Medical law, engineering, are all noble pursuits that are necessary to sustain life, but art is what we stay alive for. The small art community of Nepal is finally coming into the limelight since more people want to share the different aspects of art.
Koikoi Art Studio is an online art page started by Dipshikha Giri in June 2019 with an aesthetic touch to the art. It was a platform to express her love for art by sharing it with like-minded people.
Giri says, “I was discussing opening an art page with a friend and we were throwing random words on the table. When I blurted out ‘koi’ randomly, I felt an instant connection and thought ‘Koikoi’ would be perfect.”
Inspired by the myth of Aphrodite and her son Eros who turned into koi fishes to escape from Typhon (a monster) she felt connected to it. She adds, “With Koikoi, I feel like I am the koi fish, swimming away from my Typhon (mental problems). Also, Koikoi in Nepali roughly translates to ‘Someone’ and I’m just someone trying to put my art out there and make people smile.”
While the page was born out of her love for all things art and stationery, people started getting more interested in her work and wanted to buy it. So, she decided to sell products such as stickers and notebooks from early 2020.
A student of BSc CSIT without an art background, she had always been interested in art from an early age. “The ideas for my products come from a lot of research on the internet, especially YouTube. What I have been doing is not new by any means. It has been done before. But it was not so common in Nepal, or say Kathmandu itself,” says Giri.
Although it is a small business that is still to bloom, she handles everything on her own except for outsourcing deliveries. According to Giri, “I think anyone who wants to start a business needs to be passionate and consistent about it. When I first launched ‘aesthetic stickers’, only three people bought them. For months, the stickers kept collecting dust on my shelves. But I kept making new stickers despite that. One year has passed since then and now my stickers get sold out within a few days of being launched. While handling a business can get daunting at times, I still enjoy the process.”
Despite struggling to reach a proper audience and make sales at first, her shop is doing pretty well with just the testimonials from her customers which instill a sense of authenticity in other people.
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