The popularity of social media websites and applications such as Facebook and Instagram has been a boon for aspiring Indonesian artists.

While it may have been a niche career path a few years ago, these days wanting to make a living through creative means doesn’t seem so crazy anymore.

Those who began uploading their illustrations, paintings and other sorts of art onto their social media profiles just for the fun of it, are now considered tastemakers. Aside from relative popularity, they are making good money through sales and partnerships.

Considering this, and understanding that the market for creative businesses in the country is now wide open, two men came up with Arterous — a website that focuses on working with artists to produce and sell their merchandise to an even larger marketplace.

Kevin Osmond started Printerous a few years ago. The website focused on providing a printing service on literally anything: shirts, mugs, hats, etc. Arterous takes it further by providing illustrations and graphics by local designers and artists, all curated by Osmond and co-founder Eric Wiryanata.

The goal of Arterous is to show how strong the market is for local artists, and as a tangible support system for those artists, especially those just starting to get their feet wet.

“I was initially awed by the features Printerous had,” said Eric, “and about a year ago he developed a new feature to his site, a marketplace to help local artists sell their own merchandise.”

With Printerous’ immediate success, Kevin knew that he needed a collaborator, and Eric, who is an artist himself, was eager to come onboard.

“After a while, after the marketplace feature got bigger, and Kevin offered to collaborate to develop a new entity. I accepted the offer and in September 2016, Arterous was launched,” Eric says.

Arterous is described as a platform for creative industry types to sell their works of art in the form of various merchandise. These artists, mostly unknown to the mainstream, have an easier time in focusing solely on their creativity, with Arterous focusing on the production side.

“We take care of quality control and send the merchandise to the buyer,” explains Eric, who adds that the goal isn’t just to turn art into merchandise, but to show that: “in the face of competitors who have similar services today; we are not just about ‘selling’ but also about building a story through every work done by every artist — to give life to each product.”

Kevin concurs, saying that “[We’re] not only about selling products, we thrive for originality too.”

So far, Arterous are in talks with around 400 artists, all of whom will be officially announced soon. Though they have begun promoting a total of 10,000 products on their website, Arterous hopes to reach 20,000 by next year.

The founders know that this is the right time to engage with such artists.

“The rapid expansion of the creative scene was started in the last decade, with more and more individuals from the creative world now being able to support themselves, or at least make decent extra income,” explains Eric, adding that “the market is also getting bigger, and not many creative people have the free time to produce merchandise for fans. We’re here to help.”

Eric knows this. As a relatively-popular artist whose work includes a well-received designer toy collection (Lemi the Space Wanderer, a robotic rabbit) and colorful illustrations, Eric knows how hard it can be for artists — even known ones — to sustain their creativity while trying to manage the money that may or may not be coming in.

He’s done everything from hawking his merchandise at booths during hobby fairs around the world and networking with a host of different people for the past 15 years. The problem has always been that same old thing — production, marketing and selling.

Through Arterous, which also provides analytical and financing tools to help artists keep track of what their making, he hopes to give back to the community of his peers.

“Contemporary business is always connected to the creative scene. You can’t start any business without creativity. You need someone to design a leaflet, name card, packaging, your workstation, uniform, everything.”

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