“If you want to stay relevant and current, you have to invest in yourself and embrace a lifetime of learning.”
Bouwien Luppes, the founder of The Heart and Soul, a coaching business for solopreneurs, has been an entrepreneur all her life. She has worked in marketing, run a health and fitness franchise, imported and sold baby products, and worked in banking services.
After graduating from the Marketing Management program at UCSC Silicon Valley Extension, she became the founding CEO of Try it Art, an Alberta, Canada-based international fine art rental and sale company. It was a way to cover the walls with the unique work of handpicked artists from around the world.
“My clients were anyone who considered themselves an art lover,” she said. “People who want easy, affordable access to great art.”
Launching her own company
She had always loved marketing and began taking the classes to update her skills.
“All the experience that I’ve had is the base that I started from; then I had to pull it into the 21stcentury,” she says.
As her business idea unfolded, she started targeting courses that would help bring the new product to market.
Luppes talked often about her business ideas with Ly-Huong Pham, an instructor, chair of the Marketing Management certificate program, and a successful businesswoman and CEO of her own company; and Michael Savod, instructor of the Integrated Marketing Communication course and a marketing consultant formerly with the Oakland As, Chrysler, Jeep, and Maserati. She signed up for the social media course series and used Try it Art for class presentations. Class feedback helped her shape strategy going forward.
“The response from my fellow students was so enthusiastic that I had to think more in-depth,” she says. “It evolved. Every course demands that you think in a certain way. Every course took me a step further. By the time those three (social media) courses were done, I was pretty certain I was going to make it into a business.”
Luppes took a business writing course because English is not her first language. It helps her to formulate blog posts about the artists she visits.
“I’ve taken online courses and I can do that online thing, but actually being on campus adds another dimension. An online classroom is not the same as sitting in the class and meeting and interacting with your fellow students and instructors. They truly have a wealth of knowledge and they are sharing it.”
Last year, Luppes filed her Articles of Organization as a limited liability company with her husband Percy Rotteveel as chief technology officer.
Building a Social Media Audience
Using old-fashioned networking and many of the social media tools she learned from instructor Shilpi Agarwal, Luppes studied the industry, talked with artists and art lovers, and built an audience. Eventually, she partnered with eight contemporary artists from as far away as her native Netherlands and Portugal and as local as San Francisco.
The company delivers its work to a growing list of clients who want temporary or permanent installations. She organizes art exhibitions and fundraisers. Recently a group of friends rented a painting as a housewarming gift for a woman who had been visiting the website admiring one of the pieces.
Luppes quickly lined up several events including a Taste of the World exhibit in San Francisco, which included an Art on a Postcard charity event, benefitting a local art organization.
“Do it,” she says to students considering jumping into a new venture. “If you don’t, you’ll always wonder what would have happened. There’s no shame in failing. Take the courses first and then go and do it.”
Learn more
Explore the Marketing Management certificate program extension@ucsc.edu or (408) 861-3860.
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