E-commerce is coming your way. Take Heather McKay. She is an artist who creates beautiful cards. For years she painted away to her heart's content. Her portfolio got fatter and fatter and her collection of beautiful illustrations became more and more diverse. But, her designs were in danger of never seeing the light of day.
Luckily, coming from a business family that understands the value of marketing, McKay discovered the Internet just in the nick of time, and she got swept along in the wave of activity that is slowly changing the way Irish business is conducted. She was bitten by the electronic bug and this year. She set up www.headinthecloudsireland .com with her brother, Andrew. Hey presto, a new e-marketing venture is born and now her cards are now selling steadily, all thanks to the advantages of e-marketing. As far as McKay is concerned, it's still early days in e-commerce terms, however since the site was set up 600 people have already stopped to take a look at her designs. She's dying to put more designs up on the site but she'll only do that when more are printed.
Business people in the retail area are still, in her experience, largely doing business in the traditional way, but she does believe that e-commerce is growing. Although it is early days yet, McKay has been asked to speak to e-commerce students at third-level colleges. She is also teaching computers at Stillorgan Senior College, Dublin, and e-commerce is becoming an increasingly important part of the course, she says.
If McKay is not careful, could she be on the way to making her first million? She smiles, not really believing it could be that simple, but the girl with her head in the clouds is beginning to realise that it really is that easy. Individuals who go to her site browse, view her range of specialist cards and sometimes decide to make contact by phone. McKay is not at the stage where customers can pay her over the net, using a banking service and a credit card number - yet. That's still in the future. But it's probably only a matter of time, she explains. She and her brother, who is a business teacher, are already discussing the option of renting a banking service which will allow people to pay as well as browse. Having the site "opens up the world to us", she says. "You're not with it if you don't have one. It's a visual medium that cuts across all divides. It's like a catalogue that doesn't need to go in the post. It's accessible to anybody."
She says it's a learning curve. Following her graduation with a diploma in graphic design from the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Technology and Design in 1995, she did a teaching diploma at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. After travelling and teaching, she decided to do a business course in FAS over three months. Here she learned about business appraisels.
"I was an artist but I knew I wanted to make my greeting cards commercially, but I didn't know how. They thought us about business and we had to do market research to see if it was feasible. I needed 100 shops to make it viable and to print 30,000 cards to make it successful, so I knew the ballpark I was working in."
Her drawing has been put on the back boiler for the moment as the demands of running a business, teaching computers and promoting her cards has increasingly taken over. And yet a lot of people are still fairly computer illiterate, she says. "I feel the computer is a tool. It's of use to me because I have a design background. Without that it would be very difficult to create your own web-page. There's an ease of transaction and there's more security in terms of the use of credit cards. It all makes for a smoother process.
"I was the most computer illiterate person at school," she says, laughing. Now she's teaching computers and using them every day. "I teach them how to switch it on," she explains. "The way I teach is very beginner-friendly." E-commerce is a good medium for sensitive artists, she explains.
It's all part of learning about being a businesswoman and e-marketing. E-commerce is about ease of communication, she adds. "People have seen your produce and range and they're at liberty to make contact, she says. "We're learning about business every step of the way. I'm dying to get back to doing some more drawing". But for now, she's involved in dealing with clients who contact her by e-mail or phone.
"It's a huge market, but also it's not the be-all and end-all of it. You can never compare it to meeting people and making an impression, but the Internet can only add to the professional nature of our business." As an artist, she's amused that she has become a business woman in spite of herself.
It's only a matter of time before the sharp suit, the mobile phone and the slim briefcase become part of her look. Before e-marketing, on one of her forays into marketing, she arrived in Thurles, Co Tipperary, to meet some retailers and interest them in her cards. She laughs at the memory. She forgot to bring a calculator; she didn't have a pen and she locked the keys into her car.
