Eszett invites visual artists to apply for our Summer 2025 Open Call to join a new kind of talent agency—one built for the future.

Our Artist Acceleration Program supports creators who reject the use of Generative AI in their art, offering them a platform rooted in transparency, equity, and innovation.

As an Eszett-represented artist, you’ll gain access to:

• Direct support in e-commerce operations

• Market-driven product development guidance

• Data to focus your patron engagement

Eszett enables you to focus more on your creative work and less on business operations and logistics.

We cover operational costs and assume the financial risk, so you don’t have to.

Through our Artist Acceleration Program, Eszett takes on the operational burdens of running an online shop. We handle:

• E-commerce Platform (Etsy, Shopify, etc.)

• Physical product production

• Packing, shipping, and fulfillment

• Customer service & returns

• Store accounting

• Sales tax liability & compliance

We do this so artists can focus on what they do best: creating art!

We work collaboratively with each artist to curate a profitable product mix aligned with their artistic voice and audience demand, while using advanced automation and CRM tools to grow and deepen patron engagement.

Artists pay nothing out of pocket; instead, we operate on a fair and transparent revenue-share model where our success depends on theirs. By building a strong roster of like-minded creators, Eszett is positioned to unlock future licensing, brand partnerships, and large-scale visibility for our artists.

Visit MINK's Store

About the Artist

MINK has over 20 years in traditional art. Working in acrylics, watercolors, and pen & ink, MINK creates nature-inspired art with a bold edge, aiming to spark joy, reflection, and connection.

MINK’s pen and ink drawings are shaped by personal experiences. She uses acrylics, watercolors, and pen & ink to communicate messages of motivation, hope, and personal experiences and the way she sees the world. She describes her art being influenced by nature with a little kick.

With each piece she is hoping to allow people to have an experience, remind the viewer of good memories or at the least, put people in a fun, happy state of mind to help them through the day.

Summer 2025 - Open Call for Artists

• Are you an artist spending too much time “running your online store”?

• Unsold inventory taking too much space in your home or studio?

• Confused, frustrated, or uninterested in dealing with sales tax & international shipping & VAT?

Eszett solves all of that for visual artists with zero upfront cost…

Interested? Submit an application for our Summer 2025 Call for Artists!

Visit Dave Kaminsky's Store

About the Artist

Dave Kaminsky is a illustrator and found-object sculptor born in the Soviet Union, but raised in the United states, he currently resides in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Kaminsky’s illustrations are digital, created using a pen & tablet. His small interactive creations blur the lines between natural and man-made, using text and images to give clues about how we understand our own fleeting lives and the discoveries made therein.

Often fusing techniques from all mediums, Dave’s work is intimate, emotional and whimsical and is saturated with memory and emotion.

Summer 2025 - Open Call for Artists

Are you an artist spending too much time “running your online store”…?

Submit an application for our Summer 2025 Call for Artists!

🥇 Firsts

• Artist store launched: Joshua Barber Fine Art + first art sales = first revenue for Eszett!

🪴 Ecosystem

• Accepted to the Startup Virginia Idea Factory, Cohort 11

• Planned to have our public in-person debut at the AI Ready RVA “Power of Possibility” Expo in Richmond, VA, but the event got rescheduled due to snow ❄️ - we’ll be there on March 4!

• Planning to attend SXSW and specifically:

  • 3/6: SX with Sequence hosted by Sequence, a “financial router” aka money movement platform that I’ve written about before on Full Backlog

  • 3/11: Flatstock, because artists

💼 Business Development

• Next two artist stores “under construction”

• 120+ artists identified as “leads” in our CRM

• Boilerplate artist licensing & store operations contract completed

🤖 Platform

• Posted: Eszett's Q1 Roadmap: From POC through MVP to Version 1.0

• “Atelier” Artist Portal - no/low-code platform candidates identified

• “Fisher” Sales Tax & VAT Compliance - Store Transactions to GL Code automation schema developed w/ robust GL Code taxonomy

🌬️ Upcoming in March

• 3/19: Attending rvatech/Data + AI Summit

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Five of my paintings were selected by Eszett to be recreated as museum-quality art prints on canvas and paper, as well as other sundries. This online presence will be an ever-evolving catalog that will reflect my 25 years of creating art.

