From Sticky Notes to One Platform: The Story Behind Art Easely

For emerging and working artists, building a sustainable career often means juggling the roles of artist, marketer, salesperson, administrator, and business manager. Art Easely was created to make that process more manageable, bringing together the tools artists need to organize their work, maintain a professional website, manage collectors and contacts, sell originals and prints, prepare submissions and exhibition materials, and handle the many moving parts of an art career—all in one platform.

The idea grew from CEO and co-founder Megan Schaugaard’s own experience an oil painter with an MFA from the New York Academy of Art who has also worked in marketing for Fine Art Connoisseur and PleinAir. At one point, she found herself managing her own career across five apps, a spreadsheet, and a collection of sticky notes. “Every time I updated one thing, I had to manually update five others. It was exhausting.” So she turned to her husband, Gary Schaugaard, a developer who had built technology for organizations including the Smithsonian and Glasses.com, with a simple question: What if there were one platform that could keep it all together?

When you founded Art Easely, what core problems for artists did you set out to solve for artists and what solutions have you come up with? 

Art Easely really grew out of firsthand experience. As an artist, I realized that creating the artwork was often the best part of having an art career. Everything surrounding it was where things became complicated.

Artists are expected to wear so many hats. You're creating the work, but you're also managing a website, marketing, social media, artwork inventory, contacts and collectors, exhibitions, sales, your CV, and all of the other administrative pieces that come with building a professional art career.

I was talking with an up-and-coming artist recently about another artist we both knew who was doing really well. We started talking about how he managed everything that came along with that success, and part of the answer was pretty simple: his wife handled a lot of the administrative work behind the scenes.

The artist laughed and said, “Well, I need an art wife.”

It was funny, but there was a lot of truth behind it.

As an artist's career grows, so does everything surrounding the artwork. Someone has to keep the website updated, organize artwork, manage contacts, market the work, keep track of exhibitions and sales, fulfill orders, and make sure all of those pieces stay connected.

Not every artist has a spouse, assistant, or team doing that behind the scenes—and they shouldn't need one just to keep their career organized.

That's a big part of what we're trying to solve with Art Easely. What if artists had one place to manage the business side of their art career?

Instead of maintaining separate systems, an artist can organize their artwork once and use that information throughout Art Easely. The same artwork can appear on their artist website, be offered for sale, generate artwork labels and certificates of authenticity, connect to an exhibition, become available as a print, and more.

Artists can also manage their contacts and collectors, events, tasks, bio and CV, marketing, sales, and other parts of their business from the same platform.

The goal isn't to make artists better administrators. It's to make the administrative side of an art career work smarter.

Who is the ideal artist that would benefit most from what Art Easely offers?

The ideal Art Easely user is really an artist who wants to actively build and manage their art career—whether they're just beginning to think about the business side of their art or they've been doing it professionally for years.

We want artists to actually use the tools we've built to help them stay organized and move their careers forward, but we also know that not every artist needs everything at once.

Think about an artist who meets a potential collector at an exhibition. They want to remember who they met, which artwork that person was interested in, and that they should follow up with them next week. At the same time, they're preparing for another show, updating their website, working toward a goal, and trying to remember everything else that needs to happen.

Those little things can easily end up scattered across notebooks, calendars, spreadsheets, sticky notes, and someone's memory. With Art Easely, that artist can keep the contact, notes from the conversation, follow-up reminder, upcoming exhibition, and artwork information together.

That's really what we mean when we talk about managing an art career in one place. It's not just the big things like a website or inventory. It's also helping artists keep track of all the small things that can make a difference over time.

We really want to meet artists where they are. A student or artist who's just getting started may only need a simple way to begin organizing their artwork and building good habits. They shouldn't have to jump into every tool or every part of running an art business all at once. That's why we've created plans that allow artists to start smaller and grow within Art Easely as their career and their needs grow.

For a more established artist, the need may be completely different. They might have years of artwork, contacts, exhibitions, sales, and other information scattered across different places and need a more connected system for bringing it all together.

We've also had artists come to us after using other artist-specific platforms because they wanted a better workflow or simply wanted their platform to do more.

Ultimately, Art Easely isn't just for one stage of an art career. It's for artists who want a system that can grow with them and give them the tools they need as they need them.

We're not trying to give artists more administrative work to do. We're trying to make the work they're already doing easier to organize, easier to remember, and easier to act on.

Which service(s) are you most excited about at the moment? 

There are three we're especially excited about right now: our data migration service, our mobile app currently in beta, and our hands-off print-on-demand integration.

One of the biggest barriers we've seen to switching platforms isn't that an artist doesn't want something better. It's that they look at years of artwork, images, exhibition history, products, biography information, and everything they've built and think, “I can't possibly start all of this over.”

We don't think they should have to.

Our data migration service allows us to take the important content from an artist's existing website or other records and bring it into the appropriate places within Art Easely.

