Artist Perry Milou
Join us for an inspiring conversation with artist Perry Milo, who shares his journey from street selling to becoming a successful full-time artist. Discover how he leverages social media, guerrilla marketing, and philanthropic endeavors to turn his passion for art into a thriving business. Perry discusses the importance of building connections, being prolific, and the strategies that have helped him navigate the art world. Whether you're an aspiring artist or simply curious about the creative process, this episode is packed with valuable insights and motivation.
Podcast Transcribe
Perry Milou: First of all, it's super cool and humbling to be able to chat with you finally, one-on-one. I think I watched the ASF Zoom calls for six months before I threw my name into the hat. I'd have to say that you are the main reason, and I think you are probably to a lot of aspiring artists that are on the radar of ASF from the get-go. Whether to have your company build out a website, to me, that's what impressed me a lot because just hearing the way that you spoke about the company and your passion, it was more your passion that I related to because I'm a very passionate artist. When I can relate to somebody else that's speaking about art or other artists or collaboration or seeing other artists succeed, boy, that was hook, line, and sinker. I just wanted to share that.
I have been blessed to be painting and creating art since I was five years old. I always tell people it's just a gift from a higher source, God, whatever you want to call it, and I don't do the art, the art does me. I could pan around the studio in a minute, and I have drawings from fifth grade that are framed in glass. I always tell this story to people when they ask me about sales. In first grade, I used to get off the bus and buy a pack of bubble gum cards from a store here on the East Coast called 7-Eleven. They were probably 25 cents in the mid-'70s. I used to get my cards with my brother, take the stick of gum out, and we'd get our doubles the next day. I'd get colored 8x10 construction paper, wrap them up, put another piece of gum in it, and I would draw a Phillies player on the top because I'm from Philadelphia, and it would say "One Philly inside." I would tape them up real nice, gamely folded, and bring them to school and sell them for half the cost. I just started, I knew that art was my love, and I knew I was a natural-born salesman. I got pinched in a week by the principal, and my mom had to come into the school, and they reprimanded me from selling my double baseball cards. But it was the drawing, the illustration of looking at something and drawing it on the construction page, and that's what started me. I just knew it was all there.
I've taught kids, I've had art studios, I've had a gallery in Philly for seven years in the early 2000s. I packed the shop to bet on myself to move to Miami, the Wynwood Art District, which is like the American Riviera of art right now. I lasted a year there because the market crashed. I came back, decided I didn't want to be in retail anymore, and I've been in several big studios for the last decade, utilizing social media. I sell my art all over the place. One thing that is pertinent to my journey is I had a brain tumor survivor of 20 years. I had a pituitary adenoma this big in the center of my brain in 2005. It was scary, my life was saved, and I think after that moment, I decided to become very philanthropic in my endeavors with pivoting to branding my art philanthropically. I probably do an event two or three times a month where I set up many auctions. I have to educate and massage nonprofits into how I could sell my art at their auctions, paint live, give a good percentage, live paintings 100%, prints maybe set them up in a sliding scale of profit that I could take back without them thinking that I'm a pig and I want to get slaughtered versus a pig that wants to get fat. It's worked really well.
I hear you on your chats all the time because I'm constantly on Instagram about giving it away, making a print, giving it away, and I can't stress how much art I give away. I give away art every week because I can make a giclée whether it's from your company or three other companies for 20 bucks, and I can give it away, and it's another customer wall. It's a beautiful thing to give, and you get back 50, 100%, tenfold whatever in that strategy. Go 100%. The hard thing about it is viewing it not as something you're giving away but viewing it as advertising dollars spent. That's what it is, it's just advertising dollars.
Patrick Shanahan: How long have you been doing digital marketing? It feels like my whole life, 25-plus years. I have not seen a single solitary artist on Instagram, on Facebook, on X, on Google ads ever start advertising and then keep advertising. The reason is it doesn't work, never works. Okay, great. What does that mean? Artists and photographers just don't advertise. There's not a business in the world that doesn't have to advertise, right? Tesla's advertising now, the only one by the way is the red rooster sauce Sriracha that's never spent a dollar on advertising, but every other business in history you ever hear of, they have to advertise. Artists are no different, and when you do these giveaways correctly and you realize it's just an advertising cost, it's boom, there you are.
So just out of curiosity, are you back in Florida now, or are you back in Philly now?
Perry Milou: No, I left. I had a big strong gallery in the Wynwood Art District in 2009 when everything crashed, but it was just a gentrification of the Wynwood Art District now because Art Basel took over the phenomenon there. There's 100 galleries in the district, there's more galleries in the Design District, a lot takes place on the beach, but I lost a lot of bank. I risked a lot going there, I was too early going there, and I was falling in love with my now wife, and I have two children. She was back here, I lost my money, I came back, I got married, I started a family, so there's more cement under my feet, but I love Miami and Southern Florida. It is a great place for someone who creates art like me to market themselves.
Patrick Shanahan: Amazing. How long have you been a full-time artist because it's your day job, right?
