Of Sisters and Businesses 

My sister and I are very close, both in age and interests. We spent our Summers in the creation of sketches, drawings on canvas colored with acrylic paints, paint by number paintings, etc. We bonded over color palettes, how to design something that had seemed simple but was actually quite complex, friendly arguments over whose art was better and what we would do next with our art.

Soon we had a collection of art pieces. We had to make room for new creations. In 2019, we started a partnership business to sell our art - RE Creations Studio. 

Here are some of the business decisions we had to make: 

• Naming the business - picking a suitable name. We picked RE Creations Studio. R and E for Ria and Esha and it also highlighted that our studio ‘recreated’ art.

• Selling our art with no online presence. We didn’t have any email accounts, social media accounts or smart phones. So we did physical sales only. 

• Customers - Our sales were to neighbors, friends, and family and public sales were done at Farmers markets.

• Pricing - we took the cost of creating an item (e.g. frame, canvas, paints, etc.) and added an amount to it that seemed like a fair price to us for the effort we had spent on it. 

• Income distribution - 50% of our income was ours and we split that equally between us. The other 50% was donated to our favorite charities. 

We made mistakes too along the way. I wish we had taken photos of us selling so we would have a keepsake of the memories, that we had logged the time spent in creating art, that we had kept a log of what we had sold and for how much, etc. I have now rectified these mistakes with my current businesses. I now capture and log everything regardless of how insignificant it might seem at the moment.

As my team member Mica had said in his blog “How to start a business”, think about what drives your passion and where you would like to invest your time and energy. And then come up with the simplest way to get that to customers. If you start off with a complex plan you might never execute on it. So start with your heart and let it guide you. 

Ria Kumar

May 7, 2025