The Gregangelo Museum wasn’t supposed to exist. It began as a run-down rental in San Francisco — a place where artist Gregangelo Herrera patched collapsing rooms with found materials, turning repairs into creative experiments. One of those repairs became a full-blown art installation. One became two. Then three. Forty years later, the house is a city landmark, and the team behind it is reshaping what immersive art and marketing can look like.
In this episode, host Dave Charest talks with Gregangelo Herrera, Artistic Director of the Gregangelo Museum and Velocity Arts & Entertainment; Angelica Irreno, Artist Manager and Marketing Coordinator; and Marcelo Defreitas, Creative Director. Together, they share how they transformed a private home into an immersive storytelling experience — and how that became their most effective marketing tool. “We didn’t sit down and make a strategy,” Marcelo says. “By doing it, we reinvented.”
Tune in to hear how they leaned into storytelling over ads, how this small team markets through meaning, not money, and how their outdoor art garden helped them stay open during the pandemic.
Meet Today's Guests: Gregangelo Herrera, Angelica Irreno, and Marcelo Defreitas of Gregangelo Museum and Velocity Arts & Entertainment.
🎨 What Gregangelo does: Gregangelo is the Artistic Director of the Gregangelo Museum in San Francisco. A lifelong artist and performer, he founded the immersive museum experience inside his own home, blending storytelling, installation art, and cultural rituals. He’s also the founder of Velocity Arts and Entertainment.
💡 Key quote: “My form of marketing has always been to show up and invite people in.”
🎭 What Marcelo does: Marcelo is the Creative Director at the Gregangelo Museum. He brings a background in nonprofit leadership, events, and design. After hiring Gregangelo’s troupe for an event years ago, Marcelo joined the team and now leads strategy, operations, and creative direction for the museum and its experiences.
💡 Key quote: “We’re not just performing anymore. We’re helping people reconnect—with themselves and with each other.”
📱 What Angelica does: Angelica is the Artist Manager and Marketing Coordinator at the Gregangelo Museum. Originally from Colombia, she began as a marketing intern during the pandemic and helped reimagine how the museum connects with its audience through storytelling and content.
💡 Key quote: “At the beginning, I didn’t quite get the selling point. Then I realized—it’s not just the art. It’s the stories.”
If you love this show, please leave a review. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/bam and follow the simple instructions.
Chapters
The Gregangelo Museum wasn’t supposed to exist. It began as a run-down rental in San Francisco — a place where artist Gregangelo Herrera patched collapsing rooms with found materials, turning repairs into creative experiments. One of those repairs became a full-blown art installation. One became two. Then three. Forty years later, the house is a city landmark, and the team behind it is reshaping what immersive art and marketing can look like.
In this episode, host Dave Charest talks with Gregangelo Herrera, Artistic Director of the Gregangelo Museum and Velocity Arts & Entertainment; Angelica Irreno, Artist Manager and Marketing Coordinator; and Marcelo Defreitas, Creative Director. Together, they share how they transformed a private home into an immersive storytelling experience — and how that became their most effective marketing tool. “We didn’t sit down and make a strategy,” Marcelo says. “By doing it, we reinvented.”
Tune in to hear how they leaned into storytelling over ads, how this small team markets through meaning, not money, and how their outdoor art garden helped them stay open during the pandemic.
Meet Today's Guests: Gregangelo Herrera, Angelica Irreno, and Marcelo Defreitas of Gregangelo Museum and Velocity Arts & Entertainment.
🎨 What Gregangelo does: Gregangelo is the Artistic Director of the Gregangelo Museum in San Francisco. A lifelong artist and performer, he founded the immersive museum experience inside his own home, blending storytelling, installation art, and cultural rituals. He’s also the founder of Velocity Arts and Entertainment.
💡 Key quote: “My form of marketing has always been to show up and invite people in.”
🎭 What Marcelo does: Marcelo is the Creative Director at the Gregangelo Museum. He brings a background in nonprofit leadership, events, and design. After hiring Gregangelo’s troupe for an event years ago, Marcelo joined the team and now leads strategy, operations, and creative direction for the museum and its experiences.
💡 Key quote: “We’re not just performing anymore. We’re helping people reconnect—with themselves and with each other.”
