In this week’s episode on the podcast, I’m speaking to the incredible Jessica Hische. Jessica is a lettering artist working in branding, film and television, book design, and advertising. She's also a New York Times best-selling children's book author and illustrator and has recently opened two physical stores in Oakland, Jessica Hische and Friends, and Drawling. In this episode, you'll learn how to know when it's a good time to open a physical store, the process behind opening physical stores as an artist and insights into branding a physical store, as well as why it can help to start separating your social media pages for your projects, and so much more!
In this week’s episode on the podcast, I’m speaking to the incredible Jessica Hische.
Jessica is a lettering artist working in branding, film and television, book design, and advertising. She's also a New York Times best-selling children's book author and illustrator and has recently opened two physical stores in Oakland, Jessica Hische and Friends, and Drawling.
In this episode, you'll learn how to know when it's a good time to open a physical store, the process behind opening physical stores as an artist and insights into branding a physical store, as well as why it can help to start separating your social media pages for your projects.
Jessica also shares insights on how to communicate all of your passions clearly as a creative and how hearing from you should be a joy to your audience and so much more!
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Connect with Jessica Hische:
Website: jessicahische.is/awesome
Instagram: @jessicahische
Threads: @jessicahische
Pre-order Jessica’s new kid's book, My First Book of Fancy Letters.
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Read the accompanying blog post.
Tag me on Instagram @makerandmoxie and let me know you're listening.
And sign up to the Moxie Musings newsletter for more goodness like this.
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Hollie Arnett: Welcome to the show, Jessica. I'm so excited to have you here. The people in the introduction have heard a little bit about what you do and all the amazing creative things that you have going on, but I would love to talk to you today about what you have been up to recently and how you have got there.
So in 2023, you opened both Jessica Hische and Friends and Drawling, two physical shops. So I would love to know, in the beginning, where did the idea to open a shop come from? Tell me about that.
Jessica Hische: It goes way back. When I lived in New York, which was between very early 2007 and 2012 ish, with a few years of bi-coastalness thrown in there at the end, I had a studio in a place called The Pencil Factory, which was in Greenpoint.
This building was like an old Eberhard Faber pencil factory. And in it, they had divided it into these studios. There were just an overwhelming amount of illustrators in the building. It was four people per unit and there were probably three or four units that were occupied by illustrators that were all buddies with each other.
So back when I was in New York, I had this sort of like dream in the back of my head what if we together, all of us, went in on making a physical store, because we all make our own art, but wouldn't it be great if we had a place where people could come and see it? It would be this connection, like this real-world connection to our work.
When I first moved to New York I was 22 or 23. Then by the time I left, I was 28. I felt like it was a dream, but not something that I was ready for. Then of course, after leaving, it was like, “Oh no, I guess that's not happening.” But when I moved to California, I was looking for a studio space and it's actually quite hard to find a small studio space that isn't just like a WeWork kind of desk situation or like even a private office inside a place like that.
The space that I ended up finding on Craigslist was a storefront space. So I had a storefront studio for eight years when I lived in San Francisco, but we privacy filmed up the front for me and my studio mate, Eric. We thought “What if we had the front of our studio be a store and the back of it be where we work?” But even just seeing the disruption that would happen from just people casually visiting us, I was like, okay it doesn't totally work to be like open air working in the back of your store because people want to just talk to you.
So again, it was just like, okay that's something that I want to keep open as an option, but not something that feels like it makes sense right now. And then when I moved over to Oakland, it was the same thing. I was looking for a similar space, but maybe something that was a little bit bigger so that I could do something like build a wall or something like that would separate the make space from the retail spot eventually.
At first I was going to rent, but then I did all the math, cause I tend to just plunk down and be in a place for a really long time. So I talked to a financial planner and I was like “Does it make sense for me to buy a studio? If I think I'm going to be there for 15 years or whatever?”
And she was like, “Absolutely it does.” So I ended up buying my studio, which was two live/work, tiny apartment places where each of them was like 700 square feet, but they were side by side because the couple that owned them planned to put them together at some point and just didn't do it.
