FROM ROCK BOTTOM TO £40,000 A MONTH
FOR Michaela Morgan 2019 was the worst year of her life. It was a whirlwind which saw heartache and despair giving way to resilience and determination. She separated from her husband, lost her pet and closest companion, and at one stage wouldn’t get out of bed.
Carmarthen-born, she moved around in childhood due to her father’s role in the Army. But the pull of west Wales is strong, it seems, and she moved back to the town of Whitland as a teenager.
Seven years ago, in her early 20s, she got married. As her husband was in the Army, her life would once again return to being one of constant travel and defined by a frustrating inability to lay foundations on which to form her own career. But she had always been interested in art.
“I had a job, working in a college in Llantwit Major, that I loved so much,” said Michaela, now aged 30.
“But I had to leave due to my husband’s work and we had to move abroad.
“I think that’s when I realised that I had to do something, that I had to make a change, because we’d been married for seven years and we must have moved five times.
“Every year-and-a-half, roughly, we would move again, and I would lose whatever I was doing at the time and lose my friends.
“So we separated last year and within two weeks of that my dog Dougie died. He was only three years old and had been battling cancer. I was on the floor at that point, just devastated.”
It was here that Michaela reached her lowest ebb. She didn’t want to leave the house and relatives would come over to sit with her to make sure she was OK.
“I had always wanted to sell my art, oil paintings, portraits, that kind of thing,” she said. “I would do them for people I knew and for family members.”
Michaela thrust herself out of despair and started to read. Selfhelp books, business books, any literature she could find on digital art – defined as art which is created using technology, where designs are produced and brought to life with a computer rather than a paint brush.
“By this point I had started painting as much as possible but then realised that it was going to be really difficult to get my work printed,” she said.
“Because I kept reading so much about digital art I decided to give it a shot and got myself the equipment I needed to start.
“It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done but you’ve got to trust yourself sometimes and go for it.
“Once I got the equipment I found that luckily I took to it like a duck to water.”
What happened next is an art form in itself – setting up a business, from home, during a pandemic, and earning thousands of pounds.
Between the end of April and the end of July this year Michaela sold £117,000-worth of orders through her business, Mimo Arts. She’s also amassed an Instagram following of more than 27,000 in that time.
During an interview at her home – one room of which, no larger than 5mx5m in size, doubles as a bedroom and work station – her phone receives a number of notifications, each one marking a new order to her website.
By lunchtime on a Wednesday afternoon she’s made £500 that day. So how does it work?
Once Michaela purchased the software and the equipment needed (“that initial cost to get started was a few thousand pounds”) she then went about creating designs and bringing them to the page – or, more accurately, to the computer screen – first by using a tablet used by artists called a Wacom and then by using an iPad Pro.
She began to create trendy and contemporary fashion art – the kind of pieces you would expect to find in a modern and tastefully-adorned living room. A lot of them focus on iconic brands such as Vogue, Prada, Chanel and Christian Dior. It might be a print of a shop front, a stack of books, a handbag, a pair of shoes – anything really.
“I started thinking about the business in January so I put together a plan and started selling a few pieces to people I knew,” said Michaela.
“Then I started properly in March and created a website. To be honest with you it didn’t go that well to start with.
“The website wasn’t really doing anything, it was just there.
“But then it started to take off in April and it’s just grown since.”
Michaela has created a number of designs which can be ordered in a range of formats – be it a simple print, a canvas, in a frame – and then a company, often in another country, prints the image their end and arranges for it to be framed accordingly and delivered to the customer.
That company gets a percentage of each sale that they are involved in but the bulk of the money goes to Michaela, who continues to work at home, creating new designs and taking care of the customer service side of the business.
“It’s really taken off – a company from Dubai have got in touch and asked me to create a design based around their perfume brand and I have a partnership with an American company which enables me to sell over there and elsewhere in the world,” she said. “This time last year I wasn’t really aware of digital art. I look back and think of all that time I spent wondering what to do with myself – I could have done this 10 years ago.” The rewards for
Michaela have been huge – not just in terms of her capacity to earn money and run a successful business on her own but in turning her life around.
For now Michaela is happy creating and earning from her bedroom but her ambition to cross new frontiers is startling – she would like to open a gallery in Wales to showcase her art.
It’s all a far cry from 2019.
“I spent three weeks in bed,” she recalled. “I just felt completely lost and without hope and hopelessness is the worst feeling in the world. It was a truly awful time but now I’m able to do something that makes me feel proud every day.”