Renee Co. Creative

…is this something?

Somehow, last week, my Etsy shop hit 1,500 sales (which may be a random milestone to celebrate, but life is moving fast these days, and the 1k mark came and went without notice – oops).

The shop started with a personal project about 6 months ago: looking for floral art for my own home. I found a print that I loved for a price I didn’t ($400 each!), so I tracked down the original source —a 200+-year-old botanical text.

Starting with high-resolution scans, I spent HOURS curating, color correcting, touching up imperfections, resizing, and eventually printing my collection.

Knowing that Etsy had a marketplace for digital art, I figured maybe someone out there was looking for the same thing, and 4 dollars was certainly a better deal than 400. Within a few weeks, people started buying it.

About 2 months later, I was thinking of how bland and impersonal interiors have become in the past few years. How do you incorporate more fun and color into an existing aesthetic without it looking terrible? And I thought:

well, I guess you just try it and see how it looks.

So, I took those antique prints and added some colorful watercolor stripes. Sales increased 10x in a matter of weeks. After that, I started selling original artwork too. The whole thing felt surreal for a while; I made something that hundreds of people liked enough to pay for?

So the sales, plus all the DMs asking where to buy the home decor in my mockup photos (the answer is nowhere – they’re AI-generated, sorry!), have me thinking that other people may resonate with my style.

My friends have told me that I need a platform to share my creative projects. Maybe that’s because they think I have something useful to share, or maybe it’s because they’re currently my only audience and they’re tired of hearing about it (kidding, love you guys).

Regardless, here I am, bolstered by the 1500 people who paid for my work and the confidence of my wonderful friends, thinking: what now? I’m not sure, but I figured this website is a good start, so if you’re reading this, welcome! I’m pleasantly surprised (assuming you’re not my mom) that anyone made it this far, but thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more!

More what? No idea, but stay tuned for … definitely something.