Jonathan Mitchell
When Covid stopped the shoots, fine art and ballet photographer Jonathan Mitchell needed to reach collectors online instead. We built him a bilingual gallery site, ran the marketing that put his work in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and still look after the site today.
A full engagement (brand, bilingual WordPress build, social strategy and paid campaigns) that moved Jonathan Mitchell Visual Arts online during Covid, on a site we have hosted and cared for ever since.
The Challenge
What we were solving
Jonathan Mitchell is an Australian artist who was living in Mexico when he came to us. Under his studio brand JMVA, he shoots ballet, fine art, paranormal work and portraits, with a client list running from individuals building their portfolios to some of the biggest ballet studios in the world.
Then Covid arrived and closed the door on all of it. No travel, no studios, no in-person shoots. Jonathan wanted to pivot: instead of being booked for photography, he would sell the artwork itself to collectors who wanted to own his creations.
That pivot had a hard problem baked in. Buying art is personal. Collectors want to see the piece, and they want to meet the artist. An online-only business had to overcome both objections at once, and do it for buyers in two languages (Jonathan's collectors sit in Australia and Mexico, among other places).
Success meant a site where his personality and his images did the work a gallery visit would normally do, and a marketing engine that put the art in front of people who had never heard of him.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
Let the images carry the site
Photography sites fail in one of two ways: they bury the work under design, or they dump it in an endless grid. We built a custom WordPress theme on the Beaver Builder framework that does neither. The site is deliberately spare (clean pages, generous space, minimal interface), and visitors navigate by genre, choosing the gallery that speaks to them (ballet, fine art, paranormal, portrait, street) rather than scrolling one long feed. Every gallery is responsive, so a collector browsing on a phone in Guadalajara sees the work as well as one on a desktop in Sydney.
Because Jonathan's buyers span two languages, the site runs in English and Spanish through Weglot, with a switcher rather than a separate site to maintain. One set of galleries, two audiences.
Market the artist, not just the art
A site alone would not replace the word-of-mouth that came with in-person shoots, so the engagement went past the build. We wrote a social media strategy around a simple insight from Jonathan's own pain point: people needed to know more about him before they would buy, so the content had to make them feel they had met him. Consistent posting, captions that told the story behind each image, and behind-the-scenes video did the introduction work a studio visit used to do.
Then we added fuel. Between May and July 2021 we ran a series of Instagram campaigns promoting individual pieces (Cinderella, Dracula, Carmen, Carnaval and others), testing one artwork per ad set and shifting budget to what the audience responded to. Thirteen campaigns later, his work had been seen far beyond anything an exhibition could reach.
The Solution
What we delivered
The campaigns generated over 5,400 clicks through to the site at an average cost per click of roughly 25 cents, with the best-performing piece reaching more than 310,000 people on its own. More important than any single number, an artist whose business had depended on being in the room now had an audience he could reach from anywhere.
The site is still live today, still on the theme we built, still bilingual, and still under our care plan. For a one-person creative business, that longevity is the point: the platform has quietly done its job for half a decade without needing to be rebuilt.
What we learned
Small clients test an agency's process more honestly than big ones. There was no committee and no brand book, just an artist, his work, and a business model changing under his feet. The discipline of starting with strategy (what is actually being sold, to whom, in what language) mattered more here than on projects ten times the size, because there was no budget to build the wrong thing twice.
We also learned that for a visual artist, the marketing is inseparable from the site. The galleries gave the ads somewhere worth sending people, and the ads gave the galleries an audience. Either half on its own would have underperformed.
And sometimes the best outcome is the one nobody notices: a site that just keeps working. Five years of hosting and care with barely any drama is a result we are as proud of as any launch.
The Results
Impact & outcomes
combined reach across 13 Instagram ad campaigns
live on the original build, with Chillybin hosting and care throughout
