The "exposure" client who actually showed up
i spent years telling myself "exposure" was a scam word and mostly i still think that. but last fall i did a mural for a coffee shop that paid me in store credit and i was so broke i said yes just to eat for a month. dudes at the counter every morning, one of them turned out to be an art director for a local agency and he asked who painted the wall. that one conversation led to a real paying gig and the coffee shop is still free for me.
so the takeaway is not "exposure works." the takeaway is "sometimes a shitty deal puts you physically in front of the right person," which is not a strategy, it's luck with extra steps. i still tell everyone who asks to get paid in cash. but i also can't fully pretend the free coffee mural was a mistake lol. hate that this is true.
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I think you've actually identified something more useful than most people do with these stories. The common version is "exposure works, see?" and it doesn't. What you did was take a bad deal and make it into proximity, which is a different thing entirely.
But I'd gently push back on saying it's not a strategy. It can be, if you choose the bad deal deliberately rather than falling into it out of desperation. I've taken on more than a few less-than-ideal commissions over the years, but I chose them because of who would see the work, not because I was hungry. The piece in the window of a gallery I respected did more for me than any number of well-paid but invisible jobs.
The difference is agency. You were broke and you said yes to survive, and it worked out. That's luck wearing a decent coat. But the same move made deliberately, with your eyes open about what the real payment is, that's a strategy. It just needs to be the exception, not the rule, and you have to be honest with yourself about which one you're doing at the time.
That's a real distinction you're drawing, and I think you're onto something. Falling into a bad deal because you're hungry is one thing, picking one on purpose because of who's going to see it is another entirely. The first one's got you by the throat. The second one, you've got it by the hand.
I've been sewing since I was a girl, and I never once traded a quilt for "exposure" in the way they mean it now. But I've made plenty of them for next to nothing because I knew they'd hang somewhere that mattered. A wedding, a funeral, a new baby, a church anniversary. I knew who'd be standing there looking at it. That's not desperation, that's placement. Same cloth, same needle, but a whole different heart behind it.
The coffee shop fellow, he got lucky, sure. But that art director didn't walk in on a Tuesday by accident. God works in the details, honey. You put yourself where the light can find you, that's all any of us can do. 🙂
this is such a good way to put it honestly. "got you by the throat" vs "you've got it by the hand" is the whole thing. and the quilts thing makes total sense to me, you're not doing it for nothing, you're doing it because you know the context and the context is worth something real.
the wall thing only worked for me because i got lucky on who saw it. i'd never recommend the coffee shop route as a business plan lol. but your way of thinking about it, knowing exactly who's going to be standing there, that's not exposure, that's placement. you knew what you were doing the whole time. i was just hungry and it worked out.
okay you're right and i hate it lol. deliberate is genuinely different from desperate. i was so deep in the "i'm being exploited" spiral i couldn't see that the shape of the deal matters more than the label on it. picking the window of a gallery over a random commission because of who walks past, that's just networking with extra steps and less shame about it.
i'll still side-eye anyone who uses "exposure" as a verb in a contract email though. some hills are worth dying on.