So the upstairs is my studio and the downstairs is separated into my workshop, which has my letterpress and all my maker stuff in it. And then the storefront, that I wanted to eventually open, but wasn't sure when I was going to do it. Then there's a big picture window between the two.
The seed of it started a long time ago, but then this building made it into something that I was like, no, this is definitely going to happen. I just have to find the right time.
But I moved into this space two months before the pandemic lockdown. So that was not the right time. Also, I love Oakland so much, but it's also gone through some rough times. And so it also wasn't the time to start investing in a brick-and-mortar spot for a little while.
Then, as things started opening up I was like, “This is the time I feel like I'm going to do it. I'm going to be in one place for a while. It feels like I want to have a more physical connection to my local community and not just be on the internet that's ever growing and ever murky and whatever”. So the timing felt like it was both the right timing and reaction to what was going on locally, but then also a reaction to how I felt about my existence in the world in a global internety way, where I felt like it was harder to stay in touch with my community online because everybody's expected to be there.
Being online is about advertising yourself now in a way that it wasn't necessarily when I first started doing social media or just even early internet chatting with people. So I felt like I needed to figure out a way to have a community that wasn't necessarily building another online property. So all the things came together to be the right time.
Hollie Arnett: Yeah, amazing. I love how those two things came together to make it happen at the right time. d
Jessica Hische: So what happened next is I started doing the build-out for JH&F about eight months before it opened, because I didn't have any specific rush to do it. It's not like I was paying extra rent or anything. So I just slowly designed the space and started ordering things a little bit at a time and just feeling into it.
During that time I was trying to come up with a name for it. Originally I worked with a naming agency because we were going to do something on tradesies and I really liked some of the names that they came up with. But then it turned out that this fancy printer in New Jersey was really close to one of the names. And I was like, even though it's a different thing, I don't want to step on anybody's toes.
So I went back to the drawing board and I had this idea for a name that was based on the fact that I went to college in Philly and I'm a deeply nostalgic person and have very nostalgic ties to my early maker life in Philadelphia.
The name Drawling kept coming up, so I went pretty far along with it and ended up trademarking the name. This was while I was still developing the store and figuring out the layout of it. But then I put all of my prints up on the wall and was like, wait a second… This store has to be called something with my name in it, because otherwise, it would be strange to go into a shop where all of the artwork was by one artist.
Plus I also knew that this space is more of a destination spot. So a lot of people would be like Googling, like “Jessica Hische shop” or whatever. And if it wasn't called something with my name in it, I think it would be hard for people to find it.
So all of a sudden I was like, I invested all of this, made branding, paid for the trademarking of not only the word Drawling, but also a secondary mark that I did and also a tagline. It really went pretty far, it was probably a $10,000 investment. And then I was just like, “Okay. I guess I'll just do something with it in the future. Maybe I'll make like a product line or do something.”
Then another thing happened when I was building the store out here. I originally had a section of kids' stuff. But I realised that the vibe really changed in the store as soon as you start introducing children's things. I notice this as a shopper, if you go into a shop and there's not a very clear vision about what the store is meant to be, it's disorienting and you don't really know what you're supposed to get there.
So all of a sudden I was like, “Oh I don't think I can put the kid's stuff here. I think this has to be the fancy grownup store.” Then all of a sudden a light bulb went off and I was just like, “Oh, Drawling is the kid store.” And I knew that there were a bunch of openings in Temescal Alley after the pandemic.
Temescal Alley is this little shopping area in Oakland that's super cool, like the people in San Francisco. It's one of the first places that you go visit coming over to Oakland. It's like a gateway drug of Oakland for the creative set, and so I reached out to one of the other retailers there that I know being like, “Hey, I want to chat because I'm thinking about reaching out to the landlord. What do you think?” And she was like, “You have to do it!”, then immediately put me in touch with the landlord. And I was like, “Oh, I'm just doing some investigation. I'm just going to figure it out. Maybe in six months, I'll do this. Obviously I have to launch my first store first.”
Because this would have been two months before my first store opened. And so I was just doing some R and D or whatever. But then I went into the conversation with the landlord and I was like, “Okay, if it's below a certain amount, I'll really think about it.” That number in my head for the rent was like $2,500. I was like, “If it's $2,500 a month, it's tempting because if I open in three months or four months, I can probably burn through that amount of money and not feel awful.” I certainly could not spend like $10,000 on rent for nothing, but I could spend maybe like $6,000-$7,000 and not feel truly bad about it.
