Time to Act

To all members of our Minted family,

We stayed pretty quiet this past week to amplify Black voices and to really think about what we’ve heard and how to take concrete action.

Minted’s mission from the beginning has been to create a meritocracy — a fair, inclusive platform — for all artists. Rooted in my own sometimes difficult experience as a minority female immigrant in business, one of my key goals in founding Minted was to provide others with equal opportunity and a professional experience free from bias.

Last week, we were reminded of systemic racism and persistent inequality in our country. We are in the grip of tragic loss of life — the lives of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and before that, the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, among so many others, due to racial violence. These events call upon us to be visible in our outrage and, more importantly, resolve to work for meaningful and lasting change.

Personally, I am feeling pain and disappointment. I can’t help but think about how we, as a country, have lost an opportunity to be our best selves. We need to be committed to ending the violence, bias and systematic oppression continually set upon this country’s POC and African-American communities, which will require united and sustained action against dehumanization in all its forms. The impact of George Floyd’s murder touched the entire world. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. A bit of all of us dies with George Floyd.

At Minted, we are fortunate to have built a platform for artists. We strive to provide financial opportunity and exposure to artists in as meritocratic a way as possible. Artists submit artwork to our competitions and consumers vote to tell us what to sell — but on a blinded basis, meaning that the identity of the artist is hidden during voting. In collecting and analyzing over 13 years of behavioral data from artists and consumers, we became convinced many years ago that both positive and negative biases exist in evaluating artists and their work. We have worked hard to identify, quantify and systematically eliminate bias in the selection of products for sale.

However, regardless of how hard we are working at Minted to create a pure meritocracy, we recognize that there is much more we can do. To be an artist is to answer a challenging call to share your unique voice. For Black artists the added tolls of racial bias and socioeconomic inequality have affected opportunity and experience, making answering that call even more difficult.

Minted will work to help end systemic racism and persistent inequality by providing a platform for Black voices to express themselves through art and design. Here are a few things we commit to doing at Minted:

1. We will publish the data that we have collected on bias so that others can benefit from it. We hope that sharing this information helps others challenge their own assumptions about Black creatives and take steps to achieve representation in all areas of education and professional advancement.
2. We will donate $50,000 to organizations to help support the education, community-building and career development of emerging Black artists. We are specifically looking for nonprofits that help bring arts education into urban K-12 schools — let me know if you have any suggestions. Here is a starting list of organizations we are considering; we’ll have donation(s) committed by June 15:
   The Black Art Futures Fund
   Black Artists & Designers Guild
   Young Black Artists
   Afrotectopia
3. We are committed to building an artist community that is inclusive — where all people have a sense of belonging. We will recruit more BIPOC artists to join the Minted community, and we will reach a higher percentage of competition submissions coming from BIPOC artists. We’ll come up with specific quantitative goals and publish those by the end of June.
4. We will tell the stories of the BIPOC artists already in the Minted community on our platform to inspire future generations of African-American creatives. We hope that this provokes a dialogue about how to continue improving opportunities and access for Black artists.
5. Finally, we will launch more works from BIPOC artists across the product portfolio, both by increasing recruiting and by ensuring that we are creating special collections in addition to what’s been voted in by consumers. We’re seeing this not as a short-term bandaid response, but as a long-term, sustainable change.

We hope that you’ll continue holding us accountable to make sure that every artist feels like they can express themselves and be heard. If you have any ideas as to how we can do better, as always, let me know.

Best,

Mariam

(The illustration above is by Gia Graham, Instagram @iamgiagraham, a member of Minted’s community of independent artists. Gia Graham is a designer, illustrator, lettering artist and Skillshare teacher based in Atlanta, originally from sunny Barbados. Gia credits her island background for influencing the vibrant colors and lush florals and foliage she often incorporates into her work. Over her 20 year creative career, she has worked in corporate graphic design, run her own stationery business and now focuses on licensing her art primarily for greeting cards sold by Minted, Target, MPIX and Trader Joe’s, to name a few.)