This is the second part of my interview with owners of Atlanta's Young Blood Gallery, Kelly Teasley and Maggie White. With backgrounds in art and social work, they began Young Blood as a D.I.Y. gallery in their living room in 1997. Following media hype (Lucky magazine and the Handmade Nation documentary, among others) and much community support, Young Blood Gallery and it's complementary, all-handmade boutique now nestles among a bike shop, a bakery and an all-vegan restaurant in one of Atlanta's hippest neighborhoods. Part 1 of this interview lives here, and I'll post part 3, the final portion of the interview, soon.

Jolene, the Young Blood mascot

C: How did you get this off the ground, start-up capital wise?

Kelly: We got loans. It just depends on what level. It’s a big jump if you start where we are now. It has taken us so long to get to this point because we didn’t have money, so we had to slowly build up and borrow money along the way, versus a lot of businesses that start up with a large loan, and throw it all in, and get out in a few years if they can’t make it.

Maggie: We had name recognition going for us by the time we decided to go fulltime, whereas for a lot of start up businesses, that’s an additional risk that they’re taking, they don’t have that. People saw us for almost ten years with the attitude, keep Young Blood, keep the doors open just to contribute to the local art scene in Atlanta. If anything, they wish we would be more aggressive when it comes to making money. Because we worried in the beginning, ‘oh we don’t want to be perceived as trying to make a buck,’ but everyone that we talked to was like no, you guys need to be more aggressive businesswomen. So we have that support behind us, and it makes us more confident about playing the game, I guess.

C: Did you get books or something? How did you learn the ins and outs of business?

M: The main way we’ve learned is by making mistakes.

K: We kind of went backwards. We had no idea what we were doing, we’ve learned by mistakes we’ve made. A few years ago we went to a business coach and he tried to teach us the basics of running a business that we should have known from the beginning. So I definitely recommend taking just a basic business class if you want to go it full-time. There’s a few rules that, even though I know we’re really different than a lot of businesses, we are a business, and there’s some basic rules that you need to follow before learning the hard way.

M: Because as an alternative business, we’d like to think the rules don’t apply to us, but they do. And there’s some business fundamentals that we think are crucial to understand and apply if you’re going to have a profitable business. Like we now have sales report meetings and a profit loss sheet, stuff like that.

C: And when you say not making a profit, are you breaking even at this point?

M: Yeah, which isn’t ideal, but we try to focus on the positive and because so many other businesses around here have had to close their doors in the past couple of years because of the economy.

Mississippi artist Ming Donkey installing a show in the gallery.

C: Ten year plan, five year plan, what do you foresee?

K: I would say for this location, the size is okay, but we’d definitely like to have more going on in different cities.

M: That would be our dream.

K: That we have a franchise or something, we open them, but we have other people that are kind of over them in other cities.

M: I think my dream would be to really get a successful business formula down and then open some other shops and galleries, some other Young Bloods.

C: Any idea which cities?

M: Um, I’d love…well every city I go to, I can see a Young Blood there, but as close as Athens and Savannah—we love Austin, that’d be fun.

K: There’s a lot of places that don’t have, well, there’s kind of an overload on the West Coast, but there’s not much in between.

M: Yeah, someone pointed out to me recently that one of the most profitable places to open a Young Blood might be in the suburbs, because creative people are so hungry for something different and it made me think, they’re probably right.

C: Are your artists primarily local?

M: Some are local, some are from all over the country.

K: We like to support our local artists, but we like to mix it up and also bring artists from other states that people who live here don’t get to see. That’s another exciting thing, introducing artists to the people that regularly come through here.

C: And do the artists, and the people whose work stocks the boutique, do you find them or do they come to you?

M: We still do most of the research to find new artists. On the gallery side it’s mostly people that submit to us, on the store side, we spend hours online trying to find new designers.

K: The shop is all consignment, so you contact twenty people and you get one.

M: A lot of people don’t trust consignment, but we’re really great at bookkeeping and sending out monthly checks and sales reports. Pretty much everyone that works with us stays with us.

C: How many people do you employee?

K: We have three part time people, but we constantly have interns. We have five interns right now. We like getting students from area colleges who want to get involved in the Atlanta art community and see how it works.We get them from different backgrounds, from writing backgrounds or photography…

M: Because we’re basically doing the job of ten people. So we try to get interns who work with marketing and promoting, journalism majors to write press releases, graphic designers to help with flyers and posters and web design, fashion designers who want to learn how a shop is run, and a lot of art majors want to be a gallery assistant…it really helps us out a lot to have motivated interns around.

C: And how many artists does the gallery carry?

K: We have about 500 artists—

M: We don’t have all of them now, but that’s how many we’ve had in the shop since moving to this location.

K: There are some that we don’t currently have in stock, but the vendors come in and out, they send stuff every few months.

C: Who does the displays in the shop?

K: We do it, but that’s also another internship…merchandising.

M: That’s been a learning experience, how to best display something, because obviously something’s going to sell way better if it’s well-displayed.

C: And you have so many objects and such a variety of objects. It kind of has the cozy jumble of a junk shop, nooks and crannies and finding new treasures each time you walk in.

M: That’s a good point. It’s something that requires a lot of attention, but we don’t want to perfect it exactly, because we don’t want it to feel sterile.

Little danger of things feeling sterile with Jolene around!

Part 3 up soon!

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