How a young, creative couple use digital to understand their customers’ needs

The business originally started as a kind of lockdown project. We loved travelling and collecting artwork on our travels, and we felt that the one thing missing from our gallery wall was a piece of art from our home town, in the Irish language. So that’s where the idea started. We began selling prints of local towns, and sold them on a Shopify site, just to see if there was any demand. And we sold out! After that, during our first Christmas we got stocked in Arnotts in Dublin, which was really exciting. And we had a stall in the RDS Gifted Christmas fair which did really well.

We branched out into retail space, after our Arnotts experience - as we knew there was a gap in the market for well-designed Irish inspired artwork. Our range of prints, greeting cards and cotton totes is stocked in over 20 retailers including Croke Park, EPIC museum and Arnotts. We’re now focussed on building out the collection to cover more areas around Ireland. One of our main interests is in promoting the Irish language, in a way that’s modern, colourful, bright - accessible to all levels of Irish speakers.

We put up polls on social media to see what products we’d bring out next - and we brought out a few Irish language products based on demand.

In the last year, the Local Enterprise Office trading online voucher helped us develop our e-commerce site. While our wholesale business goes from strength to strength, our online business is booming too. A recent Google Ads campaign led directly to increased traffic to our website and more sales. For seasonal occasions like Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, we’ll plan digital ad campaigns, offerings, and bundles to target customers. Through digital analytics, we can track where people were coming onto the website from, what part of the country. We were able to target that area with ads, then create artwork for that locale, as we could see there was an interest. We’ve found Google reviews really important too. In fact we’d email people who’ve purchased items to leave a review. And having us listed with Google Maps is also helpful, as the business appears when customers search for you.

We’ve just moved into a new studio at Ardgillan Castle in Balbriggan, with amazing views of the rose gardens. Our products are stocked in the gift shop too, but in the future we’d love to grow the business to a level where we’ve our own Prints of Ireland shop, targeting the tourist market.