Perry Milou: Yeah, it's my life. My mother was a ballerina, a professional actress, and a model, and my father was very successful, a restaurateur in Philadelphia. So when I graduated college with my BFA from the University of Arizona in 1990, I immediately came home and didn't want to leave Arizona because it's so beautiful, West Coast, and went into hospitality, went into bartending like a lot of actors, models, painters, writers, and made drinks for 10 years, saved a lot of cash, then started painting. That lasted about 10 years, but I was not painting full-time, maybe three or four hours a day because I was a single guy, the nightlife, I just didn't have it in me to do it. I went outdoors, en plein air, in the early 2000s in a very close proximity to one of my father's places, which was a beautiful French bistro, very European, and a very famous square in Philadelphia called Rittenhouse Square. I started setting up paintings of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and cityscapes, nothing that was in front of me that other artists would normally go paint, and I started selling off the street, and I did it for 10 years, and I did great. It was the hardest hustle I've ever imagined, but the contacts and the networks that I developed in those 10 years enabled me to then go full-time, to open my galleries, and to keep moving forward. So I would say professionally non-stop since '98 or '99.
Patrick Shanahan: Wow, that's amazing. Where along those lines did you find Art Storefronts, and what caused you to sign up with us?
Perry Milou: Your Facebook advertisements and Instagram advertisements started popping up on my radar maybe four or five months before I signed up. I've been with you almost a year and a half now. As I said, I was humored by watching you and Nick, but I wasn't happy with my site. I've been through three or four sites, and I've been publishing for a while. I work with four publishers, I don't always use Graphics and Gutenberg, there's stuff all around my gallery from different publishers all over the United States that I use and vendors, but I loved what you were talking about. Your advertising kept coming, I kept listening, I think I did five or six Zoom calls, and I said, "This is a play." I got on the phone with one of your sales guys, Reed Ramirez, who I think is a really cool street shooter, yeah, really good dude, and I threw down, and I'm really happy. I think I've signed up maybe seven to 10 clients for you. I'm ready to work for you guys.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, we need you on commission immediately. By the way, you should be getting paid for those referrals. That's absolutely right. So in the year and a half, what's changed in your business? What have we forced upon you that's been tweaks to what you were already doing? Curious about that.
Perry Milou: I think I always need more tweaks, and I think any artist needs more tweaks and is always trying to figure out how to get better if they have a good business mind. If they don't, they're just going to remain in quicksand. So I think I signed up for your marketing right away, and I knew it wasn't what it is now, and it didn't work out that well, but I didn't complain too much about it because part of it was probably some of the things that I needed to do better and some of the things that you needed to do better, and I know that the company has expressed that. But I think it's just more I'm learning to be consistent with my practices. I have a pretty good handle on Instagram and Facebook. I think between my personal Facebook page, professional Facebook page, my Instagram, it's all organic. I've never bought a list, I've never bought anybody. I do giveaways, and I look for influencers to do giveaways all the time because that just, you do a giveaway with an influencer, I think you were talking about it last week, you can land four or 500 new followers. So I think it's just better consistent practices. Do I send out my newsletter as much as I should? No, probably not. Any day that I do a post or a reel, I'm probably close to 12 or 15,000 real eyes that are on my work.
Yeah, and I'm selling through Facebook, I'm selling through Messenger, I'm selling through Instagram. People come to my gallery, I have art in car washes, coffee shops, restaurants, bars. I put my art everywhere because that's just who I am. I think I could teach a class on guerrilla marketing for artists. That's who I am, that's what I do best.
Patrick Shanahan: Your subject matter, and I'm scrolling through your Instagram account as you can see, your subject matter opened you up to so many different die-hard audiences. What would you call your primary focus? It's like celebrity-based pop art or what?
Perry Milou: It comes and goes into that niche. There's a Bono piece you just have up, we showed up at the Sphere in Vegas. There's a mobster that I'm friends with that I did art of, and I think you're turning around a piece of London that a big client commissioned. I've had some big hits. I painted Pope Francis when he came to the United States in 2015, and I parlayed that into a big licensing deal. Not to get political, but when Biden took office, I had previously been commissioned by a lobbyist that worked for him four years before, and I got their graces and did some more paintings of him, and I turned him into mugs. I had an Amazon partner, and I think we blew out eight to 10 thousand mugs.
Patrick Shanahan: Whoa, at $35 a piece, mind you.
Perry Milou: I painted Bryce Harper, who's a big deal here in Philly, and I made offset lithographs and blew out 2,000 of those when he hit that mammoth home run that put them in the World Series two years ago. So I'm always trying to think of how to make a project because my art is timely, and I like to create timely pieces. It's not always exactly a pop piece of art, but for the most part, pop culture, yeah, for the most part.
Patrick Shanahan: Do you feel like when you have that range of subject matter, and each one of those subject matters has a die-hard audience behind them, it puts you in such a unique position throughout the year to be able to bring those pieces back up when it's their birthday or if the Phillies get in the World Series again, right, or they win a playoff game, or if so-and-so's in town touring? It opens you up to so many different individual marketing opportunities when you can water ski behind whatever's in the zeitgeist at that moment in time, right? Which is like such a powerful hack.