📱 What Angelica does: Angelica is the Artist Manager and Marketing Coordinator at the Gregangelo Museum. Originally from Colombia, she began as a marketing intern during the pandemic and helped reimagine how the museum connects with its audience through storytelling and content.
💡 Key quote: “At the beginning, I didn’t quite get the selling point. Then I realized—it’s not just the art. It’s the stories.”
If you love this show, please leave a review. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/bam and follow the simple instructions.
What is Be a Marketer with Dave Charest?
As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the Be a Marketer podcast! New episodes every Thursday!
Dave Charest:
What if I told you that one of San Francisco's most mind blowing artistic experiences started by accident? Picture this. A young artist living in a rundown house fixing floors out of necessity until those repairs started turning into intricate mosaics. Add a circus troupe,
Dave Charest:
a basement full of creative minds, and an unshakable passion for immersive storytelling, and suddenly, you've got a museum unlike anything else in the world. Today, I'm talking with Gregangelo Herrera, the artistic director behind the Gregangelo Museum, along with his team to uncover how this one of a kind space went from an underground secret to an official cultural landmark without ever losing its sense of wonder. It's a story you won't wanna miss. This is the Be A Marketer podcast.
Dave Charest:
My name is Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact, and I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore what it really takes to market your business, even if marketing's not your thing. No jargon, no hype, just real stories to inspire you and practical advice you can act on. So remember, friend, you can be a marketer. And at Constant Contact, we're here to help.
Dave Charest:
Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. And don't you worry your little heart because that's right. Kelsi Carter is here. Hello, Kelsi.
Kelsi Carter:
Hello, Dave. Happy to be here.
Dave Charest:
Good to see you as always. I wanted to start, Kelsi, by just doing a little check-in here. I know when you started this role, one of the things that you were concerned with and we're coming up on as the time of recording anyway, we're coming up on about a year you've been helping out with this project here.
Kelsi Carter:
I know. A year already.
Dave Charest:
And wow. It's been amazing year to have you here with us, of course. But I know one of the things when you first started was you were a little concerned about how much of a background in marketing you did not have. And so I'm wondering, how are feeling today almost a year later?
Kelsi Carter:
You know, I feel so much better than I ever thought I would. When I first started, I just thought it was this whole world that I was just not in tune with that I had obviously, I know what marketing is, but it's just like I was not involved with that world whatsoever. But having these conversations with these small business owners, a lot of them are also in a situation where they don't know a lot about marketing either. So hearing them learning about the process and having them explain it in terms where they're not necessarily marketers.
Dave Charest:
Right.
Kelsi Carter:
Has been super, super helpful. And just hearing, like, their firsthand experience and just, like, starting off and everything like that is just it's helped me tremendously get my head around it, but then also get my head around how we can have better conversations to help them or just give them better insights to things too as well. Yeah. So I'm feeling so much better.
Dave Charest:
Well, good. Well, I'm glad. Well, it's been fun to watch you kinda grow and see your knowledge grow understanding and how you've been applying it to the things that you've been doing. And the reason I really bring that up is because, you know, as you mentioned, so many of the small business owners that we talk to don't necessarily consider themselves marketing. And, you know, the leader of our group here today, no exception, really has no background in marketing.
Dave Charest:
But as we've learned through our past conversations, right, storytelling really plays a big part in marketing. And like many people that I would say that are in the creative or artistic space, you know, I would argue that they just don't realize how good they actually are at it. So, Kelsi, why don't you tell us a little bit about who our guests are today?
Kelsi Carter:
Of course. We have a whopping three. So our first guest is Gregangelo Herrera, artistic director of the Gregangelo Museum in Velocity Arts and Entertainment, which is based in San Francisco. And then we have Angelica Irreno, who is the artistic manager and marketing coordinator. And then lastly, we have Marcelo Defreitas, who is the creative director.
Dave Charest:
Yes. So we've got the small team that really makes the magic happen, and I love the way these three really work together and play off each other's strengths. Kelsey, I'm wondering, I mean, how do we even start to begin to describe the Greg Angelo Museum?
Kelsi Carter:
I know. It's I want listeners to actually Google it as well because you have to get a visual in your head as well. But just verbally, it's a private home of Greg Angelo, and it's tucked away in a quiet San Francisco neighborhood near the Pacific Coast. So him and his team of artists from around the world create unique, whimsical, and imaginative experiences that really spark curiosity and creativity.
