The History

The History    The Vision    The Pivot    The Founder    Learning in Action    Artifacts

How a Lifetime of Building Things Became a Business

 

Most businesses begin with an idea.

This one began with a career spent learning — without knowing exactly what it was preparing for.

The story of Nicart doesn’t start with a business plan or a breakthrough moment. It starts with two decades of building things: brands, communities, databases, events, newsletters, relationships. It starts with a woman who didn’t set out to become an art industry innovator but who spent twenty years developing every skill that innovation would eventually require — and who walked into a business degree program already carrying more real-world entrepreneurial experience than most people accumulate in a lifetime.

This is that story.

 

THE FOUNDATION: TWENTY YEARS BEFORE NICART

 

Before there was an agency, before there was a gallery concept, before there was a method or a manifesto — there was a craftsperson.

I spent more than twenty years in website design, graphic design, and digital sales management before any of this had a name. These were not glamorous years. They were formative ones. I was paying my dues — learning and building in real time, pulling myself up by my bootstraps, figuring it all out on the fly in a sink-or-swim environment where the stakes were high and there was no safety net. I learned how brands are built from the ground up, how digital infrastructure creates the conditions for business growth, how a well-designed online presence is not a luxury but a load-bearing wall. I learned how to build things that worked — and how to rebuild them when they didn’t.

That foundation became immediately visible when I joined Face Rock Creamery in 2013 as Internet Sales Manager and Online Marketing Director — a role I held for nearly eight years and grew into something far larger than the title suggested. I built and managed every layer of the creamery’s digital marketing infrastructure: corporate website, email marketing, social media, wholesale and eCommerce operations. I managed a qualified customer contact database of 26,000+ names. I ran the full eCommerce P&L — online revenue, order fulfillment, shipping logistics, inventory management, customer support. I produced three Face Rock Festivals: city-scale anniversary events coordinating musicians, food and beverage service, vendors, and logistics for hundreds of attendees.

 

It was, in every practical sense, a complete entrepreneurial education disguised as a day job.

 

And it produced one insight that would later become central to everything Nicart was built on: a well-maintained, relationship-driven contact database is one of the most valuable assets a business can own.

 

THE ENTRY POINT: POKING A TOE INTO THE ART WORLD

 

In 2021, I made a deliberate decision to enter the local art world — carefully, and without competition.

The vehicle was community art walls: partnerships with local coffee shops and small businesses to place rotating artist exhibitions in non-gallery settings. It was a low-stakes way to learn how the industry actually operated from the inside — how artists thought about their work, how the public responded to art in approachable settings, how relationships between artists and venues were built and maintained. It was research disguised as community service. And it worked exactly as intended.

What was happening underneath all of it was more deliberate than it appeared.

When I left Face Rock Creamery I had no personal social media presence at all. What I had was eight years of hard-won knowledge about how email lists are built, how cross-channel promotion works, and why message consistency across platforms is the difference between a campaign that compounds and one that evaporates. I applied all of it immediately — and on two tracks simultaneously.

The first track was public: I became the person on Facebook who showed up at every art event on the South Oregon Coast and posted about it freely. Not promotional posts — genuine enthusiasm. Photographs, encouragement, personal responses to the work. Free advertising for event organizers who quickly noticed and welcomed me. An experimentation lab for learning what kinds of posts people actually responded to. And a slow, steady accumulation of a personal following that eventually grew to 2,000+ — built entirely on the reputation of being the woman who knew everything happening in the local art world and was generous enough to share it.

The second track was infrastructural: every time a new artist went up on a community art wall, an eBlast went out and a social post followed. The Nicart list and the Nicart social presence were being built from day one — informed by everything I had learned managing 26,000 contacts for a creamery, and running in parallel with everything I was about to build for BAAA.

 

By the time the agency launched, Nicart already had an audience — not a massive one, but a warm one. Built relationship by relationship over years of showing up.

 

The agency didn’t have to introduce itself to strangers. It introduced itself to people who already knew my name and trusted what I had to say about art. That is not a small thing. That is the difference between a launch and a cold start.

That same year I joined the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Artists’ Association — the only arts organization serving the greater South Oregon Coast — as its marketing and digital strategy advisor, webmaster, and editor of the association’s newsletter, Perspectives.

