UW-Whitewater @ Work: Janesville Collaboration helps bring the business woman out in the artist

November 29, 2004

Susan-Hunt Wulkowicz creates lithographic portraits of heartland America in breathtaking detail, right down to the roadside gravel, the weathered planks of a red barn, or the cluster of needles on an evergreen tree.

With all of this painstaking attention to detail, Hunt-Wulkowicz the artist doesn’t leave much time for Hunt-Wulkowicz the entrepreneur.

While she pursued the rigors of her art, financial challenges were busy painting a different picture. Materials and production costs were beginning to take a bigger and bigger chunk out of the family company’s profit margin.

When Hunt-Wulkowicz decided to pursue some help, she turned to Brian Pope, director of UW-Whitewater’s Small Business Development Center, for some third-party analysis of her books.

“My business philosophy before this partnership, in dealing with setbacks, was always, ‘Gee, I guess I just have to sell more artwork,’” she said. “That was the solution to everything. We’ve never had a budget, we’ve never had any knowledge about business practices.”

The artist’s work is on display in more than 100 galleries nationally and she has a major client base in Japan, a culture that cherishes lithography. Hunt-Wulkowicz said she was beginning to rely too much on her Japanese business, and meeting that demand forced her to scale back on gallery and community art fair sales.

Pope’s analysis of the operation, by looking at her material vendors and other costs, yielded some surprising and beneficial results. It turned out that a longtime supplier of photo frames was on the high end of the market, and by switching vendors she was able to shave literally two-thirds of her expenses.

“The company we were doing business with was charging $10 a foot, compared to the $3.50 we pay now,” she said. “The difference will be about $80 for a large print, $50 for midsize and $20 for small prints.”

If sales this year are comparable to average years, Hunt-Wulkowicz said they will yield a $6,000 savings.

Pope also provided some analysis of a new market the artists are considering. They would like to pursue a “Giclee process,” which are unique prints that provide watercolor quality but are not hand-painted.

This process, for the first time, would allow the group to offer prints nationally at a much lower cost, and be able to keep up with the demand. “The future lies in something I don’t have to do completely by hand,” she said. “We would still have the hand-painted originals for our core patrons, but the giclees give us a more affordable and available product.”

The team behind the art includes Hunt-Wulkowicz; her husband Dennis McWilliams, also a lithography artist; and printer and etching artist Kirk Baird. The group is long on artistic talent, but have approached the business side through trial and error.

“Most of the people I work with and do business with are also artists, so you can get stuck in the same old patterns,” she said. “What Brian did for us was very valuable, but only the tip of the iceberg. We are going to continue this partnership and look into many other parts of the business."