Main Street Mavericks Business Spotlight: Bread & Badger

Amanda Siska of Bread & Badger welcomed the Main Street Mavericks to her SE Portland home and art studio on day one of our tour to meet Oregon small business owners.

Getting the opportunity to watch her creative process — from ideas to execution — was a great way to spend our third stop of the day. It was easy to see why she has been so successful in her 16 years as a small business owner: she produces unique art pieces made with love.

Come meet Bread & Badger!

Q&A With Bread & Badger

Tell us about your small business!

My name is Amanda Siska, and I am the owner of Bread and Badger.

I am a graphic designer, and I sandblast my art onto glassware and ceramics. I started in 2006. Originally, I was freehand engraving with a Dremel tool, and now I sandblast all of my art in my garage in Portland, Oregon. You can find my work online at breadandbadger.com. I’m also on Etsy, and I do a handful of local events every year.

What is your top piece of advice for small business owners just starting out?

I recommend trying to find people both within and outside of your niche to meet up with. In person if you can! I get a lot out of in-person meetups.

I love meeting with a group of people who are also in small business, being able to bounce ideas off of them, and seeing what everyone is struggling with because I’ve learned so much from other businesses, especially ones who are different from mine. Sometimes, they have a completely different outlook than I do or a totally different experience than I do.

I’ve just learned so much from other small business people.

What is the best part of being a small business owner?

Well, for me, it is the absolute flexibility of my time because I’m a parent, and I have a lot of other responsibilities. My husband is disabled now, and being able to have the absolute flexibility to take care of all of his needs and completely rearrange my schedule to be flexible around the rest of the family has been the greatest help.

I am also a control freak, and I like being able to be 100 percent in control of everything. Especially as an artist, I like having the flexibility of being able to experiment with my art as much as possible, which I don’t know that I would be able to do in a lot of other environments.

What’s one challenge you are facing, and how can the community help?

My biggest challenge right now is marketing and getting the word out about my business.

Because I’m so bad at social media these days, things change too fast, and I just want to make things and ship them out. I love doing that. I like making things, shipping them out, and drawing new things.

I always need advice on marketing, and I love when people spread the word organically. That seems to be the most effective thing, especially for my business. People like to gift my items because mugs make great gifts. So, letting people know that we exist is really helpful.

Has Etsy been a good resource for you?

Etsy has been one of the biggest forms of growth for my business ever. And I have no intention of leaving because I always grow the most from Etsy. That’s where I get the most new ideas, and customers discover me there. So, I love Etsy because people find me there.

But … I don’t love that Etsy controls so much about my business from the look of the business, the feel of the business. And they can, I mean, their algorithm affects me all the time. Their fees are non-negotiable, and they can shut down people’s shops without any notice for many reasons.

So, I have always had my own website, and I promote it primarily. And I recommend that everybody does that. I can’t imagine someone only having an Etsy shop. Or any other marketplace where you’re completely at the whim of someone else. I did sell on Amazon for a little while, too. And it was the same kind of thing where people didn’t realize that I was my own business. They expected me to meet all of the other Amazon expectations. This is just not realistic for most small businesses, even though I was doing prime shipping.

The profit margins are so small on Amazon, and for a business like mine, it’s not worth it at all.

What do you think is the biggest misconception about your small business?

A lot of people think I’m bigger than I am. Also, a lot of people think that I’m a potter, and I really feel terrible that I’m not a potter and that I will never be a potter, even though I have tried. I’m just really terrible at it. It’s not my skill set, and I work better as an illustrator, so I will let the expert potters do their own thing. I will be happy to pay them a living wage, and we can all make great progress through that arrangement.

But I’m also only me, and a lot of people think that I have a team. I don’t know what or how many people they think I work with, but it’s really just me doing absolutely everything.

At what point did you know you wanted to turn your artistic talents into a business?

Ah, I have been drawing for as long as I can remember. I have always wanted to draw things. As a kid, I originally thought I would be a children’s book illustrator.

As a teenager, I thought I would be a tattoo artist, and I did some tattooing just on my own. I took a class on children’s book illustration, and I loved it, but it was very, very competitive. I said, well, maybe I’ll do this someday, but what can I do in the meantime, because I have to be creative. What can I do that’s different, but I still get to draw every day?

And it was my dad who said, “Here, I’ve got this Dremel tool; you can draw on stuff with it.” And I thought that’s crazy. But I was able to draw on little pieces of glass, and I started with vases and things I found in thrift stores.

I just loved being able to draw directly on something and sell that item. And it was always different items that I found. So it felt very sustainable, ecological, um, and people liked it. It just took off before I really knew what I was doing, and I just really enjoyed it. And I said, well, I’ll just do this until maybe I come up with something else, but it’s just taken off this whole time, and I’ve had no reason to do anything else.

I never had any particularly formal training. I took a few continuing education classes when I lived in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts School, but I didn’t go to college, and I’ve just been teaching myself everything since then, and it’s so far been working out.

Do you remember your first sale?