What followed was one of the steeper growth curves in the region’s arts community history. The newsletter had 80 subscribers when I took it over. Within less than a year it had grown to 2,800+ — a 3,400% increase — establishing it as the primary arts event publication for the South Oregon Coast. Organizational reach expanded through editorial interviews with leadership at the Coos Art Museum and SWOCC, building partnerships that would later become central to Nicart’s network.

 

THE EVENTS: WHERE THE VISION STARTED TO TAKE SHAPE

 

Alongside the community art walls and the newsletter work, I began producing signature events — and discovered something I hadn’t entirely anticipated: I was exceptionally good at it.

The Soirée d’Artiste & Musicale galas became the highest-attended art events on the South Oregon Coast. Two sold-out evenings — 70 to 100 attendees per event — combining multi-artist exhibitions, master-class musicians, wine, food, and thematic installations into something that felt less like an art opening and more like an immersive cultural experience. Every element of the evening was designed to work together: the art, the music, the wine, the atmosphere, the conversation. Nothing passive. Nothing left to chance.

The 2024 event — Beethoven Plays Rock at the Coos Art Museum — brought together ten abstract artists and four internationally recognized musicians for two evenings that generated $4,000+ in art sales and drew approximately 80 attendees per night. The 2023 event — A Night Under the Stars at Sprague Theater — set a venue attendance record with 100 guests for a classical concert experience woven through with photography, wine education, and curated immersive design.

 

These events were not just successful. They were the first real-world proof of the idea that would eventually become the Nicart Method.

 

Art sells when the experience around it is intentionally designed to create connection. The passive gallery model — hang the work, open the doors, hope someone feels something — was leaving enormous potential on the table. A properly engineered experience could move people from observers to owners in a single evening.

The events were the laboratory. The Method came later. But the hypothesis was already forming.

 

THE CREDENTIAL: THE FORMAL ART WORLD OPENS A DOOR

 

In 2024, I was selected for the Coos Art Museum’s Curator’s Pilot Program — a recognition of my growing standing within the regional fine art community. I have since served as an invited collaborator on exhibits and installations and joined the museum’s exhibition committee.

This was not a casual credential. The Coos Art Museum is the highest-level fine art institution on the South Oregon Coast, and its curatorial program is not open to everyone. Being invited in — and being asked to stay — was confirmation that the years of community building, event production, and relationship development had produced something real: a reputation as someone the art world trusted.

 

 

THE DEGREE: WHERE BUSINESS EDUCATION MET LIVED EXPERIENCE

 

In 2022, I enrolled at Southwestern Oregon Community College to complete a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration — not as a beginner, but as someone who had been running a business for years and wanted to understand, at a deeper level, why it worked the way it did.

The coursework landed differently as a result. Finance didn’t just teach accounting — it informed the decision to pursue a building purchase rather than a lease, grounded in the logic of tangible asset appreciation versus escalating lease payments. Sales didn’t just teach techniques — it introduced the traveling product salesman circuit that would later become the architectural model for the Nicart placement network. E-marketing didn’t just teach digital strategy — it reframed the entire philosophy behind The Curator’s Inbox, making the case that authority in any industry is built by giving knowledge away freely, not hoarding it. Advertising and social marketing reinforced the same insight: the influencer who shares openly outperforms the expert who charges for access every time.

Every class became a lens. Every framework became a tool. And the business I had been building intuitively for years began to reveal its own logic in sharper and sharper relief.

I am completing that degree in Spring 2026 — with a business that is already operational, already generating relationships and revenue, and already doing things the industry has never seen before.

 

THE THROUGH LINE

 

Looking back, the trajectory is clear — though it wasn’t always visible from inside it.

Twenty years of design and digital marketing built the infrastructure instincts. Eight years at Face Rock Creamery built the operational discipline and the database intelligence. The community art walls built the artist relationships. The BAAA work built the audience and the editorial voice. The Soirées built the proof of concept for the Nicart Method. The CAM involvement built the institutional credibility. The degree built the frameworks that made sense of everything else.

 

None of it was wasted. All of it was preparation.

 

The question was never whether I was qualified to build something unprecedented in the Oregon art world. The question — the one my husband asked, the one that started everything — was simply whether it could be done at all.

 

The next chapter is where that question got answered.