171022 Six Million? Really? 

Finding ways to jump start our small businesses at the NPCI 

For nine years I have grounded my plans for the Northwest Print Center Incubators on a number: six million. I say, “Six million people in the US alone would buy a Halfwood Press if they only knew about it.” That’s a lot of people, and if I had a dollar for each one sold, I could retire—maybe, like the MTG founders, live like a rock star.

(Can’t you just see Bill and Lynda Ritchie living like rock stars! Makes me smile.)

Where did I get that number?

When?

It was in 2008 when I wrote the first accounting of how I came to make the first Halfwood Presses. In my book I was working on a paragraph, writing under my pen name, Harris Sweed, to explain the dollar-value of my design.

I wrote as though interviewing myself. I gave an accounting in a little Excel spreadsheet, counting who had bought the first 30-some Halfwood Presses up to that year. Taking into account these people (and I knew them in quite good detail) as a demographic; and then I took into account the people I had met when I was an art professor teaching college.

I taught college for nineteen years—call it a generation. In that generation, the population of printmaking classes at the UW School of Art in Seattle was typical of many universities and community colleges in the USA. In other words, 15-20 people in each class of printmaking, ranging across the four printing processes of relieve, stencil, planographic and intaglio.

Digital printing didn’t exist in the 1980s (unless you counted dot matrix or pen plotters), but photography was making inroads in classic printmaking by way of photo-screen printing, etching and lithography.

Technical matters aside, by simple math I concluded that six million people had been exposed to printmaking over the twenty years I had been teaching it (1966-1985) and, at the time I was making the calculation, another twenty years (1986-2006) another number, perhaps equal to or greater than the previous generation—had been exposed.

The calculation at that time (writing my book in 2008) acknowledged but did not include how many people were “exposed” to printmaking (TV, workshops, art fairs, museums, etc.). Nor did my calculations consider people who came to know printmaking sideways, as it were, through photography, computer graphics, book arts, fabric design, collecting and crafting.

Nor did I consider the parents, or the children of print-loving parents, nor their spouses—people who in one way or another love prints, printmaking, and printmakers. I dropped my calculations at the portal of my knowledge: College-taught printmaking.

And that’s how I got six million. The simple equation of the number of students in typical classes, the number of classes taught in a year in the number of colleges in the USA at the time. I remember when I did this exercise in Excel, I distrusted my understanding of my formula because accounting is not my forte. The number six million persisted.

I was trying to assure myself that I wasn’t nuts and that I was making another big mistake in my career and my efforts to restore our living standard to what it was before I resigned from the UW. So I added the codicil: Only ten-percent of my former students continued in the art field after graduation, and of these only one percent would continue making prints in the manner in which they learned in college.

Thus reasoning, then six-thousand was a number with which I felt more at ease. Still, if we made and sold six-thousand Halfwood Presses over the next decade, my partner Tom Kughler's and my families could do well financially. At that time, Tom and I were only making Mini Halfwood Presses and selling them at the top price of $1,300. The larger ones—which sold up to a price of $3,500—were just a twinkle in Tom’s eyes.

I wonder: Will I look back (or am I now looking back?) and realize that, once again, I’m making a big mistake—like the time I put my faith in the integrity of the University of Washington’s Powers-that-were and lost my family's financial foothold?

Have I, again, gambled on a vision of the success of the Halfwood Press for thirteen years and now assessing my losses?

I find myself awakening in an era of big data—when success seems is measured by how many millions of dollars you can acquire as seed money to launch a startup like the Northwest Print Center Incubators. So it seems, from the meetings I attend regularly, dominated by high tech and a favorite pursuit of Millennials, dreaming of the Next Big Thing.

In these times, six million dollars’ income from sales of presses spread over a year may not be enough to impress anyone! However,  like making an artwork from scratch, few can see how.