You have a lot going on in this business, right? Like a crazy amount. Out of curiosity, on all of those Biden mugs because you sold through Amazon, did you keep the email addresses, or you don't have the email addresses because it went through Amazon?
Perry Milou: No, they don't give them to you. I had a partner in Seattle who works on his business mainly to launch niche entrepreneurs into Amazon. So I went to college with this guy, contacted him, it was, I'll get it real quick, so I did the painting for Biden, and I met him, and so it was him drinking his coffee, a cup of Joe mug, love it, yeah. And then in turn, I said, "He just picked her," and not to get into politics, and I did the one, yeah. So we launched it. You have to understand the numbers. I had to pay the broker 15%, I had to pay Amazon 15%, the mugs cost me $6.50 a piece, you got to package them, you got to put them out, but it was a volume deal, and I knew that it was perfect timing, and I had the PR. I was on Inside Edition, I got great PR for it, and it was done.
I got somebody who wants to give me a lot of money to start Trump paintings right now. I'm weighing it. It's again, when you get into politics and that kind of stuff, it's a risk as an artist, but no risk, no reward.
Patrick Shanahan: No risk, no reward. And I feel like if anyone gets latitude to express themselves in that capacity, artists certainly get more than most. Yeah, are you familiar with the term "newsjacking"? Have you heard me say that at all?
Perry Milou: Maybe vaguely, I've heard you say it.
Patrick Shanahan: Okay, it's a super interesting concept, not just for you but for everybody. A marketer coined the term, this guy David Meerman Scott, and he coined it in relation to when the Chilean miners were stuck down in the mine. Okay, and he uses this example to define the term, and then we'll move it to some of the stuff you're doing. You did it essentially with Biden, but somebody at Oakley was like, "Oh my goodness, all these guys are stuck down on the ground, their eyes have not seen sun for so long, they're going to be blinded when they come out. Let's get some Oakley glasses down there." And so they flew Oakley glasses to that place in Chile and sent them down into the mine. Then when they started coming up, every single solitary one of them had Oakley glasses on. And that's what he called newsjacking. It's like this was a 30-40 million dollar PR coup of all time that Oakley pulled off doing this, and that's what you did with Biden. And to be honest with you, it is such a smart tactic for an artist or a photographer.
So it's like when we look at your subject matter, it's anytime any of these folks pop for whatever reason, Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she died, anytime any of these people are in the news again, it's boom, you got your opportunity to surface it and hit it again. How many times have you seen this guy's face in the news in the last couple of months? I painted him once, it was a charity event, and I just got a call for another charity event, so I'm doing a giant painting of him in two weeks for a big charity event for a friend of mine who lost his son, unfortunately. So that'll be a great piece to do.
Patrick Shanahan: Exactly. Again, it takes a certain type of artist that wants to think this way and that creates this way in the first place. It's not for everyone, but that doesn't mean that you can't apply practices to any type of painting that you would do and figure out how you could market it into a niche or a direction or a demographic and get attention as well. It doesn't have to be my kind of art, for sure.
Perry Milou: Yeah, yeah, which is just amazing to contemplate. One thing I do want to pin you down on and get some feedback on is, like, number one, okay, and shout out to Erica. Erica, I love your work, Perry, so you got a fan in Erica. I'm like, we have 14,000 customers, right, and many are like you. We just have so many different things going on and so many different revenue opportunities in so many different ways of becoming successful as an artist or photographer. And I've long said that I've never met a revenue source I don't like, right, as long as it's legal, because the hardest thing to do is turn a creative passion into a business that pays your bills.
And in that context, what always gets brought up is the gallery model, right? And I'm not anti-gallery, okay, per se, because it's a revenue source, and if you can get it to work, fantastic. What I am anti is anti-gatekeeper. And I think one of the beautiful things that's come along in this age of the internet is like the gatekeepers are just utterly, totally obliterated. It used to be you had to go through the gallery, now you can start your own gallery, which is where I want to go with this. It used to be that you would have to have an art publisher or to get discovered, the internet wasn't here, and it's, I hate gatekeepers. I don't want anyone in my way ever, and that's just my own personality. Great if you're in a gallery, good on you, but I find that relationship to be somewhat exploitative in the sense that the artist never ever knows who's purchasing their work, and then the 50% haircut, and then not getting paid on time. And I don't even mean exploitative, that's a bad way to say it because not bad, though, yeah, but those gallery owners, they're outlaying capital, they're paying those bills, they're doing everything they can, they need to be compensated for it.
But what I don't necessarily like about that gallery situation, big picture, is I've seen over the course of years because we've been doing this for long enough now, what happens when you don't know who your collectors are, and the collectors are the lifeblood long-term of any single solitary artist or photographer because what happens is these folks just keep coming back and back and back and back for life. And if you build those up, it's like you have a base salary for your business every single solitary year when new stuff comes out. But what I love more than anything else is the notion of artists owning their own galleries. I think that is so fantastically powerful. I think it is the way forward. Do not again, capital intensive, so I want to get some feedback from you on how that process has been. Is what you have now retail and your studio, or is it both?