It was probably to a friend or relative. It may have even been a jewelry piece because I was engraving little glasses and turning them into pendants and earrings. And then I made them into magnets and things, too. So, it could have been something that small. It could have been a little vase. One of my favorite first pieces, though, was a black glass vase that I engraved an octopus all the way around, and it wrapped around, and I was so proud of it.

I remember selling that and being like, okay, if I can sell this, I can do this forever. It just clicks.

Where do all of your best ideas come from?

Especially around the fall time, Halloween, I’m like, “Oh, all the spooky things come out!”

I get lots of ideas from just having cats.

I’m really a cat person above all else. So, seeing the cats do ridiculous things and thinking, whatever my interests are, whatever someone else’s interests are, and thinking: how could I illustrate that in a way that would connect with someone else? How can I incorporate a cat into it?

It is often what just comes to me. And that’s how a design is born.

What’s next for Bread & Badger? Is there anything you are striving for?

I feel like my aiming is pretty small these days. There was a while when I had a warehouse and multiple employees, and we were making as much as we possibly could. I was doing a lot of wholesale. And I really didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t enjoy managing people. And it took a lot of creativity away from me.

I actually had less time to be creative and create art. Now that it’s just me and I’m working from my home, it’s really just my goal to make as much as I possibly can and sell as much as I possibly can until I don’t want to anymore.

And this is slower this year than some other years. But in general, I get to that point where I’m like, okay, I’m busy enough. That’s all I need. I just want to be out of debt.

I go through phases. Sometimes I get burned out.

But sometimes the inspiration just hits, and I do my own product photography, and it’s just like getting the right photo shoot or going on location somewhere. And I go, “Oh, this is so exciting.” This is really what I want to be doing. Or occasionally, I open up my books, and I take custom orders.

Some custom order that I never would have considered drawing that animal or that kind of thing, and I go, “Oh, this inspires me to do a whole other line of something along this line.” And that kind of inspiration is amazing.

When I haven’t done anything new for a while, and there are certain times of year when it’s slow, it can be a little discouraging, but I feel like it always comes back. Doing a lot of in-person events helps. Sometimes, I’ll feel really burned out, and then I do something in person, and I get to actually speak to customers, and all of a sudden, the fire comes right back, and I’m like, “Oh, this is why I’m doing this.”

I’m definitely an extrovert. I love being able to talk to people, but I also need to hear feedback and work alone. I don’t get feedback all the time, so when I do, it can really help.

What are some designs you’re thinking of doing next?

I always have fun ideas. I have people requesting more Halloween designs, too, and I’m like, I don’t know if I have time. I’m doing a lot of things, but I haven’t done a lot of horror movie monsters. I’d like to do them. That would be fun.

Yeah, I would love to do that. I like skeletons and bones and teeth and weird, weird, like, dead nature stuff. I have a lot of, like, rebirth symbology, lots of, like, decay, but, like, new life, or lots of animals that transform, like, insects that transform, or the phoenix on fire, things like that.

I plan to do more with that, more mythology, folklore kinds of things, too.

What is the impact a customer can have on a business like yours?

Every sale that comes through me goes directly to my family, and I am the breadwinner and the only employed person in our household at the moment. So it pays for the food and the housing and everything for myself, my husband, my son, and our cats. It goes to supporting other small businesses because I get materials from other small businesses, and I always buy from other small businesses.

So, especially when I do in-person events, I do a lot of purchasing and trading with other small business people. And I just try to keep things as small and local as possible. And so it really helps support lots and lots of people in the immediate area where I live. I know we talked about business advice in general.

Do you have specific advice for artists?

Trying to be different is really hard, but doing what you love and feel drawn to do is always the best thing.

Whenever I try making art that is not something I’m really excited about, it doesn’t feel right. So, just kind of trust your gut, do what you want to do, and look outside of your typical zone of expertise to see what else is there that you could do.

Maybe there’s a different kind of product that people aren’t even considering that you could try. I get a lot of excitement when I find other small businesses doing something I’ve never seen before or doing it in a completely different way than someone else, and it’s really exciting to support them, too.

Do you know Tyler Thrasher? He lives in Tulsa, I think. I discovered him years ago because he was collecting insects, like cicadas, and he was growing crystals on them. So, like, crystallized cicadas. And then he was growing other crystals on skulls and bones and all kinds of other, like, animal pieces.

His newest invention is glow-in-the-dark flora. He’s a mad scientist. He’s amazing and brilliant, and I have some now. He has made this special glow-in-the-dark material that he dips things in. And then you have this preserved plant that glows in the dark. And they glow in all different colors and they’re amazing. And he does all kinds of fundraisers to teach science to kids in Tulsa. He does a lot of political action and raises money and awareness for good causes and he’s just, he’s the best.

Bread & Badger’s Vendor Round-Up

And which of our vendors and partners are assisting Bread & Badger on their small business journey?

What site does Bread & Badger use for eCommerce? Shopify.

What POS do you use at in-person events? Square.

Who is your credit card processor? Square. “But I also take payments from any way people want to pay me. So, I accept PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Apple Pay.”

Who do you use for shipping?  ShipStation

Project Management Software? Trello