Intro to Peeshi

Hey there! Welcome to the Peeshi Blog. I figured as my very first blog post, I would write a more in depth introduction about Peeshi including more about me, how the idea started, the goals of Peeshi, how the pricing works and what to expect going forward. So strap in and get ready to learn all about Peeshi!

1. Intro to Me

Oof. To be honest, these are never easy for me to write. I have never really been a fan of talking about myself in general. Now talking about animals and art on the other hand, I could talk about for weeks and weeks. So I guess that would be a good place to start.

For as long as I can remember I have always had a soft spot for animals. I was always the kid that refused to kill any animal and even today I have a very hard time killing anything including insects. Unless they are crawling on me unexpectedly well then I’m not responsible for my reactions towards them. I would say that a pivotal point in my passion towards animals would be when I got my very first pet. He was a hamster named Booey and I was obsessed with him. Even though he was so little, I loved him so much. Unfortunately, our family dog scared him to death and it was then that I also experienced my first heartache towards animals. Even though I was devastated as a child, it did not deter me from wanting to rescue more animals. Over the years I have had A LOT of pets and do what I can to volunteer and/or donate to various animal shelters and rescues.

Some organizations that I have donated/volunteered for (some I am still am) are: ASPCA, WWF, Heaven Can Wait, Fig and Friends, Wildlife Rehab Center (now known as West Michigan Wildlife Center), Happy Cat Cafe, Noahs Arc and I am sure that there are more, but those are the ones that I can currently recall. A lot of people don’t realize that it is really easy to help out any NPO out there. Most of the time it comes down to a money or time issue when in reality, even something as simple as liking and sharing their social platform pages can help out tremendously. On the Involvement page, I have included a section specifically regarding ways that you can help as well as 3rd party links to other information for those that are generally curious about how to help.

So, to recap, I love animals, want to help them and want to spread awareness about how others can help out too even the smallest acts can have huge impacts. I guess that leads us to the next topic about me, being an artist.

According to my mother, I have been drawing since I was about 3 years old. I started drawing on walls, then moved to furniture and then FINALLY started on more..appropriate surfaces such as paper and canvas. Pretty soon, all the holiday and birthday gifts I was fortunate enough to receive, began to be wrapped around art and craft projects. It was apparent that I had a natural ability to create and make things, but because my life revolved around basketball starting at age 9, I didn’t really have a lot of extra time to focus on art so it became more of a therapy for me and just a hobby.

Art has always been something I’m good at, but I was so focused on basketball playing on various travel teams and playing for school until my sophomore year of college. It was that year that I blew my knee out for the 5th time and it ended my career. I may have lost one of my passions, but I am lucky enough to have another one to focus on. In case you didn’t figure it out yet, yes I am talking about my art. So, beginning in my early/mid 20s I shifted my focus towards creating, experimenting and networking. I was young and so I didn’t really understand the ins and outs of networking with Galleries so my commissions primarily came from word of mouth. To be honest, I am not a huge fan of the idea of my work being in a gallery and that is mainly because most galleries charge a huge chunk of the profit of your work being sold. I am not saying that galleries aren’t for anybody, they just don’t align with my professional goals.

I went back to school, got an associates in Art Education and a bachelors in Graphic Design. I currently work full time for Sweet Express as the Marketing and Web Manager. As much as I enjoy my job (for the most part) and the company, my true passions will always be with animals and art. Because of this, my long term professional goals are to be able to work Peeshi full-time and continue to have multiple rescue animals. THAT is what makes my heart full. Creating art full time while at the same time being able to help animal NPOs.

Keeping that in mind, that is how the concept of Peeshi was formed in my mind.

2. How Did PEESHi Start?

Well, if you’ve read section 1 chances are you’ll get the gist as to why I wanted to start Peeshi. I love animals, being involved with NPOs and being an artist. So I combined all three of those passions and created a business plan revolving around them and thus the concept was born. At first I did not have a name, I only had the concept. I researched to see if any other artist had the same concept/idea as me and from what I could find there wasn’t. Because of that, I wanted to create a name that was one of a kind as well. I started thinking about things that mean alot to me or that are important to me. Immediately I thought of how much I LOVE being an aunt to a sweet caring little boy and a spit fire and bold little girl. When the little boy was first learning to speak, he had a hard time pronouncing my name (Paige) so instead would call me Peesh. Although they are both years older than that, they still call me Auntie Peesh and so do some of my friends now too. My heart warms up every time I hear their little voices call me Auntie Peesh and I wanted to create a brand that had that same effect on others who have similar passions.

So why did I add the i at the end. Well Peesh to me didn’t sound like a full business name and felt like it was missing “something” so I racked my brain and thought of other things that make me happy. My Grandfather was one of the most influential people I have ever known and I was extremely close to him. We would talk everyday and I would go out to AZ to visit both him and my Gram Gram as much as possible. Every time we would talk and I would ask him how things were for him, he would just respond with “Oh just peachy” or “peachy keen”. At first, I was going to keep the y and it would be Peeshy but that was too close to peachy and there are a bunch of business’ that incorporate peachy in their name. Thus, I changed it to an I and Peeshi was named.

Now I had a concept and a name but I still needed a logo and branding. I am fortunate enough to be creative and also have a lot of experience with graphic design so I didn’t have to outsource creating a logo. Instead, I first did a mood board created from a lot of research and color theory. It was clear I wanted a more “colorful” color palette because 1. It creates a sense of happiness and 2.I use a lot of color within my art. So it was perfect. I researched other NPOs logos and color palettes and decided that to go along with the meaning behind the name of the company, I wanted a logo to be personable to me as well. My favorite animal is the Red Panda so I started sketching ideas in black and white and pretty soon I created a colorful Red Panda logo that I was extremely happy with. It was original, creative and colorful just like me and my goals with Peeshi.

3. GOALS

The biggest objectives of Peeshi are:

1. Broaden awareness of various NPOs that some people may not know about
2. Inform people of key topics that affect the animal population and our ecosystems through blog and marketing
3. Share my art with others while also being able to donate some of the profits to different NPOs.
4. Get more people involved by giving them suggestions on how they can help (including buying art in order to help NPOs too)
5. Help Animals and their environments. They can’t speak so we must speak on their behalf. 

4. Pricing

Yes, a percentage of every purchase will go to the current spotlighted NPO. But how much? Well that depends on the purchase amount. Instead of doing a set dollar amount, I wanted to do a percentage and this is because I want to give people the opportunity to “donate” more but purchasing more products. So essentially I can market “the more products you buy, the more you donate”.

After each purchase, you will see in your confirmation message, how much of your purchase will go to the current spotlighted NPO. You get an awesome product and help an NPO so it’s a win win! 15% of each order prior to taxes, gets automatically put into a side fund and once that NPOs segment is complete, all of the orders

The exact formula for pricing is based on a product by product basis. I take the cost of materials, the amount of time it took me to create the piece and then the amount it costs for reproduction into consideration when pricing pieces.