Photo courtesy of BottlesCape Art
From college best friends to business partners, that's where the journey of BottlesCape's founders begins.
Created by Chloe Trent and Deken Taylor, BottlesCape is a Black-owned arts business repurposing bottles and selling tumblers, vases, keychains, coasters and more. They bring their pieces around to local fairs, conventions and online.
It stemmed from brainstorming a creative business while looking for a job.
Taking it back to 2022, while Trent was getting her MBA at the University of North Texas (UNT), the two decided on a business. But what? After ideas such as candles crossed their minds, they eventually settled on bottle art.
"So since then, we have learned how to market our products better. We have learned how to deal with certain audiences," Taylor says. "We have different fandoms that we do specialize."
The two combine their specialities to run all parts of the business. While Trent designs all the art for their products, whether it's painting or coming up with new character designs (such as Pokemon and One Piece), Taylor takes care of the marketing and communications side of things.
According to Trent, both are creative visionaries.
"Looking at things, social media, finances, basically a lot of other aspects of the business I handle," Taylor says. "Chloe's our main product design person and also she's our visionary."
They use a process of sublimation for their tumblers, which transfers images onto tumblers, a process that happens outside in a sublimation machine.
"Usually the printing process takes about five minutes. The process to make the art itself can take it two to six hours, depending on what it is," Trent says. "The burning process can take about 10 minutes. And bottles and vases can take a whole day."
Weekend markets, fairs, and conventions are a big part of BottlesCape strategy. On average, they do close to 40 a year with March and April being the busiest months.
The biggest convention for them, according to Taylor, is the upcoming DreamCon. Hosted by content creators RDCWorld, it's a summer anime and gaming convention that takes place in Austin.
After making it to this point, BottlesCape hopes to keep up their work for another 5 or so years and even venture into podcasting and other paths.
"We do plan to let this go strong for the next five to 10 years," Trent says. "Even though we know there's a time where BottlesCape may start to close the curtains, we will be willing to just make this as big as it can and just suddenly disappear."
"We want to start a podcast just talking about all of our adventures, all of our moments that we've had. So BottlesCape's longevity is definitely going to be there," Taylor says.
You can visit their site here.
Photo courtesy of BottlesCape Art
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