Hi! Welcome to our very first blog post! My name is Pascale and I started Pinpoint in 2016, and opened my retail shop in 2017. Now, I’m going to do something I never do and share a bit about my personal journey with Pinpoint!
I tend to shy away from opening up online, but I always appreciate hearing from other artists, makers, and business owners about parts of their journey you don’t normally get to see. So I’m going to pay it forward, and open up a little in the hopes it resonates with some of you! I never thought I was the kind of person suited to business. I didn’t think I was the type to: 1) Take the risk, being a generally anxious sort of person and 2) Stick with it and put the work in, having been a chronic underachiever for the first 34 years of my life.
Fortunately, a few experienced entrepreneurs gave me fair warning that to start and keep a business takes more work than is reasonable and rarely turns a profit in the first 4 years or so. (Note: I think the average is 2-3 years, but that depends on many factors, and I’d wager the average in NL is much longer). So I knew at the outset that I’d probably be terrible at it. I have many flaws and shortcomings working against me, but there’s one that is a little bit of a blessing now and then and that’s the tendency to get carried away in a fugue of enthusiasm when I decide I really want to do something. One day, I decided I really wanted to start Pinpoint, so I metaphorically shut my eyes, stuck my fingers in my ears, and shouted “LA LA LA LA LA” so I wouldn’t remember to be scared to try.
I spent about 15 years working minimum wage following a failed attempt to earn an arts degree, and gradually found myself restless and depressed. Growing up, there were many creative things I loved, and showed promise in, but one by one, I reached a point where I would get discouraged and give up. Drawing was the only thing that, while I rage quit repeatedly, I would keep picking it up again after a suitable cooling off period. So over time, I developed a degree of competence and confidence. Of course it’s one thing to be decent at drawing, and another to make a living as an artist, at least by traditional means. These days there are way more possibilities for those of us that are artists, but not the kind the galleries love. For me, it came together when I learned how to screen print, and thought “Oh hey now, I could put my drawings on things and people might like them. The mall is full of crappy shirts with terrible graphics, and they sell those like hot cakes!” With this cogent thought, the winds of novelty and enthusiasm blew straight up my bum and carried me to Pinpoint where I found my “thing”. This thing that is Pinpoint is very dear to me, because even though I work twice as hard for half as much, it’s satisfying work. I love Pinpoint very much and I hope you do too! Thanks for reading :)