Then it ended up being $1,800 a month and I was just like, “Oh, shoot. I think I might have to do this!” There were a number of spaces that were open, but some of the larger spaces were significantly more money, and the space that I got was really reasonable.
And so I was like, “Okay I'm just going to get it and then I'm going to figure this out and try to open it as soon as I can”, thinking that I would open in like January or something. But then, with not only friends that have done retail stuff, but then also like a little bit of pressure from the landlord to open sooner, I was like, okay I think I have to open it before the Christmas holidays. Thank God I did because I would have wanted to shut it all down had I not. Because January is super dead, February is super dead, and it would have been a really disheartening opening had I waited that long.
But so I basically rushed it together. I opened my first shop at the end of September and opened my second shop at the end of November. So they were both open for the holidays and it was completely chaotic. But it was good. So it had a good opening and I was able to make back some of the money that I had invested in it, not all of it, but enough to make me not feel bad.
So that's where I'm at. And now it's just in this nice cruise control mode where I'm certainly trying to mix it up in the stores and stay on top of inventory and things like that. But it's not a scramble right now, which is nice.
Hollie Arnett: Amazing.
Jessica Hische: But yeah, it's happened because I had invested in the name and the brand, and I was just like “I got to do something with this!”
Hollie Arnett: Yeah, I was going to say, you had to scramble to put it all together, but at least you had all the branding done.
Jessica Hische: It's similar to a lot of stuff that we do as creatives or just as people. When you learn how to do something that's really hard to do for the first time, you're like, “I need to figure out how to use these skills again, because I feel like now I have a master's degree in doing that thing.”
And so it just made sense, because it's all part of the same ecosystem in terms of the point of sale, backend, and all that kind of stuff. So it's not really two stores, it's one store split between two locations. The only thing that makes it two stores is that the inventory is quite different between the two and that I have to staff two different places. The staffing thing is definitely interesting. But otherwise, it's really just like having one store with a lot of staff.
Hollie Arnett: I was interested in the staffing and there are so many things to think about when you have a store and going from, being a creative, that's generally something that we are doing on our own. You might collaborate with people or you might have a manager or there might be a little bit of collaboration going on, but when you open a physical store, you probably can't be in there full time because you have other things to do. I know I saw on your site that you’re in there on Thursdays and Fridays.
Jessica Hische: A lot of people are though, a lot of people are in their stores full time because what they do is they use it as like an office.
So most people who set up their own retail stores, what they do is that they either have never had their own office before. Or it becomes like an extension of their office where when they're not busy, they're in there working on their other thing. And that works out really well for people because then it's like anything that your store makes is just a bonus on top of what you would be making anyway, instead of it necessarily being like its own separate business.
That's the one thing that's a little tricky with not working out of your own space, because while I could probably work downstairs in the store all the time and just be on my computer and stuff, I have this big comfortable office and I want to like work in front of a monitor and I want to have a more ergonomic environment for working.
For me, it makes just so much more sense for me to pay someone a retail rate rather than me with a much higher rate working down there.
Hollie Arnett: Yeah, that's such a good point.
Hollie Arnett: I was also curious as well, in terms of the social media, because you now have social media pages for each of those shops. I know you also have started a new social media page for your new book, which is coming out. You also have social media pages for your own work, obviously.
So tell me about how that's working. Are you doing all of that? How are you managing all of that? Tell me about all of that, all the social media side of things.
Jessica Hische: I am doing all of it. But, part of that is because I haven't invested in it as I should. If I really want the stores to be very successful, I should be doing a lot more social media for them, reminding people constantly of stuff that's there, but it's also a little tricky because both of the stores are brick-and-mortar only.
So most of the time, if you see a shop doing a ton of social media, they also do online sales. What happens if I do a ton of social media for the shops, I get a lot of DM’s being like, “Do you ship to me?” And I'm like, “No.” And because the audience isn't all local. So really the reason why I do social media for the shops currently is just to remind people that they're open.
