FFF: Lindsey Crafter on Pricing, Pinterest, and the Myth of the Big Following

Lindsey McCord paints under the name Lindsay Crafter, a nickname a boss in New York gave her years ago when she was rigging marshmallows from ceilings for Target and L'Oréal events. She got there through fashion school, event production, ghostwriting, prop styling, basically every creative job that existed, and it wasn't until she had her daughter in 2020 that painting became the thing she actually built a business around, posting one piece at a time while the baby slept.

This conversation goes deep on the parts of running an art business that don't show up on Instagram. Lindsey walks through what she believes was a full year of suppressed reach after opting into Instagram's paid views program, watching her income graph mirror her impressions graph almost exactly, and how a single interior design placement (a show house piece that got picked up by House Beautiful) pulled her back from the edge. She talks about the bathroom-mirror goal sheet that changed her income more than anything else she tried, why she stopped making tiny pieces and started painting larger canvases for the same amount of studio time, and why she quit discounting her work entirely after watching flash sales quietly train collectors to wait her out.

We also get into Pinterest as her single biggest source of international sales, why she thinks chasing follower count actively works against you, a cautionary tale about a market booth that cost her thousands of dollars and taught her how to vet a show before committing, and a refreshingly honest conversation about money, shame, and why she thinks women artists in particular need to talk about income more openly.

If you've ever wondered whether the artists you follow online have it as figured out as it looks, this one is a good reminder that nobody does, and that's fine.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.