Made for Business in NYC: Today at Apple and It’s Nice That’s panel series continues

Today at Apple is teaming up with us at It's Nice That for Made for Business, a panel series that asks what’s required to build a business from your own practice in the creative industry today. Hosted in Apple Stores as part of the same programme where Apple hosts ongoing photography, design and coding sessions, each panel assembles a roster of remarkable creative talent who’ve all walked varied paths in getting to where they are now.

Some of its panellists are prospering solo entrepreneurs (or solopreneurs), who, as a one-person army, have forged a sustainable, successful business and a big client list to boot. Others are solo-to-studio founders, who, whilst starting solo, have since grown blossoming teams and entire studios around that original vision. Regardless of their individual setups, the panel conversations are set to be as compelling as they are practical, detailing the nitty-gritty of pricing, positioning, and workflow, as well as their greater creative vision.

Next up in NYC, we have Alex Proba, Zoë Pulley and Bráulio Amado taking the stage at (Apple Store, NYC). Spots are limited! Sign up below.

On 21 October, Made in Business hits New York City – the Big Apple – where three artists across three different disciplines dig into their creative careers and what it has taken to get there. This includes Alex Proba, the multidisciplinary artist and designer behind StudioPROBA, who has spent over a decade turning colour and shape into physical space. Murals, ceramic tiled pools, textiles, furniture. All playing with scale (and showing play on scale) through medium, colour and her unique, instinctive approach to physicality. Whilst her 40-foot installations have an effortless tangibility to them – as if they were always there – Alex starts with iPad sketches, which just goes to show how the biggest ideas, more often than not, start simply.

Zoë Pulley, a Brooklyn-based artist, educator and designer, will also share the stage, discussing her work across textiles, writing and digital media. Her work – engrossing, enlivening and interrogatory in equal measure – explores Black American heritage, pulling from her own family archive of photographs. Through the familiar quality of Zoë’s chosen disciplines and materials – backed by an iPhone packed with scanned documents – stories, ideas and fragments become finished pieces in their own right, toying with both medium and implied message.

With a similarly vivid practice, Zoë and Alex are joined by Portuguese graphic designer and illustrator Bráulio Amado – the man behind B.A.D. Studio and most of your favourite new album covers. His work and prolific practice span multiple avenues, including editorial illustration for the most prestigious publications, record covers for the world’s biggest musicians and prints for the coolest brands out there. Bráulio’s wholly singular work is rightly well-loved, embedded with a fizzing, fuzzy, electric quality that is unmistakably his own. There will be plenty to unpack, especially considering how such a distinctive, non-conformist style can work so successfully in the mainstream.

Made for Business is about proof, not theory, hearing real insight from creatives that have made the jump and stuck the proverbial landing. It’s a rare chance to sit down with entrepreneurs who’ve turned their own practice into a real, sustainable business, and hear exactly how they made work work for them.