Dave Charest:
Yeah. I mean, they do tours. They do shows. They run events at this place. And, really, I think the best way to describe it is that it is an experience, but not in that, like, fake overused way that you hear people talk about, like, creating an experience.
Dave Charest:
Right? Like, this is, like, the real deal.
Kelsi Carter:
Absolutely. And it's also worth mentioning that the Gorgangelo Museum is now recognized as a legacy business in San Francisco. That's really big. That means that it's a long standing community serving establishment that is a valuable cultural asset in the soul of the city, and its preservation is critical to maintaining the unique character of San Francisco.
Dave Charest:
Impressive stuff. And, I mean, I found this a really insightful chat. And, you know, I love these conversations with, I'll use some air quotes, like creative types. And in this one, we talk about how the pandemic changed everything for the business, why storytelling trumps selling, and why you actually don't need to spend a lot of money to do effective marketing. So let's go to Greg Angelo as he shares the evolution of his home from an unintentional art project to an immersive storytelling experience and cultural landmark.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Both the Gregangelo Museum, which started as my home and our headquarters, and Velocity Circus was our first reiteration of a business, came at the same time. It's interesting because the the museum, which is now called the Gorgonzola Museum, the public named it that, was always evolving and being built at the same time. Was my home. I'm an artist at the headquarters. I didn't have some corporate headquarters.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I worked here in the basement, in the attic, wherever. I had a room. At that time when I was quite young, I was still a teenager. I was renting rooms to many people, so I would work off the floor, wherever I had to do. And little by little, once in a while, a room in the house would cave in, literally.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And I would, well, let me fix that. And then while I was fixing it, well, let me lab this into some installation I'm creating for a show. So that was happening simultaneously. I didn't set out to create a museum at all, but I was creating a circus troupe that was based in sort of rites of passage, lots of different world cultures, rites of passage that have evolved into circus acts. And I think at that time, we had nine artists, and it was all happening at the same time.
Gregangelo Herrera:
So we were working earning money as performing artists, but we were a byproduct of what we're doing was creating this place that we're sitting in right now. We can talk about that later. We're Sure. We're now forty something years into it, and there are you might if you really listen close, you're hear a mutter of about 10 artists right underneath us in the studio making new work for this place Amazing. Which is more intentional these days.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah.
Dave Charest:
Got it. I just wanna understand the timeline here. So forty plus years, but when did Velocity Arts start, and then when did the museum start?
Gregangelo Herrera:
Okay. Well, I started officially just as Greg Angelo is my stage name. I was a whirl I'm a I am still a whirling nervous. That was an act I started with, and I was performing and earning a living in San Francisco, and I attracted many artists at that time. I was solo, but probably in the early nineties, I started Velocity Circus.
Gregangelo Herrera:
The museum, what's called the museum now, had started long before that. It was probably started in the eighties. So that did come first, but it wasn't a commercial enterprise at all. It was just a workshop. I didn't think anything of it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And it wasn't till the nineties that curious mostly our clients would come in. Like, they're very curious about the place, and they would wanna look around, and all of a sudden architects and designers and people are coming. And I I kinda just kept working on it with whatever artists were here. If we had a slow season, which happens often in the arts, I would just to make sure the artists were on board, I would train them to do mosaic or gold leafing or whatever, makers. And we keep working on the house to keep them employed.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And so that it just kind of slowly continues to evolve to this day. So it was house started first, not an enterprise. Velocity Circus was the first, you know, entertainment enterprise that made money.
Dave Charest:
Got it. Tell me about the museum then itself. Was this always the vision when you bought the house? Or like Oh,
Gregangelo Herrera:
no. I didn't. It was a rental property. It was a dump. I didn't think I'd be here that long.
Gregangelo Herrera:
No. It was I had no vision for it all. It was really out of practicality. I mean, I always joke, like, one day my brother walked into the bathroom and fell right to the floor. I'm like, oh, you know, I'm I'm a maker, so I'd like, oh, let me fix that.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Let get some plywood here and that. And I would kind of makeshift things. And then as it evolved, story I often tell is one of the rooms in a house, it's called the Green Room, and it was a very badly decaying room. It was sliding off the foundation. It had lost most of the plaster in there, and I kinda started fixing up.