Perry Milou: I'm gonna try and walk around, and if it slows down, just tell me, just give it a shot. I was gonna answer your question with something that's very prevalent right now that happened last week. So my gallery, and I'll tell you about this gallery, this gallery is a 2,600 square foot space that I found from a great guy that owns a two-building complex. Long story short, he had office flex space that he couldn't rent since COVID. I negotiated a great deal with him. It's got 10 rooms in it. I got a spin art room, I got a print room, I paint, it's huge, it's got 10 huge, whoa, and it's outside a neighborhood, two very artsy, famous neighborhoods called Lambertville and New Hope. New Hope is in Pennsylvania, Lambertville is in New Jersey, and between the two of them, there's probably 15 or 20 art galleries.
But the thing that hurts me, what's not hurting me, it's interesting, is my gallery is half a mile away, and as they say in Jamaica, you could be just around the corner, but you could be in the wrong place if you're in retail. So people don't necessarily walk into my gallery, but because I'm working so hard on my guerrilla marketing, I have a festival in the metropolitan area of the little town all weekend or the next two weekends, and I get people to come to my gallery. So I work very hard on that.
Now, the thing you said about an artist having their own gallery these days, I've been thinking about throwing down and really going to a big art fair this year. Two weeks ago, I applied for Hamptons Fine Art Fair, which takes place for 19 years in Southampton, in the Hamptons. It's called the Hamptons Fine Art Fair, very famous fair. So I applied. Imagine, look, anyone can have art, anyone can say that. I hear you talking about it on social media, make a black wall, put up the art, put up your sign, you're a gallery. My ASF site has a gallery page, this is a gallery. So I applied, I got juried into the show, I'm bringing another artist, it's costing me close to $20,000 to play ball for four days, but I'm gonna be in front of 10,000 multi-millionaires in a 20-foot-long booth by 10-foot sides, plenty of room for storage, and I'm gonna roll the dice. I'm looking forward to it.
Patrick Shanahan: Love it. We're going to have a strategy consult before you get in there so we can maximize everything we're pulling out of there. What gives me interesting pivot, just to finish on the gallery thing, it's, I know it's a big risk, right, and retail is hard, and trying to keep retail doors open is really hard because an employee, but I do think I want to see more artists individually open their own galleries. I think it is such a path to success, and because you know what it also forces you to do, especially in like the retail capacity, is like, how do I maximize the revenue per square foot? And inevitably that goes back to your lineup and the items that you are selling and how many different things that you can get your creativity on.
And I look at Jonah, you've seen some of the interviews with Jonah, right, the photographer, Florida, yeah, yeah, yes. So him opening his gallery has really forced him to ramp up his book production, right, ramp up the postcards that he does, right, ramp up the keychains and some of these other little knickknacks because for him being in a tourist town, instead of acquiring three or four, five or six customers a month because his pieces are expensive, he's now selling thousands of books because the tourists are coming in, they're going, "This is awesome, let me get one of these to remember this place," and then they're taking it home. Now they've got the book, which is going to later drive original purchases. He's acquired a customer, he's paying his rent, and then all of that applies online as well.
So in terms of where you start and what you do in terms of price range, I'd love to hear where you're at in terms of price range. What do you have in your offering? Take us from the close to zero all the way up to the many thousands. I'd be curious to hear that.
Perry Milou: Yeah, sure. I think I made a comment on your IG reel the other day, you talking about understanding how to adjust. Told me 20 years ago, you sell the glasses, you eat with the masses. I think as an artist, exactly what you're talking about, you got to learn to do both. I sell a standard 16x20 in giclée from another company, albeit that arrives at my house stretched for 27 bucks, and I'll tell you who it is. It's BuildASign that owns Vistaprint, and they're also called Easy Canvas Prints. Their price is better than me buying bulk from Graphics, so I could sell that for, I can mark that up four or five times at a certain festival, or I can mark it up 10 times at another festival if I hand-embellish it or something.
I think that I probably, I sell t-shirts, for instance. My Taylor Swift painting that I did last year when her tour went nuts, I have friends in the t-shirt business. I probably made three or four hundred shirts. I probably have half a dozen left, so I'll take them to a festival I'm doing this weekend. I'm trying to think what else I have that's in the 40, 40,50 range because of all my files. I have 400 archived paintings at this point that have been scanned on a Cruse scanner for the last 15 years that has given me a 400 megapixel resolution image. If you look on my back end of my shop, which is no better or worse than anybody else's shop, you can see people buying prints off my ASF shop that are 35, 35,40. I also sell offset lithographs that I can sell for 35, 35,40 mass-produced. That's what I did with the Phillies project with Bryce Harper when I did the ink deal with Pope Francis. I had everything. I had paperweights, I had masks, I had mugs, I had shirts, I had calendars. I had so much.
