Minted's founder, Mariam Naficy, is one of the entrepreneurial industry's most recognizable start-up for building a world-renowned e-Commerce company that aims to connect indie-artists to clients online.
Minted is an online crowdsourcing platform that gathers artworks from local, independent artists that wish to showcase their work. It then connects users to the management to decide what is in-demand and needed in the market today.
"Minted crowd-sources stationery designs from online competitions; then users in the community tell us which ones to print and sell. We print holiday cards, wedding invitations, birth announcements-all the stationery products that celebrate the occasions of people's lives... Our goal is to become the most commercially successful design community on the web.," said Mariam Naficy in an interview with William's "How'd You Get There?"
Minted is now a multi-million dollar enterprise that aims to cater to people, or clients, who search for stationery, home design, and artwork and connect them with the artist to create the design.
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Minted also features a collection of curated artworks from various independent artists available for sale.
Naficy focused on her brand's marketing and crowdsourcing aspect, most notably her work in Minted.
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Life as CEO
Inc.com shared an interview with Minted's Mariam Naficy, who is also known to be the former CEO and co-founder of one of the very first online cosmetics company, Eve.com, whom she sold for more than $100 million in the early 2000s.
LVMH Sephora now owns the former Eve.com, acquiring it from Idealab, using its name and resources.
Naficy initially wanted a means of "cash flow" to support her and her children's life. She then thought of an online stationery market that she could manage at home that focuses more on the lifestyle business. Minted was founded in 2007 and started as a small-scale business that sells stationery art.
The CEO thought of shutting down the business way back in 2008, but alternatively, she began selling content from well-known retail brands while still keeping the crowdsourcing on the side.
She also narrated that the recession made people focus on smaller brands rather than the huge ones. That marked the start of the businesses' growth as their "crowdsourcing experiment" posted winners of the design challenge that sold well.
Naficy and Entrepreneurship
In Tech Crunch's interview with the Minted CEO, they tackled entrepreneurship, its challenges, and surprising details that the discipline brings.
For Naficy, the most surprising aspect of being a self-made entrepreneur that grew is a role model.
"If you're successful, your company will inevitably grow, and you end up, believe it or not, being a role model for people. People actually look at you, and they emulate your behavior, and that is not something that I expected," she told Tech Crunch.
Mariam Naficy's career track did not focus only on the business and revenue-generating aspect but also believing in small, start-up artists that aim to make a name for themselves.
Naficy's e-Commerce company, Minted, showed that there would be a low point in one's career despite a previous success. She believed in local talent as she continued to pursue crowdsourcing and attracted a good market for it. Much like the entrepreneur's vision for the company, Mariam Naficy persevered with sticking to its goals and believed.
Currently, Naficy is the only woman who earns so much from her investments and able to accumulate 9-figure earnings as a start-up company.
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Written by Isaiah Alonzo
