how we were going to make money, feelings of guilt about money owed to people we love, artists we care about, were so paralyzing that I could barely move for months. markel did better. I was the one who loved the store and knew how good it was and what it's potential was.

We lived on very little money in those first months as we re-invented our business. We didn't even have money for materials at first. Those were dark months and we had a hard time asking for help, because people had already given us so much help. Fortunately, our families and close friends helped us even though we didn't ask. I have never been so devastated. Having something that I put so much work, money, time, love into suddenly being gone in 5 days has taken some time to get over.

We closed the store in the beginning of November and now it's the beginning of May. I'd say that we have just started feeling optimistic and good again. Our life is smaller and we are regaining our health. We lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pasta with parmesan cheese and olive oil and hostess cupcakes because we couldn't manage anything more complex. I couldn't even go to the store. Markel had to go and that's all he could seem to manage to buy......I gained 40 pounds.

We're better, our life is more manageable, slower-paced. We are responsible for less people since we don't have anyone working for us. Our design line artwork is much better because we're making it all ourselves. We're on South Beach Diet, cooking wonderful food everyday and the weight is dropping off.....we are walking and riding bikes, reading, watching movies from Netflix and making art, slowly re-establishing ourselves so we can get at that big pile of bills we still owe.

In fact, I feel very grateful that Markel and I get to get up everyday and make art, work at our house, take time out for a bike ride or a swim, that we are safe and healthy, making progress, and we have the time to work on our larger pieces. I miss my store, still, but I am ok.

My biggest regret is not having been able to pay off our debts, but we're determined to pay them. It will just take longer.

We're both scared of, and motivated by the same thing- dying before we fulfill our potentials as artists, so we're figuring it out and working at making each day count.

Hello and thanks for looking

here it is, the funky little store that didn't survive the hurricane season of 2005....and the next photo is our little Michael. He talked his Aunt Eva into offering him up for sale (no one can say NO to this kid)- good thing we got there just as someone was buying him for $100,000,000,000,000,000.00, we very quickly put a stop to the sale. Poor Aunt Eva was crying and wringing her hands and Michael had begun to change his mind at the last minute.
The last photo is of the very funky studio living space we lived in for almost three years. It was completely destroyed during the storm season of 2005, and we had to move out.