Starting our Design Studio

"Imagination is more important than knowledge" 

Albert Einstein

Well, let us hope good old Einstein had a stroke of genius when he said this...because The 401 Studio has a whole lot of imagination and just enough knowledge.

Opening a graphic design studio/print shop/retail store seemed like just a pipe dream. One of those, "hey, if we ever have enough money, imagine how awesome would it be to own a studio? You know, a hub for artists and businesses alike...". That's how it started, we simply imagined it, but little did we know our once pipe dream would become a full fledged reality.

After a failed business negotiation this past March we found ourselves unemployed and slightly depressed. This negotiation falling through the cracks was a complete slap in the face. But after gently icing our wounds we realized it was that slap in the face that woke us up. I mean, why would we want to buy an existing business, a business with a set color scheme, a set menu, a set customer base? Why would we want to take what was once somebody else's pipe dream and call it our own? Where was the fun in that? The creativity? The imagination? So, we took some time to enjoy our lives, went snowboarding in the beautiful mountains of New Hampshire and in that enjoyment we were pleased to find our creative mojo kicking full throttle. So we returned to Rhode Island prepared to make our ideas reality.

Now, there are a few things that nobody tells you when you are trying to open a business. Things your imagination would never present to you because they are, well, unimaginative and boring, and ultimately economical in nature. Things like startup costs, average rent costs, average utility costs, how many times you will need to sit down with an accountant, how many times you need to sit down with a lawyer. The hoops that need to be jumped through to establish an LLC, acquire a Tax ID, how to go about getting insured. The first hurdle we had to jump, or rather, the first hurdle we chose to jump: finding a location. 

Now this task is far more daunting than one would assume it to be. I mean, sure, you can drive around and see what's out there. You can ask your buddies, other business owners, lawyers, realtors, but the truth is, not a single one of those people understand what's in your head. They cannot even begin to fathom what your uniquely individual mind has concocted and therefore nobody can actually help you find a location. Especially if you skipped step one, which is writing a business plan. Yeah...we will get to that in a later post. So anyway, my point here is that your imagination is the absolute key to finding what you deem a suitable storefront. You can have all the knowledge in the world...the price is right, the traffic is right, the parking is right, the town is right, etc, but none of that means a thing unless your vision, your imagined concept can fit in the confines of whatever it is you're seeing. So here it is, this is what everyone else saw when we FINALLY nailed down our location.

Gross right? Just a big checker-box room with stained floors from the meat market that used to exist. I mean seriously, how hideous are those floors? It doesn't matter, it didn't matter, it won't matter, all that mattered was what we imagined the place could (and ultimately would) look like. 

Now, it's not done. Our brains are still full of ideas, our imaginations are sticking ticking away, and that's okay. I mean, art is art. It takes time to create, an ego to satisfy, and many drafts are created before the final presentation is complete. But hey, at least we did away with that dirty floor! Now we have an actual store, the one we imagined. The colors, the floor, the walls, the decor, the fixtures, all of it once lived in our brains, and it now lives on Main Street in downtown Wakefield. So, yes we had the knowledge. We knew the "right" things to look for, but none of it mattered without the ideas that lived in our minds. 

So Einstein was right on this front. But when it comes to the actual production of printing, well that's for a later date. Right now my imagination is fully stocked on design ideas, but I'm still working on gaining the knowledge necessary to output them...