Agos Artistry
It originally started out as a birthday present for one of my good friends, Destin, who deserves a proper introduction before I explain exactly what my gift was. I’ve been friends with Destin since first grade. I don’t remember why we initially became friends, but for whatever dumb elementary school reasons, we did. He has been a foundational friend in my life and has shaped very core parts of my identity. Apart from this though, Destin is an extremely competent artist. In our senior year of high school, he learned how to screen-print from our art teachers, who are also two of the coolest people I’ve ever met. That year, he started selling his printed designs to students and teachers at my school under a new title: Agos Artistry. He was making pretty good money from it too, but all of a sudden it was summer with college only a few short months away. Agos Artistry was packed up and left in his garage, and we both went off to school.
The next summer, September 1st to be exact, was Destin’s 19th birthday. I was just coming off of building rcrd and a lot of smaller projects, and I felt the urge to find something I could make for him. I was excited by the idea of making an online store for Agos and bringing some of my technical knowledge to complement his art. I worked hard to find an online shop platform we could use and built a prototype of the site, even putting up faux products using the shirts I had bought from him in high school. I was proud of what I’d made, but I had definitely stayed inside my comfort zone in terms of dealing with a website and other electronic tools. After I showed him the site I’d made, we decided to bring Agos Artistry back over the next semester, this time as a partnership. We both knew we only had a few weeks to plan before college started, and we had a long way to go before we had an actual functioning online business. We had a bad website, with little idea how to handle shipping, branding, social media, and a whole lot more. So, naturally, we left for college having done virtually nothing.
Without Shift, I think this project would have fallen to the back of my mind, but instead I had an incentive every week to make progress toward getting everything ready. I tried to do what I could while still in Michigan, but after ordering what we needed, figuring out how to do shipping through USPS, and working on our site, Destin and I needed to be back from school to do work. We decided that we wanted to use Thanksgiving break to finish everything and then drop the site in early December, since U of M was sending us home after Thanksgiving. Up until this point I’d mostly been doing work that I was comfortable with; website design, online ordering, even most of the legal stuff that I’d done at Michigan had been well within my comfort zone. But once I got back, we only had a couple weeks to finalize a logo, schedule multiple photoshoots, pay a friend to shoot and edit a video for our site, practice the shipping process, not to mention actually setting up our screen printing area with the right inks for the shirts (that we didn’t have yet). The days passed in a blur. I realized just how much I had to learn–I was now the co-owner of a screen printing business and I didn’t even know how to screen print yet.
On December 1st we finally felt close enough to give ourselves a time limit. We said we had 4 days to get everything ready, which we reinforced by posting our shop open date to our Instagram. Even this was new to me; before Agos, I’d only ever posted one thing on Insta. We ended up only finishing the video the 4th and we barely had the new and improved site ready in time, but by some miracle we did. Agos Artistry went live on December 5th.
We reached out to friends we knew and one of our art teachers, Mr. Barton, whose brand Hamptons Surf Company had inspired us in the first place. Again, the level of support we got from everyone was so exciting; one of Destin’s friends even drew up a mock artist contract for us and Mr. Barton talked us through the ins and outs of this kind of business. Over the winter semester, we decided on two artists, Alex Shammas and Laura Read, we wanted to work with. Destin and I worked with them to find designs that they could sell through Agos and also just thought about how we wanted the whole Agos-artist relationship to work. We also worked a lot on getting Agos to be an Instagram Shop, which forced me to delve deeper into the depths of Facebook Business than I ever hope to do in the future. All of this got put on pause for a bit when we realized that our other art teacher, Mr. Garvin, had developed multiple myeloma. Wanting to do something to give back to a teacher who had given so much to us, we printed a special line of shirts and donated all the profits to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, a charity of his choice.
I’m not sure what the path forward is for Agos, but I am so grateful for the experience it’s given me. Just as it did over the previous winter break, being able to physically work with Destin this summer will lead to faster progress, but toward what end I’m not sure. I’m just excited to find out.
Patrick McElroy is a sophomore at the University of Michigan, studying computer science. He likes rock climbing and water skiing, and he still enjoys some Minecraft from time to time.