I was very close to working with QVC—you probably know about QVC. They don’t put up any money upfront, but I had three meetings with them when Pope Francis came to the United States. It would have cost $100,000 to have them feature the product when he arrived in Philadelphia. It was a great learning experience for me. My original paintings typically sell for anywhere between 2,500 to 2,500to3,000 for a 24x36 size, something like that. I just sold a piece for $15,000 at a charity auction event—that J. Lo piece. I have a nice range for sure. You have to have it, you have to have it.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, and then what do your big originals go for?
Perry Milou:I just did a commission original of a Godfather montage for a client for 10,000. It was 60 by 48 inches. It depends where you′re fishing. When I go to the Hamptons in the middle of July, they recommend that you don′t start any painting sales less than 10,000. It was 60 by 48 inches. It depends where you are refreshing. o to15,000.Now, I don’t sell a lot of paintings for 15,000, so I’m going to have to restate what my original prices look like on my site now. Am I going to bang them up that high? Is it going to be somewhere in between? Around people like that, when they see a price that’s maybe four or $5,000, they may think it’s too cheap, and they might not buy from you. So there’s going to be a lot of strategy you put into that art fair, 100%.
Patrick Shanahan: And it's really interesting, what do you do in that scenario, right? Do you, because if I'm having you put QR codes in your booth, right, and your name's everywhere, and they search you, and they go to the website, and they see something $10,000 cheaper than what you've got, you're going to be in hot water. You're going to need a clear strategy for what to do there. Either some have to come off the site, or you're definitely going to have to think that one through.
Perry Milou: And they will do it, and they will do it. You're right, you're right. Yeah, they always do. Rich people didn't get rich, it turns out, by paying retail ever, right? You know, unless you're in the inheritance business, and in which case, business is booming. But that's amazing. I love that you mix in the online stuff with the in-person events, with the commissions, with the shows and theirs, and having your own galleries. You're leaving yourself so many different ways to win, which is so important. Not enough artists and photographers do that. They just try to post a couple of things here or there and say, "Message me." It's like, you got to be cultivating these revenue sources.
What would you, so I would imagine that was just in your DNA to do that, but yeah, what advice would you give to other artists that are looking to cultivate these additional revenue sources? That would be great to hear.
Perry Milou: I can't, and look, I love, I have a bunch of artists that I speak to on a daily basis that are great friends of mine, and we're always talking about business. And I have some that are younger, and I have some that are mentors of mine that make four or five times as much money as I do that have been, that are in their 60s, that are great to talk to and to me, it all comes down to being prolific and exposing the art. If I go out to a great coffee shop tomorrow at 2 o'clock in the afternoon with a friend, you could bet I'm bringing a painting under my arm, and I'm going to put it outside and lean it on the table because people are gonna see it.
Patrick Shanahan: Love it, love it. Yeah, I bring it all the time. My friend, I moved to this new neighborhood, I got a Facebook Messenger that this guy owned the car wash. I asked my wife if she ever been to that car wash, she goes, "Yeah, you've been going there for years." It's a dilapidated car wash near your art gallery. So I went to visit the guy, and he actually has a record store inside his car wash. It's not a new car wash, it's the kind where you leave your car, you get out, you walk down a hallway, you watch your car getting washed. He got nothing but white cinder walls. He goes, "Will you give me some art?" I said, "Sure." He only takes 20%. There's 16 pieces hanging in his car wash. It's springtime, the place is going to be mobbed all day.
I'm doing an art fair this weekend on the river near the gallery, and I did it four times last year. They had four events: spring, summer, winter, fall. My wife says, "How long are you gonna keep selling your art on the street? You're arts way valued higher. Look where you're going this summer, you're going to the Hamptons. You're still going to put your art on the street for this festival?" I go, "You're darn right I am because you never know who's going to walk by." There's people that visit this neighborhood that I'm in from New York, from the Hudson Valley. They come here during the summer to get away from New York, and it takes one. I had two clients last year. I did a festival for 10 hours a day, back-breaking these festivals, yeah. Two clients, $10,000 in my pocket. So I tell her, "Of course I'm going back out there. Of course I'm going back out there."
Patrick Shanahan: I get asked all the time, the premise of the question is that there's some sort of formula, no, number of people you have on an email list, social media followers, number of sales, run consistent marketing going on, and the reality is none of that I've found accurately predictive of the revenue potential of an art or photography business. But you know what I have found that is predictive? Number of new customers acquired per year. Number of new customers acquired per year. And the reason is that the easiest customer to get is the one that you already have. It is far easier for an artist or photographer to get an existing customer, someone that's purchased something, to come back and buy again than it is to go out and get a new one, right?
And when you realize that, that's why we stress so much the pricing in the lineup. That's why your strategy of being in all these places, doing the low route there, doing the high route there, is so important because the socioeconomic graph that everyone falls into, low-income folks, lower middle class, upper middle class, high net worth individuals, right? No one is fixed on that thing for life. People are moving up and down that little thing all the time, right? And the person that can only afford to buy a $50 Taylor Swift t-shirt from you now, four years from now, is going to buy their first house, and who are they going to be thinking about? They're going to be thinking about you because the Taylor Swift shirt is hanging in the damn closet. It's the number of new customers you acquire per year that is almost the most predictive metric an art or photography business can have towards the revenue potential of the business.
