What if you love photography, love the ocean, and want to combine the two into a successful business? I found the answer today in a website called Words From The Sea.
Two years ago while celebrating a birthday, a couple walked along the beach and began noticing shapes in the seafoam washing onto shore. David, a 30 year veteran in the photography industry, quickly started photographing the different shapes, and slowly began capturing the entire alphabet – naturally, no Photoshopping allowed. Slowly he captured the alphabet, punctuation marks, numbers and other characters to add to his collection. And the concept of Words From The Sea was born.
Today David and Lea have created a dynamic web presence that showcases these extraordinary creations. Not only is their wall art an inspiration, but their website is too.
You can purchase pre-created wall art in popular choices such as “faith” “believe” and “imagine”. Or personalize your artwork, and create something just for you – your first name, your last name, or the name of your hometown. Either way, your new artwork will be the focal point of your room, guaranteed to get people talking.
From there, Lea and David didn’t stop at building a business to make money doing what they love. They also decided to give back, and find a way to help what they love as well. They spell out on their site the importance of ocean conservation, and provide details on why we should care about our oceans future. Words From The Sea gives back by supporting ocean conservation, and raises money for both awareness and by giving a portion of all proceeds to ocean conservation programs.
What attracted me to this site and to this story was the potential of moving forward in an industry that so many people say is hard to make a living in. David and Lea are photographic pioneers in the sense they’ve found what they love, and they’ve found a way to move forward into a niche that has a lot of room for expansion. They’ve created a business model that appeals to a wide variety of people from all over the world. And created affordable artwork that can appeal to just about everyone.
Lessons To Gain
1. Find what you love. What do you love doing more than anything? If you like walking the beach, how can you do that every day?
2. Combine what you love with a passion. Once you know what you love to do, how can you turn that into passion that you can share with everyone? It may be in the form of fine art, or it may be in the form of a personalized portrait. The key is to get lost in your passion, and have that reflected in your final product.
3. Treat it like a business from start to finish. Create your first website that says WOW. Don’t rely on a free site like Facebook or Flickr to put up your first portfolio. If you want to be big, you have to be big from the beginning.
4. Find your niche, and go for it. Dream big. Focus from the beginning. It may take you a while to put your ideas to market – in the case of Words From The Sea, it took two years to get all the characters he was looking for. Never give up. Know your goal. And see it to fruition.
5. Give back. Whether you volunteer your time, give a portion of the proceeds to a charity, or start up a new foundation, its important to connect what you do to something more. It gives you purpose, and the will to succeed even more.