I tend to just post once or twice a week, just to be like, “Look, the store is here. Here are the hours this week. Remember… it's a thing.” Versus if it had an online sale component, I would be posting a lot more. Part of the reason for having them all be separate though is that I run into this issue with my personal account where if people see me doing too many different things, they forget what I actually do for my job.
I still notice that now too with the stores. I have a guy who just started working for me as a pinch hitter in the shops. I was working on a lettering commission the other day and letterpress printing it. I don't usually do personal commissions, but this was for a friend's birthday. And he made a comment of just being like, “Oh, it's so nice that you're still keeping your toes in lettering or whatever.” And I'm like, “You mean my primary career?”
In January, both of the shops, if you add them together, they broke even. In February they made a little bit of profit, but the profit that they made is like half of my day rate. So it's not something that I'm like, “Oh, I'm pivoting to a new career in retail.” It's definitely an add-on.
So part of having the separate social media accounts is also to let most of the posting of the stores happen in a separate channel from my channel which is my primary work, which is being a for-hire lettering artist.
Hollie Arnett: That was one of my questions to ask you. Now you are adding these things, you're also adding new books and things going on, how do you, as a brand, if you want to brand yourself as a person, how do you communicate all the things that you do have going on from your shops to your products, to your books, your fonts, your client work, your speaking, all of that. What's your approach to communicating all of that?
Jessica Hische: I think it's nice to have different channels for the different things that you do and talk about, so I wouldn't make my whole Instagram account be me sharing tips and tricks because that would instantly make people think that's what I'm doing from my career.
Or I wouldn't make posts on my main about speaking too much because people would be like, “Oh, that's what she's doing now.” And that's why for the new book, for my new kid's book, I made a separate Instagram account for it. Cause I know I'm going to have to post about it. Quite a bit. But I don't want it to take over my Instagram feed because I'm not posting that much about client stuff.
Like I wish I could post constantly about client stuff, but a lot of my client stuff that I do is stuff that I don't have permission to post about right away. Or there's some official strategy for rolling it out or whatever. I have to post a lot more about those things when they're happening because you just got to hammer “buy my book.” I don't want people to suddenly think I'm not available to do commercial lettering work. So sometimes having a separate channel is good.
The only thing is, on my main channel, I have a ton of followers and so I have to then cross-post from the other one to be like, “Hey over here! There's this information about a thing!” because otherwise then I'm not actually accessing my audience.
I also too have been really trying to re-enliven my newsletter just because it's such a good direct way of talking to people and giving them a longer form story of what's going on. Because algorithms are really unpredictable online. You just don't know what people are seeing.
What I have found is that the algorithm tends to favor certain kinds of posts, and then it really changes the narrative about what people perceive me as. For example, I had issues with my online courses, which I haven't taught an online course in a year and a half or more, but people will have this perception that's like the only thing I'm doing now because those are the posts that are getting surfaced in their feed that I'm making, even though I'm posting about other things. So you can't trust the algorithm to portray you as you want to be portrayed.
So splintering things off and having different channels for stuff or committing to my personal things are only shared in stories and this stuff is only shared on Instagram and this stuff is only shared on Thread. That can be really helpful for making sure that the narrative about who you are and what you do is true to what you're actually doing and interested in.
Hollie Arnett: I love that approach. I think that's really smart. And I think you're right in the email newsletter. I'm such an email newsletter nerd, and I think if you're not utilising it, you're basically missing out because you're right in that, the algorithm, you're just at their whims of what they show people. But email newsletters, it's going directly to their inbox and they're going to get it. It's just up to them whether they open it. But it's going to go to their inbox.
Jessica Hische: There are different rules of engagement for every platform, and you have to ask yourself, how would you want to be engaged with?
That's the thing my email newsletter, I moved to a different platform because I was paying just so much money on MailChimp to have it, because I really only send them out three or four times a year. I don't send email newsletters out often.
The reason why I do that is because every now and then I'll join someone's Patreon and then I start getting weekly newsletters from these people. And I'm just like, “This makes me want to unfollow everything that you do.” It's just too much communication. There's an author that I follow on Threads who has a book coming out and because so few people are using Threads right now and she's like a super user on it, I sign in and 60 percent of my content that I'm seeing is from her. So I had to unfollow her.