Gregangelo Herrera:
It was whitewashed. And one day, I will never forget, was 03:00 in the morning coming home after performing the whirling dervish act. I put my classrooms away. I walked by the room, turned on the lights. So we'll maybe have a little energy.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I'll work on it. And I had bought this can of green paint, and I realized I didn't have a brush. And I was like, oh, what am I gonna do? And I just looked down. I took off my shirt, ripped it up in the shed, and I painted the whole room with my shirt, the base color.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I like to tell the story because it's very organic. It's very unplanned. It's very tearing in the process, but it's not thoughtfully curated at all until later. Accidentally. It's accident.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah. It's just sort of real inspiration and real time happening. But then later, I would say usually through children who visit the house with their families that the kids I always say if this all the arts stay close to the age of innocence. So when you see a kid come in and something resonates with them, they just blurt out. Oh my god.
Gregangelo Herrera:
This is this that they mentioned an emotion or a historical thing. And that's where the stories started to evolve from children, actually. And some of the stories run quite deep, I mean, really deep, and the stories keep evolving. Now we're these days, you know, thirty, forty years later, we're more consciously creating stories that are more relevant to now, especially after COVID. I think definitely all of the world has been experiencing a shift.
Gregangelo Herrera:
So we've been really careful in how we present the stories and the art. The art's actually asking the viewer questions rather than the viewer asking questions about the art. The art's asking questions about the viewer. So it's all turned out, and and it goes all over the place. There's laughter, tears, joy, you know, going into grief, getting out of grief, going into love, getting out of love, whatever.
Gregangelo Herrera:
We never know what's gonna happen. You know? But it it has a purpose.
Dave Charest:
So I'm curious then. When does that that transition happen? Right? You start doing some of these things by accident, but then what was the tipping point that was like, oh, wait. What if we turn this into an artistic enterprise?
Dave Charest:
Right?
Gregangelo Herrera:
Like Yeah. Well, the I mean, I did it probably for I didn't say for the last twenty years. What would that be? And, you know, maybe the beginning late nineties, being in the 2 thousands, there was a lot of interest, and I would just sort of charge people $30 or there was nothing.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Sure. Come in. We'd have a guy that kinda they looked around and talked a lot, and there wasn't anything really curated. So we did that for years. It was just sort of a side hustle.
Gregangelo Herrera:
It wasn't really to make money. It was just to, sure. People are curious. Let them in. It was a way that clients can come in.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Other artists can come in. That very soon led to me hosting lunches every Tuesday and Thursday just to have artists and clients come in because I realized they love the space. It was exciting. They see the artists working. So, you know, it's probably the 2,000 that it it was sort of really starting to go.
Gregangelo Herrera:
There was enough to see at that point before that. There was always something to see, but I think by that time, there was a lot to see. It really the bulk of the work happened during the AIDS epidemic. It's when culture in San Francisco was drastically shifting. It was dangerous to go out.
Gregangelo Herrera:
You couldn't have sex. You didn't wanna touch we didn't know what was going on. Yeah. But I lost a partner to AIDS. There was many I lost a lot of friends to AIDS in the arts world.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And I just kinda turned inward, and I started working here. And, again, it wasn't I didn't realize till last year that I was really working out grief by making the art here and, like, really, really going deep with it without consciously knowing it at the time. So a lot of it sort of marking these sort of tragic things that happened in San Francisco, including earthquakes, fires that happened in the Bay Area. It's always been a catalyst to go inward and create art that's more expressive and beautiful, actually, and cathartic, I guess, in the process. But it again, it wasn't intended to be that.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Now it is. You know? Now it is for sure.
Dave Charest:
Yeah. So, Marcelo, I'm wondering how did you get involved in the whole operation?
Marcelo Defreitas:
Oh, well, I used to run a nonprofit organization in Sonoma, and I hired Velocity and Entertainment to come and do the show, the event, the show part of the event. So Greg came with his troupe, and this was about six or seven years ago, five or six years ago, and within three weeks, we were working together.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I can elaborate on that. So, yeah, he hired he hired us to do a Mont Lounge Moulin Rouge. And I have salespeople in front of me. I don't do the negotiations for the business. It's not my forte.
Dave Charest:
Sure.
Gregangelo Herrera:
He probably hired us about a year in advance, sort of gave us carte blanche and creativity, gave some direction, paid market value. I never met him. Never talked to him. Didn't know who he was. We show up.
