CERAMICS—A-Paint-It-Yourself Entrepreneur

Fire Your Imagination Core Business: Paint-it-yourself ceramics Year Founded: 1995 Revenue in 1997: $121,000 Revenue in 2000: $200,000 Employees in 1997: 3 Employees in 2000: 9 Goal: To create an enjoyable experience for families Driving Force: An interest in developing creativity among young people A would-be teacher decided business beat the classroom and created a community resource where kids and adults could indulge their creativity The week before Mother’s Day is busy around Fire Your Imagination. Young would-be artists, their fathers trailing behind, stream into the studio. They scan the shelves crowded with unpainted ceramic dishes, kittens, elephants, bunnies and elves. Once they find just the right one, they settle at a table with paint and brush at hand, ready to create. At the back of the studio, crammed between a Subway sandwich shop and a Baskin-Robbins, a group of girls gathers around a large round table. In the middle of the table is propped up a plate with the figure of a pony on it and the words, “Happy 6th Birthday, Shelly.” A birthday cake is close by. “Sometimes we do two or three birthday parties a day, one after the other,” said Lorene Sosa. “You just can’t say no.” Sosa is the founder, owner, president and creative force behind Fire Your Imagination, a paint-it-yourself ceramics studio in family-friendly Thousand Oaks. Over the last five and a half years, the once-aspiring teacher has turned a passion for ceramics and an inherent love for children into a thriving business. At Fire Your Imagination, anybody not just a kid can pick out a ceramic, sit down and paint it (for a fee of $6 an hour), glaze it or have it glazed by a staffer, and then a couple of days later pick up the work of art. In 1995, Sosa was wrapping up her master’s degree in elementary education when she realized she didn’t want to be a teacher. “So, I had to think fast,” she said, “because I suddenly didn’t have a clue about what to do.” Some people fresh out of college might have gone looking for a job. Sosa went looking for a business, “something where I could be creative with kids.” Given her interest in ceramics and what appeared to her to be an unfilled need for a place where kids could make their own . something, it all seemed easy at the time. “I started asking members of my family what they thought of the idea,” Sosa said. Before she knew it, she had the best kind of venture capital there is: $30,000 from her grandfather and another $30,000 from her mother. “It was a good interest rate too,” she said. Thrown into the deal was plenty of advice from her grandfather, who trudged with her from vacant storefront to vacant storefront in search of the right place. “Finally, he said yes to this one,” Sosa said, and she’s been in Thousand Oaks ever since. “I knew it was a family area with the right demographics.” Sosa, now 29, was in business. That first year her only employee was her grandmother. She lost money. But she learned how to run a business. “I learned not to take things so bad,” she said. “I learned that crying out back every day was not good.” Her accountant, Linda Cameron, who has known her since the day she opened, said, “Actually, her naivete at the beginning was a strength because, if she’d known then what she knows now, she wouldn’t have done it.” By “it,” Cameron doesn’t just mean the 50 or so kids that pour into the place every day (more on weekends) looking to be instant artists. She means also the adult groups from Amgen Inc., Jafra Cosmetics International Inc. and Whole Foods Market that schedule plate-painting sessions. “Team building is really hot now,” Sosa said. “It’s a bonding experience for them.” And now that teachers in the Conejo Valley have learned about Fire Your Imagination, Sosa and her staff of nine (eight of them part-timers) are on the road constantly, delivering the charm of ceramics to schools. “It’s definitely gotten more complicated,” Sosa said. But more profitable too. Sosa did little more the first year than pay back her family. Now she figures she’s grown the business by 20 percent or 30 percent a year ever since. She had revenues of $200,000 in 2000, $160,000 the year before. Despite all the side trips to schools and events, 90 percent of the business still comes from families walking in, picking out an unpainted piece of plaster and sitting down to paint it. But it’s clear, Sosa said, many of them never would have gotten in the door if she hadn’t gone to them first. “In the beginning, I wasted a lot of money on newspaper advertising,” she said. Word of mouth, she learned, works better. “Now Grandma gets a plate. That’s how I advertise.” Thanks to the wisdom that distilled, Sosa was recently named Young Entrepreneur of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. “When you think about it, this is exactly what small business is about,” said John Tompak, awards coordinator for the SBA. “She is someone who worked hard, gathered capital and built a business from scratch.” When she started out, there were two franchise-operated paint-your-own operations within a short drive of hers, one in Simi Valley and another in Westlake Village. They’re gone now. “It was basically a help-yourself kind of thing,” Sosa said of her competitors. “We try to make this a friendly, homey place. “And the kids, they are just so darn precious.”