Perry Milou: I agree. I'll tell you a great quick story. Since I graduated college in 1990, I went across the country to go to school in Tucson, Arizona. Big school, 45,000 kids, a lot of money kids: Chicago, New York, Michigan, California, Florida. I didn't really go there to learn much about art. I socialized, and I partied, and I don't know how I got out of there alive sometimes, to be honest. But once Facebook hit, and once Instagram hit, seven, eight, nine, 10 years now, it's what, 35 years later, these kids that I went to college with, and some, they are buying my art during their 50s now. They're paying three, four, $5,000. They're ordering giclées. I'm sending them stuff for free. They're involved in nonprofits. They're this, they're that. It's unbelievable because of the network and the friendships that I created then, how it's coming forth full circle now.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You had four phone calls in the time that we've been on this thing, so if anyone thinks Perry's not hustling, his phone's telling a different story. It's amazing. I'm gonna silence it. Yeah, it's, yeah, we need that connection to keep this thing going on. Yeah, absolutely amazing. 2024, what's your biggest focus going to be? We obviously have that Hamptons show, which is a big dog, but other than that?
Perry Milou: Well, I'm always trying to figure out how, like you always talk about pivoting, and I hear Brandon, and I try, even when I try to listen to as many of your marketing calls as possible, and even though I would say more than 50% of the artists, and I'm not judging anybody, a lot of it is I'm past that stage of what people are talking about, but I'll hear once in a while if I'm not on the call, I'm going to miss something, and there's always something to learn even from somebody that I wouldn't call a novice or that's more emerging than I am because you have to check your ego out the door.
But when you talk about, when I hear you guys talk about pivoting and the strategy, so I'm throwing down for this fair, the galleries represented in the fair, and I know that going back to Miami for Art Basel, a lot of it, these fairs are all gallery-affiliated, so this will give me the credentials to point towards December and maybe I bring a couple artists that I represent here at the gallery. I don't really represent that many artists at the gallery right now. I thought I was going to represent a lot of them when I opened last year, but I got so busy with my own work, I didn't feel I was giving them the right justice and my attention. If I had somebody working for me, that would be a different story, and that might be something in the future, but I think this July, and then pointing towards getting back to Miami for Art Basel, for sure.
Patrick Shanahan: Amazing, amazing. And what will be the main thrust of your online marketing efforts?
Perry Milou: I always think my online marketing efforts need help, and I hope I get a chance to follow up with you because I need to delegate authority, and I'm not afraid to pay people to work for me, and I don't think I do a good enough job at it. I'm a good front man.
Patrick Shanahan: So hard. Delegation is so hard. It's so hard. I'm not, but you have to find the right people to delegate it to. I'm a good speaker, I'm fun, I like to talk. I'll talk to anybody. I'll sit down on a bench and talk to a homeless person all day as much as somebody that buys my art because you can learn so much from everyone. Great attitude, but yeah, I need to delegate authority. I need to have a better, much greater marketing strategy. I need to be able to hit on those projects that I created that I did well with, but I need to be able to hit on them tenfold. So when I do that painting of the home run that sends the team into the series, I need to have a strategist that can get it Facebook ads that can get it to move, that can target 10, 10 billion, 10 million baseball fans in 30 days instead of doing it the way that I do it, which isn't bad. I get retail accounts, I sell them on Messenger, I'll sell them through social media, but I have to have a way better strategy. My success at it needs to go like this.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, yeah. You already have all the green lines to tell you, invest more in your online side of things. Your Instagram account, for instance, does not represent in the slightest the potential of your business. You're doing revenue, you're at 3,500, and we've got to get this thing up to 100,000. So we've got a ton of work to do here, and I could certainly give you some advice on all of the above.
I do love one of the things that you said that most people shy away from, and I would be curious to get your philosophy. You just figure this out natively, but conversations are all that matter. You're talking about Messenger, you're talking about Instagram DM, you're talking about holding a painting in a coffee shop. If all artists and photographers just focused on having conversations instead of hiding behind their online facade, everything would change. Everything does change.
We're currently in a program at Art Storefronts where we've neglected this. Now I've got one guy that reports directly to me and my team that is responding to every single solitary email, no matter what. Then I'm going to move him into Messenger and ManyChat, and I got to teach you about ManyChat too because you'd be leveraging that. We'll talk about that after the fact. Those conversations are what lead to sales. It's the moment where you put everything down and you have that conversation, and I can tell you're having those all over the place, and I know that's native to you, but is that an intentional part of your strategy?
Perry Milou: Yeah, of course, it's native, but it's very intentional. I may go out to dinner with some friends tonight or family friends or anyone. I may be visiting somebody's house, right away, I'll be scoping up their artwork. If I see something they got somewhere, I'm gonna ask them where they got it. I may ask them how much they paid for it because that's just the kind of guy I am. But yes, if you're going to, that's just it's native, and it's intentional. My whole life, besides my wife and my children, which is at 4:00, I put on this other hat, so I only have so much time during the day to cram that. And to me, having the physical real conversation versus spending the time on where I need help, which is online, like you said, it works better for me because if someone sees something on my Facebook or my Instagram, I will try and get them on the phone right away because I can sell it through them seeing me or hearing my voice versus, "This is a thousand, but I'll take 750." I'd rather put it, if you live around the corner, I'd rather put it in my car and drive it to your house and leave it with you for a week. I don't care. Let me leave it, let me leave it there. Let me give you three or four paintings. Where's your shore? You want to put this in your shore house for the summer? I'll be down there in July. I got 200 paintings in this gallery. They're not selling if they're going to sit here.