That's what I'm very aware of that. I don't want to bombard people. So I feel that way about social media. I feel that way about newsletters. I wanted it to be a joy to hear from me, not a burden. And so I always try to keep that in mind whenever I'm posting or sharing or whatever.
Hollie Arnett: Yeah, that's such a good way to think about it. Wanting to be a joy to hear from. I love that!
Hollie Arnett: My last question for Jessica is the question that I ask everybody, which is - what is the biggest lesson that you have learned or piece of advice that you want to share with the audience about branding your passion?
Jessica Hische: I get real philosophical about this because my feelings about your personal brand, I dive super deep into sort of almost like spiritual stuff where I like have no idea what happens at the end of this life. It'd be super cool if we all ended up in some happy place or whatever, like whatever positive message is out there about what happens after you die. Great. That'd be icing on the cake.
But I know that if nothing happens, the only thing that you have is the impression that you've left in the world. Like if there's no way to live on because it doesn't exist, you will live on by the things that you've created and the things that you say about yourself or, post about yourself or create.
So I'm very conscious of that and I think that's why I approach all this stuff trying to be as genuine and true to myself as possible. Not everyone does that because they're able to really compartmentalise who they are from who their work is and they don't need those two things to be aligned all the time. And that's fine. It's a completely fine approach.
But I think for me, I just think if someone was trying to get to know who I am as a person in the future, what evidence would they be looking at? And I always want that evidence to be a reflection of my truth. So I'm very curatorial about what gets said.
My brand is like me. I just want people to know me. If people unearth projects that I've made or things that I've written or posts that I've done, I want them to feel like they're getting a sense of who I really am.
I think you can approach it from two ways in terms of branding your passion or passion projects or whatever, but that's the approach that I have and I feel like it works for me and my values.
But just do whatever feels the most true to yourself and what you want. If you're someone who wants to keep yourself to yourself, like you don’t want the world to know everything about you, that's definitely totally valid as well. But I just think of it as “If people meet me, does their expectation of me align with the real me?” I want it to, and that's how I approach it.
Hollie Arnett: That's such a great way to approach it. And I think that's the way, that when you get to whatever the end looks like, you'll be able to look back and feel comfortable and happy with how you did that. You won't feel any type of uncomfortable way about how you showed up. You'll feel like, “No, that was me. And that was great!”
Jessica Hische: I have three kids, I feel like my kids know me very well. And I know that I would do anything to have had the internet around when my parents were younger so I could just read their every thought. I know that when they're older they'll probably be like, “What was mom like in her twenties and thirties?” and be looking at that.
So I want it to be real. I don't want them to have to sift through it and look at it through a lens of “Oh she was doing this because she needed to get work” or “She was doing this because that's what people expected of her.”
I want them to always feel like they can be true to themselves also. It's the ultimate self-defense mechanism too. You go out into the world and as long as you're true to yourself, if people don't like you, you're just like “That's on you. That's who I am. Not everybody has to be friends. The end.”
Hollie Arnett: Yeah, exactly. Amazing. Thank you so much, Jessica. This has been amazing. I have learned so much already about opening shops and the journey about it and your book and how you approach everything. Thank you so much. And I know everybody else listening is just going to learn so much, so I appreciate it massively!
Hollie Arnett: Do you want to tell people what you have going on and where they can find you?
Jessica Hische: You can find me on the internet. If you look me up on Instagram, I'm Jessica Hische at Instagram. And then in my bio, there's a link to subscribe to my newsletter and all that kind of stuff.
Then I have a new kid's book that's coming out in October called “My First Book of Fancy Letters” which is available for pre-order. I will love you forever if you do that. That's my main thing and then just plugging along with my normal client work, doing logos, doing film stuff, doing book covers, got one of each on the docket right now. So yeah.
Hollie Arnett: Amazing. So exciting. So many good things! I will leave all of the links to all of the things in the show notes. I'm definitely going to check it out. And if you are in Oakland, you can go and visit both of the shops and go see all of Jessica's amazing work.
So that's it. Thank you so much!
Jessica Hische: Yeah. Thank you for having me.