In the video, Maya Tavares Cordeiro gives a tour of her studio. We see spools of yarn. We see Cordeiro working at her loom. We hear her explain how the pedals work. At last, we see the final product: colorful textiles, hand-made by this Bristol-based weaver.
In a store, Cordeiro couldn’t explain her process so intimately. But on Ohanga.com, we can read about her life, take a virtual tour of her studio, and browse colorful photographs of her placemats and napkins.
“Art is almost like a micro-business,” says Subham Sett, co-founder of Ohanga. “Artists also have to be their own procurers, their own marketers. They’re limited, from a bandwidth perspective. Most artists are struggling by themselves.”
Ohanga may change all that. Founded in Rhode Island, the website is designed to showcase artists of nearly any media. While sites like Etsy already exist, the new startup connects communities to local artists. Consider: When you run a search on a site like Etsy, you may hit thousands of items from all over the world. Ohanga behaves more like an art gallery, curating the work of nearby talents, and using multimedia to flesh out their lives and processes.
“The core of this is to get the human connection,” says Sett. “We want to drive art commerce through storytelling.”
Sett started the company with a former colleague, Yuping Wang, earlier this year. Ohanga – which means “nest” in the Maori language – is a departure for both: Sett spent two decades working as an engineer and brand strategist; Wang worked for years as a software development engineer, most recently for the robotics wing at Amazon. Sett’s wife is a visual artist, and Wang is an art collector; their goal is to build smart, effective infrastructure for creative professionals, who often struggle to market the fruits of their labor.
After 17 years in the corporate world, Wang was excited to try something new, and it was the pandemic that helped her transition. “While I was already working from home,” says Wang, “I started to step back a little, to think about what I can do.”
Yet are these worlds so far? Sett posits that artists share traits with software developers, who tap their creative gifts, often work in solitude, and require a team to make their work profitable. “They just like writing code,” says Sett. “They don’t have to worry about marketing [their work] or what business comes out of it. We took that approach: What if we can give artists a seamless way to focus on their work, and everything else gets taken care of for them?”
The Ohanga site launched in May, focusing entirely on Rhode Island creatives. Visitors can purchase themed “gift boxes,” which contain works by several artists and crafters. Once Wang and Sett are satisfied with their pilot program, they hope to expand to other communities. Instead of the “anonymizing” searches of other sites, Ohanga will spotlight artists located in a customer’s own city. If all goes well, they hope to team up with local institutions to help enroll new artists and their patrons.
But all in good time. “We’re taking it slow,” says Sett. “We’re not trying to be a social media platform. We are here to solve a problem, and we need to show them something first.”
“It’s a learning process,” adds Wang. “I joked with my husband – at least I know where to buy my Christmas presents this year!”
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