Arteza is the leading direct to consumer arts & crafts supplies brand offering art enthusiasts and hobbyists high quality supplies at affordable price points across a variety of categories.
Founded in 2016 by Jurgis Plikaitis and Mike Koshatko, Arteza is on a mission to build the first true cross-category arts & crafts brand. The company has an obsessive focus on creating unique, high quality products that it offers at lower price points and with a higher touch customer service than industry incumbents.
The brand offers high quality arts and crafts products across a variety of categories, including markers, paints, canvases, crafting and office supplies.
Arteza launched its brand in 2016 and rapidly found product / market fit. The Company reinvested all of its early profits into research and development to expand its product portfolio, which today boasts close to a thousand SKUs.
In April 2019, Volition Capital led the Company’s first institutional round of financing to help it continue developing products that delight arts & crafts consumers and innovate on the ways it reaches and services them. Later in the year, Volition invested in the Company.
Volition Principal, Dave Gordon discovered Arteza in early 2019, and the Volition team learned quickly about how Arteza founders, Jurgis and Mike, built a uniquely creative, fast-paced culture that’s aggressively going after an industry that has seen very little innovation over the last few decades.
A surprisingly big market at ~$35B in annual spend, arts and crafts is one that’s just beginning to see the type of shift in spend from offline to online channels that has taken place in so many other consumer categories over the last decade. The Company was bootstrapped, experiencing 100%+ growth and profitable since inception prior to Volition’s investment. As one of the first digitally native brands in its industry, we believe the Company is well positioned to become a category-leading arts & crafts brand.
Volition Capital Managing Partner, Larry’s Cheng’s, perspective on the Company: “The arts and crafts market is a huge market occupied by retailers and brands that have not innovated for the next generation of consumers. Jurgis and Mike had proven their ability to develop better more affordable products that consumers loved and were passionate about. Never had we seen a Company introduce such great new products at such a high frequency –we wanted to help Jurgis and Mike achieve their plan to disrupt the entire arts and crafts market.”
