Coffee with Independent Creatives
Featuring Stephanie Malcy, Art Director and Business Owner of Tandem
Coffee with Independent Creatives shares stories, best practices and tips from independent creatives who designed and built their own businesses. How did they innovate? How did they overcome business challenges and persevere? How did they find their niche? How did they build their brand reputations? Follow this series to find inspiration to advance your own creative business.
Keys to Success
Stephanie Malcy is an art director and owner of Tandem, a design studio in Minneapolis, MN. She started her career as an independent creative 14 years ago. I met with her to uncover keys to her success being a creative business owner.
Malcy strategically named her business Tandem. And it signifies a partnership or working together. In order to work together effectively, one needs to build relationships and earn trust. Malcy made a meaningful choice in which to position her brand and add value to her clients. Her roster of clients have sought to make their very own brands relevant and mature in their respective marketplaces.
Networking and nurturing client relationships are essential keys to success for Malcy. She prides herself on developing deep and long-term partnerships with her clients. Malcy enjoys partnering with groundbreaking companies. She’s designed for emerging companies that grew into established brands like DevaCurl and RespirTech.
Be Persistent
Initially, it may look like it falls down to luck to be in the right place at the right time to make connections. But what can grow from making a connection? What might happen when you follow-up and connect persistently? As Malcy looked back on establishing her business, she emphasized the importance of networking. She said: “The only thing that has not changed since I started (and everything has changed) is networking. And building rapport and building relationships. Because relationships really allow you the opportunity to be able to get to the next step and deliver.”
Everyone has a different style for networking and nurturing client relationships. Some creatives calendar appointment reminders to drop emails, send handwritten notes or thoughtful gifts. Malcy likes to use a technology that seems like it is becoming a relic. “I love to use the phone,” said Malcy. Conversations help her learn more about her clients, their goals and their lives and it deepens relationships.
Choosing the Independent Creative Path
Malcy built a career in design after an early stint as a fine artist and painter. She loved painting but it was difficult to make a living at it and afford health insurance. Malcy landed her first design job from an item in her fine arts portfolio: a pretty chair design with elegant lines. Her employer saw the completed chair in a friend’s home and it was the impetus for a job interview. Remembering her first break she said: “I got lucky and then I worked hard.”
She’s found her background in fine art to be an advantage in her approach to designing. She explained it like this: “As you go along on your path and especially as you continue to get information and to gain knowledge, you recognize there’s connections to everything.” She described the experience of going to a movie and it may contain tropes and references to a prior idea or theme and it is a nod to what came before but it is new again because of slight twist or new slant. She concluded, “If you have a reference point, use it. Use it strategically and think about how and what messaging your trying to communicate. Pull it all together — these different perspectives into one piece.”
Malcy is also familiar with the advantages and tradeoffs for being an independent creative. Owning her own business provides her the flexibility to set her own hours and to be involved and volunteer in her son’s school. It’s possible to design and enjoy a well-balanced life between managing a creative career and family life.
One pitfall to avoid when you’re a solopreneur is the danger of working in a vacuum. It’s a good idea to cultivate relationships and a network of talented, creative peers. “Working with others is invaluable,” says Malcy. “I think that’s one of the things you have to consciously decide that you’re going to do when you become an entrepreneur or go solo. You’ve got to have a community of people in the creative arts that you can meet with and trust to provide feedback when you need it.”
Think Ahead and Adapt
All creatives need to continually invest in developing new skills and especially for utilizing emerging technologies in design. Changes occur in tools regularly. Malcy recommends keeping the pace of change in mind. She says, “The best way to live is to be adaptive. That’s the truth of it. You know what your capabilities are. You know when you have to change. Like when everything went from customization of websites to more WordPress and a lot more automated template systems, for example. It just makes you consider what’s the next thing going to be like? You got to always think: Okay. This is right now. What is next? And you have to be willing to be open to what is next.”
Keeping Up With Trends
Malcy makes it a habit to connect with people and ask what they’re thinking and excited about it. Part of the habit is being curious and trying to put yourselves in the shoes of someone outside your generation. Malcy gave an example of taking her son’s advice to buy a pair of hip sneakers. Saying yes to his advice was another way to connect. Malcy described it this way, “Culturally, this is what’s happening now. This is what is on people’s minds and how they self-identify. I look at it and think what are you trying to communicate? Status? Are you an outlier? Are you an insider?”
And she sees implications for her design profession: “You have to willing to not be critical of what is outside your experience. For the longest time people poo-pooed millennials. But there’s value in their experience, too. They’re just a different generation. And to invalidate people because they don’t think like you is a loss.”
Finding Inspiration to Feed Your Craft
Malcy makes it a practice to visits museums and flips through pages of magazines. Another way she finds inspiration in her design career is via travel. “I was at Joshua Tree recently. I looked at the landscape and I looked at the beauty,” said Malcy. “There was this artist named Noah Purifoy and he had all this acreage out in the middle of the desert where he had made all these sculptures and installation pieces. It’s about seeing. Seeing people’s works. That’s inspiring. And locally there is Franconia. It’s spectacular. It’s really one of my favorite places to go.”