Project Plan 1.4

So here I’ll layout the 1st of the project and it will be known as IQBR, or itsquickerbyrail, a relaunch of an existing project where I initially created an “Its Quicker By Rail” LNER type poster of my hometown. Initially for myself it caught the eye of some of my friends and relatives who said I should print it and sell it

Now prior to this I had dabbled in generating online and specifically passive income, I’d put some images into Cafepress, unfortunately it was just after they drastically cut the commission fees so it never really amounted to much, I used to make approx $50 per year if that. I also created some images of my local area and sold those in a local shop, in fact twice. I made the images with Adobe Illustrator, they were posterised images which I fashioned into replicas of the old railway posters of the twenties. I aimed more towards the artwork side than photographs for several reasons. With Illustrator I could create vector images that could be scaled to any size, these could then be repurposed for any situation, with a bitmap images I could not do that, resizing would take extensive work. Another reason was that with a photo you need a high degree of technical knowledge and equipment to get a sharp, high resolution image. This I did not possess and was out of my budget anyway. Because art is subjective, you like it or you don’t. I felt that if someone didn’t enjoy my art that was fair enough, it’s just personal preference. However if someone criticised my photos, either technically or in their composition then that would be different, as a technician I would expect myself to be technically competent and to fail on that level would be upsetting

I had reasonable success with my artwork and sold it for a year or so in the local shop, I made a few hundred pounds that came in handy with bills etc but unfortunately the shop moved and downsized so I stopped for about 4 years or more. Later I had the chance to sell in another local shop, here I learnt from my previous mistakes and made smaller, more affordable pictures that were more in the impulse buy range, £25 each whereas previously I’d sold larger pictures for £40. The pictures were also improved slightly and I’d streamlined to mounting and framing process so I could assemble them much quicker with more off-the-shelf frames and matte board

Again I made a few hundred pounds and did very well considering the small town location. Unfortunately this came to and end once again when the shop closed as the owner decided to move on after about 6 months, however I’d sold 39 pictures in that period and it proved there was a small if not greatly expandable business model that worked. Once again the money had gone on bills and Christmas presents (the Christmas rush and low price point has seen the bulk of the sales)

So a relaunch and expansion of this project, known as IQBR from now on is project number one. I will relaunch both locally if I can find an outlet, and online to capture further away customers or those that have visited but not purchased a reminder or keepsake