- Joshua Barber

One of the most misused terms in modern business is "MVP" - Minimum Viable Product. While it's become a buzzword thrown around in every startup pitch and product meeting, many miss its true meaning and purpose.

Any time someone newly mentions “MVP” in a meeting, I ask: Have you read the Lean Startup book?

More often than not, the answer is “no.”

Defining Phases

At Eszett, we're intentionally defining our MVP phase as a specific stepping stone between our Proof of Concept (POC) and our Version 1.0 (v1) release. Each represent a fundamentally different stages of product maturity and market validation.

Our December 2024 Proof-of-Concept (POC) “HOLIDAY24” campaign in our eszettSHOP live ecommerce lab was just that: proving to ourselves that our core technical integration works. Can we successfully connect several low/no-code platforms to handle ecommerce, on-demand production and fulfillment, and money movement? Will orders flow through correctly? What products do people like?

The POC wasn’t about scale or polish - it was about fundamental technical feasibility. In fact, we’ve pretty much committed to a DIY ‘zine-inspired ethos to the store.

When will the MVP be “done”?

Now we are in our Minimal Viable Product (MVP) phase, which builds on this foundation by testing our core business hypothesis with real artists and their patrons.

It's not about having every feature or the smoothest onboarding - it's about learning if our basic value proposition resonates in the real world. In fact, a lot of the artist onboarding in this phase is intentionally manual, and we are documenting things every step of the way. Why? So that we can automate, using an appropriate and evolving amount of AI, our core artist onboarding process.

Once we have three artists onboarded, the MVP will be DONE.

We will then move to “Version 1.0” for artist number four and beyond. This is where we will work on more automation, AI-powered tax & VAT compliance, and scalable operations.

The danger in misusing "MVP" isn't just linguistic - it leads to bloated initial releases, delayed market feedback, and wasted resources building features nobody wants. By clearly defining these phases — especially with a “definition of ‘done’” for our MVP, we ensure each stage serves its proper purpose:

1. POC validates technical feasibility

2. MVP validates market demand – and lets us document internal processes for future planning

3. v1 (and beyond) delivers scalable value - and we believe potential investors will value something that is already generating platform-level profit.

Astute readers will notice at least two significant AI initiatives embedded within our work to serve “artists who reject the use of Generative AI in their work.” – more to come on that… 😉

We are excited to have a table at The Power of Possibility: AI Ready RVA Launch Party & Expo. If you are attending, please be sure to say hi, ask questions, and pick up some sweet stickers!

In support of our Mission, we are building a platform for visual artists who chose to reject the use of Generative AI in the creation of their works.

We are delivering this platform through a business model not unlike a traditional talent agency, but with a few twists.

Eszett is designed to be the talent agency of the future

Eszett signs visual artists to Ecommerce development contracts, taking over the operations of their non-gallery online commercial presence.

We work alongside each artist to carefully select a profitable product mix that fits their creative vision and the desires of their patrons, and we manage all aspects of their store back office: production, fulfillment, customer service & returns, sales tax compliance, and accounting – all with our advanced automation & AI platform.

Eszett uses proven customer relationship management (CRM) approaches with modern & emerging data science methods to continually seek gains in the level of patronage our artists receive.

By doing this, we seek to increase an artist’s revenue across multiple channels while building a comprehensive patron database which we help them use to grow the breadth and depth of support they receive from the people who love their work.

Our goal is to not only increase the amount of income our artists receive, but to also increase the amount of time they have to work on their creative pursuits – or whatever else they want to do – by greatly decreasing the amount of time they spend “running a store”.

Artists pay us nothing, and we deal with them transparently

Eszett takes on the financial risk of an artist’s shop, and does not ask the artist for money. We make money through a simple licensing & revenue share model, and ensure that each individual artist makes more money from their shop than we do.