So to me, it's always my guerrilla marketing strategy and my ability to communicate far exceeds what my success has been working with online, and I know that has to grow. You have to realize your strengths and weaknesses, but yes, of course, to answer your question, it's native, and it's also very premeditated.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, you know, and everyone's always asking through the lens of like, "God, I posted this thing on Instagram, and I got 10,000 views," or something went viral here or there, and I'm like, "That's great, that's fantastic, I'm fired up for you, but there's no button on the ATM machine for likes or comments or shares, right?" Like, understand what you're attempting to do. The conversation is the metric that is leading to the sale. So if you're posting stuff and you're getting into conversations, you're on the right track. Do more of that. If you're posting stuff and you're not getting any conversations, you're on the social media hamster wheel that's not getting you anywhere. All that's doing is fluffing your ego. It's not putting dollars in your pocket, and I want to see artists and photographers succeed. So it's having damn conversations. It's a really underemphasized modality, right? An underemphasized priority set, which I think more artists and photographers need to get.
I love asking the cliché question. It's cliché, but it's also telling, which is, if I could grab Perry, 30-year-old Perry, aspiring artist, what advice would you give to that guy now?
Perry Milou: What advice would I give to the 30-year-old Perry? Yeah, probably to focus more at that point. I was outside every day at that age, outside on the street. So even when I went to college, I didn't work that hard on my art. I knew I was a natural salesman, but I wasn't, if I could go back to age 30, I would be leaps and bounds further ahead than I am now because I just, I wasn't prolific. So I needed to be more prolific and goof off less.
Patrick Shanahan: Everybody evolves differently. Yeah, yeah, and so I am really trending in the right direction right now, for sure.
Perry Milou:No, I love it. I think one of the reasons that we've been successful as a business at Art Storefronts is that there's no education that exists that teaches creators how to monetize their talent. There's no classes in college, right? Not in art school, not in photography school. There was nothing like, "This is how you actually monetize your creative talent." And the shame of it was, the teachers are there, okay, and been there for a long time, and do you know who is one of the greatest teachers? Picasso. And you say this word, prolific. A Hungarian illustrator author named Brassaï was interviewing Picasso a little bit later in his career to write this book, and I think it's called "Conversations with Picasso," and the book is fantastic. It's out of print, you have to get it on Amazon for 60 or 60or70. And Brassaï, the interviewer, but also an aspiring artist, asks Picasso this series of questions, okay, about how do I grow in the art business, essentially like how do I monetize this talent? Where's the question? And Picasso early on, my drawings did not command high prices, but they all sold. The work must go out into the world. And Picasso, when he died, had 42,000 unsold works in his inventory. 42,000. And I've broken down the math, and like the sheer number that guy created, and it's like, how many artists don't ever reach the level of success that they could by just not being prolific enough? I think using " prolific" is just using that as a staple word is like a way to get there because inevitably what ends up happening is you get bored with the subject matter, and just like a broken clock is right twice a day, you're gonna create something that's going to hit because you're so prolific. That's a very, very interesting thing that you centered on. Give me a typical, how many hours of painting a week are you right now, currently?
Perry Milou: I was having this conversation with my wife, Angela, last night because I told her, "I feel my life is a big sacrifice to our family." When you have kids, my kids are my greatest creation with my wife, greater than any painting I'll ever make. My children, amen to that. Amen to that. Thank you. But when you have children, you hit a wall at a certain hour. So I have to work smarter. So my day is, I'm up at 5:30, I do a little exercise, I have a cup of black coffee, I get the kids rolling, I say goodbye, and I drive. I am so regimented, it's crazy because I know that at 4 or 4:30, I get soccer, karate, whatever, cook dinner, it's done. So whereas before, I'm not going to lunch with anybody, I'm not, if I have to go to Philadelphia, there's no lunch. It's drop off the painting or go to the publisher, race back to the gallery, paint another 40 minutes. I literally may only paint, which is crazy for someone my age, almost 57, 25 hours a week, whereas when I was single, when I was 30, 70 hours a week, midnight, one o'clock, two o'clock in the morning, seven o'clock in the morning. If that's just the way it is.
I know that when I'm 65, which is not that far away, and my kids are in college or whatever, I'll go back to that, but I'm a very patient person. I've learned to work on what I'm learning now is to work on five or six different projects at once, whereas I used to be so ADD that I couldn't do it. Now I think I'm using my ADD to my advantage, and I'm learning how to work on five or six different projects at once. Keeps things fresh. I'm moving away, I'm looking at different things, and that could be a business project too, not just hands on the canvas. So I, you have to learn to work smarter as you get older. People will always tell you that no matter what business you're in, and I think I'm doing a better job at that.
