Elon’s Student-Made Store Gets a Revamp
You may have noticed an instagram page that began to circulate among Elon students over the summer. The page, @studentmade_elon, was started Kristin Chan ‘21 to give students a platform to advertise and sell their art.
The Student-Made Store was established by Lindsay Reeth ‘19 and Ryan McElhinney ‘19 in 2017 “to encourage young artists to believe that the world wants to see them continue to do what they love. We call this movement the ‘Artrepreneur’movement; turning side hobbies into viable businesses.” The two graduated in May 2019 and are currently living in Boston, but reached out to Chan to run the store locally.
“They saw so many people who had creative ideas but no creative outlet for them, so they thought ‘why not start the student made store so they can sell their art to the Elon community,’” said Chan..
“The website and Instagram are both brand new. We launched those about three weeks ago,” said Chan. “Before, we were doing pop-up stores once a semester and that wasn’t working very well because the artist had to create 20-30 pieces to have inventory to sell”
Chan herself started as a featured artist on the website. Her business, Chanlligraphy, started in J-Term of her freshman year, 2018.
“J-Term is just a long month and I wanted to start something new,” Chan said. “To pass the time, I bought some calligraphy books off of Amazon, started practicing, and making things for my friends. Soon after, I started Chanlligraphy and started selling to people and sororities and it really took off during big/little week.”
Chan has been working hard to increase publicity for the page, mostly spread through word of mouth, but has also begun tabling at College Coffee and posting flyers in Moseley and Arts West. The flyers are intended to raise awareness of the existence of the store, as well as attract potential artists.
Not yet sure of the fate of the store when she graduates, Chan intends to begin training someone to take over. She also mentioned Reeth and McElhinney’s aspirations to start similar stores at other colleges such as the University of South Carolina and Appalachian State.
Be sure to check out the @studentmade_elon instagram page and website to support our peer artists!