Today we’d like to introduce you to Janejira Damron.
Hi Janejira, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I’ve always been an artist for as long as I could remember but finding a creative job after high school was not happening. I instead went down the path of marketing, freelance graphic design, customer service, a pyramid scheme here and there, and then finally I graduated film school in 2019 and started working for a Production company as a social media manager and costume designer. The creative juices were flowing and during my first post-grad year I started Peachful Creations. In the very beginning I sold soaps and resin creations. I made one online sale that entire year and quickly realized whatever I was doing was absolutely not working. In 2023 I got covid for the first time and my work required me to stay way for a solid 20 or so days. I lived at home with my mom who would leave meals at my door and I would wear a mask and wait for her to go downstairs before refilling my water. In those undisturbed days of solitude I decided to overhaul the entire business and ditch soaps because my true passions were digital/traditional drawing and sewing. I was also obsessed with fruit themed things and thus Peachful Creations version 2 changed my life for the better.
I got into my first anime convention which opened doors for five more and my oldest sister was selling handcrafted Jewelry at craft markets so that helped me get some insight on how to apply for events and what I needed to do to stand out.
Truly I owe it all to the friends I made along the way that gave me opportunities to take new risks and go to new places. The next few years I vended at the border of Oregon, White Center, Bellingham, Bothell, everywhere except my hometown. I’d drive my tiny Corolla full of tables, hopes, and dreams or have a friend take me in their van and I’d cover the cost of food and reimburse. Eventually I got to a point where I was regularly doing 2-3 events per month on the regular and everything I had ever learned about marketing yourself, building a brand, networking, it all finally paid off. And now this year on top of consistently vending at events I’m restarting my career as an author as well and bringing graphic novels, mangas, light novels, angsty YA novels with illustrations to life. Now that I have financial stability more doors for creativity have opened but I always find myself looking back on those humble beginnings where I DREAMED of having enough art to fill more than half of a six foot table and the thought of seeing my stickers sold in stores had never occurred to me.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I left one of my 9-5 jobs for vending full time thinking it was the right move and I would magically succeed. I don’t regret leaving that job since the change in management was legitimately a nightmare, but I probably would’ve ended up on the streets if it weren’t for my partner and my closest friends being able to bail me out when my funds were in the red. I was putting in over 80 applications every few months to get a job again after finally admitting I could in fact NOT do this. I applied for every grant I thought I could qualify for and ended up just losing money from applying to grants I didn’t get because those grants truly were for more charitable businesses and I felt like a selfish fraud because my pitches for Peachful Creations were all just “Here’s me. I’m an underrepresented artist who makes things and I need money to survive so I can make more art.” Meanwhile all the actual grant winners were like “Here’s an organization that actually solves problems with the world and provides services to people and not just pretty decorations” and I cannot begin to explain how intense the mental spiral could be at times.
When my art needed to be sold for survival it almost completely lost its soul. Market after market sales kept getting worse and eventually my online shop went stretches of months getting no sales or straight up chargeback scams.
I got another 9-5 and for a long, long while just stopped making new art and started re-evaluating what I was even doing with my life and what I wanted.
In general I struggle with imposter syndrome and it was so much worse when I realized everything that happened was just a consequence of choices I kept making. But if I could bounce back from having a bank account balance of negative two thousand due to the dumbest Instagram scam I had encountered in my life, I could bounce back from anything. And now three years after I left my 9-5 I’ve paid off my loans from those dark times and I’m finally in a position to pay back everyone that’s helped me out when I was in the red. I’ve also been introduced to the world of wholesale which I never imagined was possible. The quality of my work has also vastly improved since I can afford to upgrade materials again. So the future is looking bright but I cannot emphasize enough how doing this full time was absolutely not the answer without a financial cushion and a solid plan.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I think the real question is what don’t I do? It’s a joke among friends that I’m the Jane of all trades and my skill is collecting skills like pokemon cards. I’m a writer, an artist, I play several instruments, singing is a passion of mine, (the skill level is debatable) I dance, I make costumes, painting furniture is a recent passion I picked up a few summers ago, and I performed in my first drag show recently. I make films too but realistically I think I’ll be overhauling that career next year unless I get into something musical first. Peachful Creations however is known for my fun hair bows and animal/food themed stickers.
I’m most proud of how far the bows have come. Originally I only made small bows with an overly complicated process that took hours of my life. Every single market they were just mistaken for bow ties and I started getting sick of using one pattern for every single one. Now I have a variety of patterns, a streamlined process, 3-5 sizes, and a variety of prices to reflect the differences in design. The greatest iteration has to be my cosmic bows. It’s hard to make a big batch of them because they sell out faster than I can sew and the price is on the higher end because of the physical endurance my hands have to go through working with chains and individual star beads and the hours it takes to cast resin center pieces. But it’s always worth it when I see people’s breath taken away in person. It’s a magical feeling I can barely describe, and it reminds me what the entire point was in the first place. To bring beautiful things into the world and share the joys of creation.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
YES is my initial response. In an insanely convoluted way, the negative bank account balance of 2k put me on the right path to restarting the business. Isolating myself due to covid made the huge reset possible. There was nothing luckier than a month of zero interruption/obligation, free meals, no paying for gas, and this was before I paid electric bills and rent so capitalism wasn’t wreaking havoc on my plans for just a while. But obviously the circumstance was pretty tragic and isolating myself from other humans for that long gave my therapist a lot to talk about. I have always been and will always be lucky to have the connections I have, opportunities coming at me left and right, and being in a better position financially now than I was before. But I’m not gonna lie when the years were rough, they were ROUGH. Something greater always comes from that roughness when it comes to my life and that’s how you get through it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.peachfulcreations.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peachfulcreations
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@janejiradoesart
- Other: https://bsky.app/profile/valiantbutterfly.bsky.social
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