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Okay so I've been telling myself for months that I'd approach some local shops about carrying my prints and cards, just small ones, the cute plant shop on my corner, a bookstore I love. And I kept chickening out because sending a cold email with prices feels so much scarier than just posting on Instagram where people come to you. But last week I finally just walked into the bookstore with a little portfolio and asked if they had five minutes. The owner was so nice she almost made me cry?? She said yes on the spot, picked four designs, and I spent the weekend hyperventilating over formatting a proper invoice. Sent it this morning. Then my partner found me on the kitchen floor and I had to explain that no I wasn't sad, this is just what success feels like apparently. Anyway if anyone else has done the wholesale thing for the first time, how long until you stop feeling like you're going to get caught doing something you're not supposed to?? Asking for a friend who is me.

A museum shop in Vienna picked up a small edition of my screenprints for their retail. I was thrilled, museum shop, right, that feels like validation. They paid €150 per print, wholesale. I sold them 20. I did the math yesterday because I was avoiding something else. Each print takes me about four hours from exposure to final trim, not counting the drawing time before that, not counting the screens I burned and then rejected, not counting the test proofs. So €150 for roughly six hours of work per print if I'm being generous about what counts as labour. That's €25 an hour if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. I'm not saying the museum shop ripped me off. That's just the going rate, they were fine to deal with. But I sat there thinking: I have an MFA, I've been doing this fifteen years, and I'm making €25 an hour selling to an institution that will mark it up to €400 and call it affordable art. And I said yes because I was flattered they asked. I don't know what the right number is. I just know that the gap between what feels good for the ego and what's actually sustainable keeps getting wider and I keep choosing the ego.