But I always, people always ask me too, "What's your favorite painting?" My favorite painting is the one I'm working on right now because there's a relationship with what I'm creating, and the canvas is changing and evolving, and I'm only, it's only as good as the day that I'm in right now. So present and blessed to have this gift to just do this. It's awesome.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, it's amazing, and the fact that you're full-time and everything else. Everyone needs to get Perry a follow. So on Instagram, you can see his handle, let me get that out of the way, is @perrymilouofficial with a blue check mark because we need to give him some love and give him some followers here and get him going.
In my own quest to constantly improve, what's one thing, one thing only, that we could improve at Art Storefronts that would make you a happier customer?
Perry Milou: One thing I think is just continuing to communicate. I love right now being on your Instagram page and seeing your communication. I love listening to you, whether it's you or Nick, for a minute or for two minutes, talking and bringing up a different subject almost every day and repetitively. Like, I go to the IG page to see you talk live. That's what I love. I want to see more of that.
I would like to see, there's so much programming that you could probably put into your business. I would actually like to see, I don't know if I would call it critiques or more business interaction with maybe artists talking amongst each other in some sort of organized feed form, whether it's an artist sharing his space and getting feedback or an artist going somewhere and being on a live Zoom and people chiming in on that. I don't know, almost like some sort of shows that would go on with more people interacting because what you're talking, I think what you've been honing in on is there's a lot of artists out there that are afraid to express themselves and are afraid to speak, and when they are around more artists, it helps them.
But I certainly, and I know you just launched this new niche programming for individual marketing, I forget, it's not the co-pilot, it's the next, Hub, yeah, it's called Hub. Yeah, that's what I need. I need to sit down with you or somebody that could understand the conversation that we just had and listen to what I want to do over the next six months, whether it's the art fair, and you mentioned it, you mentioned, "What can we do? What can we talk about?" Or it's Basel, or it's me coming up with the commercial project, and putting that strategy together and paying you to do it because I am happy to do it because I want to be at the canvas creating and talking to people. I have the ideas on how to market it and how to bring it to market, but you need to be able to delegate it and have the smarter people that understand that to do that. But it has to be, I would love it for it to be really niche for me so I could identify what I want to do, have you guys strategize it, give me the price, and put it to action. There's no guarantee that it's always going to be successful. I'm rolling a dice at an art fair. I'm rolling the dice at this and that, but it all depends on what you want to do with your art and what kind of artist you want to be. That's not for everybody, but that's what I want from ASF besides the site working great. I tell people all the time that you, I've never had a website that has worked so great. It's always online, the speed is always great. I could always call John or one of the guys at 11 o'clock, and they could help me. I could always go on the Facebook group. I really think it's unbelievable. It's incredible what Nick has created, and I think you're a force. I really do.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, I really appreciate you saying that. I think one of the things that I heard out of there too is, and for those that are listening, some of you are customers, some or not, but we have this product, it's called Office Hours, and they're essentially these Zoom calls where we talk about the topics, and everyone comes in, but for a subset of the customers, you guys are at a level above, right? You're at a higher level, and the problems change as the business matures a little bit, and so I feel, I hate the word mastermind, but mastermind, separate group, Discord server, whatever the heck it is, I do feel like we need to get a higher-end product, and everybody would be able to listen to it. I feel like we're missing on something because all of you guys that are full-time artists that are like really successful and well into the six figures, some of you guys into the seven figures and total sales, like the lessons and the learnings are different, and I feel like there's so much that you guys can learn from one another even without us involved in that conversation at all that I feel like I really, I've got to put that together, and it's got to be like, the problem is that as artists get to your level, you're so damn busy and successful, you don't have time to go to these things anymore, and so it's like trying to pin all of those folks down. I have to do something really high-level like that, and Jonah's really been needling me on it, Meg's been needling me on it, like some of our more successful customers are like, "I need that, I need that." So I'm taking notes on that. I'm going to bank that.
I want to thank you for being so gracious with your time. You and I have a ton to do on this Instagram strategy. We have to get this thing beefed up and cooking, and I need to teach you ManyChat, so I have all of those on my list. Any closing thoughts for you, Perry?
Perry Milou: No, it's been great. I've been wanting the opportunity to speak with you and say hi and share, and it's just a blessing. It's great. This is such a, signing up for the website and getting the site moving, but then having the hardships within everything that you have to do. I've been at it a long time, but I'm still a novice at what I'm doing through my social media, and you could see it, but my social media is working, but I'm still a novice at it. And I've hired social media experts, they don't know anything about art, they're not niched to what I need. It's such a different beast. It's so different, they last two or three months. They might be nice, they might be able to do a couple little things, so yeah, it's wonderful to have this conversation, and I'm really looking forward to more things happening with you guys.
Patrick Shanahan: Awesome. Thanks to everyone that was watching. It's Friday, everyone, have an absolutely wonderful weekend, and we'll see you again soon for more customer interviews. Thank you, Patrick. It's been a pleasure.