We're not simply copying images onto a new website. We're bringing their artwork and its information into the artwork management system, where it becomes part of their Art Easely account and can be used throughout the platform.

That means an artist can come into Art Easely with a strong foundation already in place instead of staring at an empty account and wondering where to begin. Switching platforms shouldn't mean starting your art career over from scratch.

We're also currently beta testing our Art Easely mobile app, which we're really excited about.

Imagine you're at an exhibition and someone spends ten minutes talking with you about a painting they love. You exchange information and think, “I'll remember to follow up with them next week.” Then the show gets busy, you go home, and life moves on.

That's exactly the kind of small but important moment we want to make easier. With the app, we're working toward making it simple for an artist to add that contact, make a quick note about what they discussed, add new artwork, or upload images while they're on the go instead of trying to remember to do it later.

The app is still in beta and we're actively refining it, but it's another step toward making Art Easely something artists can use as part of their everyday workflow—not just when they're sitting at a computer.

The third thing we're really excited about is our hands-off print-on-demand integration.

Imagine a collector discovers a painting on an artist's website and loves it, but maybe the original has already sold or is outside their budget. They can choose a high-quality reproduction, select the options they want, and purchase it right there from the artist's website.

Behind the scenes, the order is produced, packaged, and shipped without the artist purchasing inventory upfront or fulfilling the order themselves. The collector gets a seamless buying experience with the artist, while the artist gets another way to earn revenue from work they've already created without creating another job for themselves.

For us, though, making print-on-demand easy wasn't enough. The quality of what arrives at the collector's door still represents the artist, so choosing the right fulfillment partner was really important to us.

That's a big reason we chose Lumaprints. They specialize specifically in wall art and offer fine art prints, canvas, framing and matting, along with a variety of materials and surfaces. We were impressed not only with the print quality, but with the quality of the materials and construction. For example, their stretched canvases use real wood rather than MDF, and their products are made with archival-quality materials.

Packaging was another big consideration. An artist can create an incredible piece and sell a beautiful reproduction, but none of that matters if it arrives at the collector's home damaged or poorly presented. We've been really impressed with how carefully Lumaprints packages and ships the work.

And then there was the business side. We wanted a partner whose pricing still leaves enough room for artists to set a healthy profit margin. Art Easely doesn't take a commission from those print sales, so the artist gets to decide what they charge and how much they earn.

For us, that's what makes the integration exciting. It's not just about automating fulfillment. It's about giving artists a way to offer reproductions that they can feel confident putting their name on, while making the process as hands-off as possible.

All three of these services really come back to the same goal: removing friction from managing an art career. We want to make it easier to get started, easier to stay organized while you're working, and easier to create new opportunities from your artwork without creating more work for yourself.

Why is now a great time to sign up with Art Easely?

I think Art Easely is at a really exciting stage right now. The platform has grown into a much more comprehensive system for managing an art career, but we're still small enough that we have a very personal relationship with the artists using it.

We listen closely to our artists. A lot of what we've built has come directly from conversations about what they're struggling with, what's taking too much time, and what they wish their existing tools could do. Our artists have a real voice in how Art Easely continues to grow.

We're also trying to make getting started as easy as possible. If technology or building a website isn't something an artist wants to spend their time doing, for example, we offer a done-for-you artist website option. And if they're moving from somewhere else, we can help make that transition easier too.

Another thing that's very important to us is keeping Art Easely truly artist-first—not just in the features we build, but in our business model.

We've worked hard to keep our pricing fair and reasonable. We don't believe we need to take a percentage every time an artist succeeds. Art Easely doesn't take a commission from an artist's artwork sales, and we don't take a cut of their print-on-demand sales either.

There are other great platforms serving artists, and we respect what many of them have built. What we're trying to do differently is give artists a more comprehensive set of tools in one connected platform while allowing them to maintain control of their business, their customer relationships, and their revenue.

If an artist succeeds using Art Easely, we want that success to belong to them.

What have some of the artists who have decided to work with you say about using Art Easely? 

Some of the feedback that's meant the most to us has actually come from artists who have used other platforms specifically built for artists before coming to Art Easely.

They already understand what these kinds of platforms are supposed to do, so it's been really encouraging to hear them tell us that they find Art Easely's workflow easier and more intuitive and that they appreciate how much they can manage from one place.

One thing we hear is how nice it is to have their artwork and website connected rather than treating them as two completely separate things. When they update information about an artwork, they're not having to remember all the other places where that same information may need to change.

We've also heard a lot of appreciation for the personal support they receive from our team. That's something that's very important to us. We're building Art Easely alongside the artists who use it, and their questions, frustrations, and ideas have a very real influence on what we build next.

And I think that's some of the best feedback we can receive, because ultimately we don't want Art Easely to simply become another piece of software an artist has to manage.

We want it to be the platform that makes everything else about managing an art career easier—so artists can spend more of their time creating.