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| Children/Educational.. |
A pen for your thoughts
Kidz Art draws upon kids’ creativity
| Franchise Times takes to the classroom to find out firsthand how a children’s art franchise really works. |
I should never have laughed when a friend told me he was eliminated from his first chess tournament by the kindergarten champion. He was 42 at the time. Even his plaintive wail, “he was the champion of the entire kindergarten,” didn’t quash my glee.
So when I sat down in the molded chairs designed to conform to children’s bottoms, at franchisee Wendy Schaller’s Kidz Art class, I should have known karma was about to bite me.
There are two rules in a Kidz Art class: (1) Have fun; (2) It doesn’t have to be perfect. A third rule should be added for students like me, “Don’t compare your artwork to your neighbor’s.”
I thought being the oldest—and tallest—student in the class would place me heads and shoulders above the competition. But, as Schaller had to say a couple of times to an insecure student (someone else, not me) who kept asking, “Is this good?”: “It’s all good.”
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Kidz Art franchisee Wendy Schaller enjoys seeing children blossom through art. |
Before we started our suitable-for-framing project, we did a warm-up drawing. “Just like in sports,” Schaller told us. Our “spaghetti warm-up,” aptly named because the resulting art looks like a tangle of noodles, taught us the techniques used by the likes of Picasso and Monét: “bump and jump,” when two lines intersect, you bump the new line up to the first line and then jump over it; and “copy-cat lines,” where a second, parallel line mimics the first line to give it width.
There were no pencils and erasers, just permanent markers, and oddly enough no mistakes. Once we learned the techniques, we followed the leader as she connected shapes to make a dragonfly, the company’s logo.
The six students didn’t have to be coached or quieted, they were immersed in adding color to their drawings, plus blades of grass, fish, ladybugs and sunsets. When the parents came to claim them, the artists had to be coaxed away from their project.
Which is the reason Schaller enjoys being a franchisee of this particular concept. “It’s rewarding seeing how excited kids are that they can draw,” the former elementary art teacher says. School programs sometimes create a chasm between the gifted artist and the not-so-gifted. Kidz Art’s techniques prove that everyone can draw. And, let’s face it while they also offer 3-D art projects such as clay, “drawing is what parents want them to learn,” Schaller points out.
Oddly enough, Schaller wasn’t in the market for a franchise, her husband David was. He filled out a franchise consultant’s profile for both of them, and it was her art background that pulled up the most interesting options. David Schaller decided to stay in corporate America—“Someone has to have the health insurance,” she jokes—while Schaller draws out the artist in children in Minnesota’s northwest Twin Cities area.
| Kidz Art Founders: Shell Herman, CEOChris Cruikshank, president Headquarters: New Braunfels, Texas Franchise fee: $31,900 Startup costs: $50,000 to $100,000 Royalty: 8 percent Ad fee: 1 percent Growth plans: Looking to open 250 in North America;40 to 50 internationally |
Currently, Schaller has five instructors working for her, and at her peak offers 20-25 classes a week. She reserves herself as the substitute in case a teacher calls in sick. Classes are held in schools, churches and at a multi-use studio that is shared with adult craft classes and a coffee shop. During the summer she holds day camps, and weekends are often filled with birthday parties.
Schaller’s full-time hours revolve around her school-age children’s schedules. And while her husband’s not going to be able to quit his day job anytime soon, she is making money, she says. She also has the benefit of her husband’s MBA—“He does the forecasting,” she says, but it’s her business. “He tries to stay out of it…because it works better that way,” she says, smiling.
Schaller is a dream franchisee, according to Shell Herman, who founded the concept with her longtime friend Chris Cruikshank. The two started franchising Kidz Art in 2002 and currently have about 67 franchisees, and plans to expand internationally.
The two partners drew upon their individual strengths: Before starting the company, Herman was a career counselor who encouraged clients to “do what you love for a living.” Cruikshank is the artist and she still develops the constantly changing curriculum.
Franchisees tend to be people with a business background who want to do something creative or who like working with kids.
“Art speaks to everyone,” Herman says. “There are very few children who don’t like to draw. What stops them is someone telling them they’re doing it wrong.”
Which is why Kidz Art has a “no mistake policy,” and, why budding artists aren’t encouraged to use pencils when creating.
“If you use pencils, you keep changing it,” Herman contends. “Nothing is good enough when you use a pencil. We teach that you won’t like everything you do.”
The end result, after all, isn’t to turn out a nation of Andrew Wyeths, but, rather, a nation of creative thinkers.