We have an evolving set of criteria for the artists we seek to represent. We work with professional artists who believe that they are doing something more than a side hustle, and who have a proven history of promoting their work to their patrons. In other words, artists who may already have an Etsy, TikTok Shop, RedBubble, BigCartel, or Shopify site and want to take things further while spending less time managing those platforms and dealing with things like production, fulfillment, returns, customer service and sales tax compliance.

We seek to always deal fairly and equitably with all parties in our business. From contract to operational back-end, we are extremely transparent with the artist on how money flows through the Eszett platform so that there are no surprises around how and when an artist gets paid.

Many are greater than one

By signing many artists and building a roster of the individuals we represent, we are able to create economies of scale across our agency. This enables us to do things like get volume discounts on product production, and cross-pollinate learnings between artist shops under Eszett’s management.

We believe that in the near future, significant segments of the consumer market will have a better understanding of the difference between AI- and human-generated art, and will have a preference for human-generated art. This will create a market for guaranteed human-made imagery.

Eszett’s robust roster of artists, who have focused their work on making art themselves without overt use of Generative AI (GenAI), will perfectly position us to represent our artists to large brands and creative agencies for new commissions and commercial licensing opportunities.

Eszett’s Vision is to be the most well-respected global talent agency for visual artists.

Please join us on our journey to build Eszett

At Eszett, we believe we’re entering new territory with our approach to a unique business architecture and an extreme level of automation using both traditional software integration methods and emerging AI patterns and approaches. All of this is wrapped in a low-code architecture intended to support rapid scale & evolution of a profitable business.

Most importantly – and with a touch of intentional irony – we are doing this in service of visual artists who choose to reject the use of Generative AI for creating their work.

We are storytellers who believe in a high level of transparency. Some would call this “working out loud” or “building in public” – we just call it The Eszett Way.

We’d like to invite you to join us on this journey by subscribing to our Substack at any of the Free or Paid levels

• All Subscribers, including Free Subscribers, will receive access to our latest News & Updates

• All Paid Subscribers will receive News & Updates as well as Commentary & Analysis around what we’re doing

• ß | Front Row Subscribers will receive all of that, plus Exclusive Front Row-only Content and Invitations to be in the live (virtual) studio audience for some of our podcast episodes like our Quarterly Business Reviews & Celebrations and exclusive artist interviews.

• Both levels of Paid Subscribers will be eligible to register for Eszett merchandise drops and discounts from artists we represent.

Subscribe now

Is Eszett…

…a talent agency for visual artists?

…a RevOps platform for visual artists?

…going to solve a big enterprise challenge along the way?

…able to influence positive cultural change?

…an emerging authoritative voice in the area of AI and ethics?

…able to truly meet our goal of being “global”?

…making good choices around the artists we sign?

…in search of investors?

Follow along and find out!

Joshua Barber has been painting professionally for over 25 years. His work depicts modern icons — his signature haloed “bubble people” — and dreamlike cityscapes. Joshua’s paintings have been exhibited in galleries in the United Kingdom, New York, Los Angeles, and Richmond, as well as in the Dreweatts Urban Art Auction in London alongside artists such as Banksy, Damien Hirst and Ron English. Joshua Barber's next show is set for June 2025 in Richmond, VA.

The Eszett talent agency is set to launch artist Joshua Barber's online store the week of February 3rd, 2025. We are excited to have him on board and support his creative work with the launch of our new platform.

To learn more about Joshua Barber, please visit:

https://www.joshuabarberfineart.com/

Eszett Front Row members will be invited to join the live online studio audience, and there will be some interactive portions of the meeting.

Hopefully this will be the most fun QBR you’ve ever attended!

Thankfully the POC was a resounding technical success and even made a few dollars with very limited promotion.

We approach the shop as if it were a zine — representing the DIY-ethos ingrained in our company culture

Several of the HOLIDAY24 pieces are still available, and we also have the Eszett merch store there. All sales from the store go directly to supporting our work with artists.

We have plans to explore some new softgoods concepts, possibly even launching a SS25 athleisure collection, and a larger FW25 streetwear collection with participation from some of our artists.