Bonding through sticker business
Already one step closer to her dream, sophomore Anushka Rane pursues her passions of design by running a small business on Instagram,@artsploot.
Rane was inspired to run a business when she was bullet journaling and wanted to use stickers that she designed herself. Currently, she runs the shop alongside her older sister, Aishwarya Rane—a class of 2019 Diamond Bar High School alumna. With Anushka’s passion for design and animation and Aishwarya pursuing a career in business, forming this business was a no-brainer for the duo.
For the past 16 months, they have been selling sticker sheets and art prints of her designs that are modeled after their original characters. A lot of Rane’s designs are also inspired by things that both Rane and her sister are fans of like ‘Avatar the Last Airbender’ and ‘We Bare Bears’.. More recently, they launched new products, such as clay earrings and tote bags, to diversify their product line.
“We make products both for leisure and business. I use a lot of stickers in my journal spreads, sometimes to help decide whether or not I want to sell it,” Rane said. “I also have made tote bags and earrings for myself and my sister just for fun for us to use.”
The process of making the stickers consists of designing on Procreate, then formatting the Cricut design space to cut out the designs as they are printed. Some stickers, however, require more steps, especially individual stickers that have a printed design on the back.
Depending on the piece, most of their stickers and prints are around two to three dollars. Since their clay earrings are handmade and are more time consuming to craft, they’re a bit pricier at nine to ten dollars.
Recently, a friend of Rane who runs Each Mind—a non-profit organization that strives to destigmatize teen mental health—offered to collaborate with the duo to raise funds for mental health charities. They started the collaboration in November and are planning to release their products soon.
However, due to colliding schedules and a lack of time, the business is currently on hiatus.
“It was definitely easier to run it when we were at home together doing school virtually,” Aishwarya said. “While we are not together we focus more on higher level tasks for running the business and strategic things that don’t require us to be physically managing things.”
However, with breaks coming up, Rane looks forward to reopening the shop with new designs she never had the chance to release.
“I hope I’ll still be able to continue running it and hopefully expand our product range to potentially more earrings, tote bags, washi tapes, and keychains because I think that would be super fun,” Rane said. “Sometime in the next year we also hope to build a website for our shop!”
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