Gregangelo Herrera:
He makes fun of me. I always joke. When we show up to an event, we have three hours to take what any production company would take three weeks to do. So I'm I'm hard hitting. I go in there.
Gregangelo Herrera:
We do our job. We're ready. Things are packed up and ready to go. And I think I kinda bowled him over.
Marcelo Defreitas:
He was rough.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Were there any help?
Dave Charest:
No. I was the client.
Gregangelo Herrera:
No. It doesn't matter. He always thinks there's a status. To me, it's like, we're gonna do a great job. No one's gonna get in our way of failure.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Doesn't matter. You're the client, the lightning guy, whatever. We're gonna do a good job, and it takes getting there and working. So I kinda bowled him over, but I think I won him over. One thing I always do with our clients is I always gather the artists together, have the client come meet them, and say, what's the purpose?
Gregangelo Herrera:
What are we here for? What's the purpose? I think that he liked.
Marcelo Defreitas:
So there was there was a I mean, I was not really impressed with him because he was kind of, you know, rough in the beginning. And I was like, oh, well my god. I'm gonna have to work with this guy. We're here. We have to work together.
Marcelo Defreitas:
But then within about half an hour, he called all the artists. There were about, I think 40 artists that came for the show, and he put everybody on stage, and he called me and he said, okay, now I need you to come in and tell the people why are we doing this, what's the cause and all that. And that was the first time out of seventeen years that I was doing this that someone was actually interested in the cause. And I thought that was really a defining moment for us to become good friends and go into this venture together.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And I'll elaborate again. So during the evening, it was very well oiled machine. I've done hundreds of nonprofits, fundraisers, and they're usually shows just because there's boards running them. No one knows what they're doing. Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
He's and it's whatever. It's fine. And I was expecting the same thing, but I always wanna do a good job. I could tell this man had experience and had probably made some mistakes on the way because it was so well oiled. Usually, by the time there's an auction or a silent auction or a fund and need or whatever, we're ready to do the show.
Gregangelo Herrera:
But usually, by the time the curtain opens, everyone's so bored and drunk and overfed that we're performing to the back of their heads. And it's like, whatever. Dancers, contortionists, warm up another hour. It's going on forever. In fifteen minutes, this man raised a half a million dollars for the organization.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Fifteen minutes, curtain opens. The audience is completely engaged with us the whole time. We're able to go out. It was really wonderful. It's really an uplifting.
Gregangelo Herrera:
One of those rare moments. And I was dressed as a ringmaster. He was dressed as a ringmaster. So at the end, I handed it back the microphone and said on stage, what an extraordinary job you did. Thank you, whatever.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And he goes, I hear you have this really cool house in San Francisco, you're still telling me about it, can I come see it? I'm like, yeah, come over anytime. He came over and he wouldn't leave.
Marcelo Defreitas:
So anyway, three weeks into it, we started working together. And to respond to the question about the museum, so we're working together. We had all these jobs lined up and, like, a lot of stuff for corporations and fundraisers and COVID hit.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And this is where I'd like Angelica to jump in, if you don't mind. Yeah, please. But literally, this is what, Angelica, if you can tell us how you came
Angelica Irenño:
So this is the moment when I joined. In that moment, I was studying marketing and business, and I was looking for internships as part of my credit. And I couldn't find any internship. It was during the pandemic. And one day, one of my friends say, Why don't you try to find on Craigslist?
Angelica Irenño:
Gigs on Craigslist. And he was like, I didn't know that that was a thing. So I joined Craigslist. I applied, I would say maybe two or three opportunities. And one of them was social media intern at the Greg Angelo Museum.
Angelica Irenño:
Applied, I did the interview with two people. I met Greg Angelo and Marcelo through Zoom and I started working on Zoom. I wasn't able to like drive to the city. And then maybe two or three months later, I came for first time to the house and then I started working. I did my internship for about a year and then I started working full time and now I'm the artist manager.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Now she's my boss.
Dave Charest:
Oh. So a couple of questions I have. One, I wanna follow-up, Angelica, with you just in terms of, like, starting an internship twenty twenty wild year. Even just to think about just starting a job anywhere and having it be all remote and not really, I guess, interacting with people other than Zoom meetings. Like, what was that experience like?
Angelica Irenño:
It was difficult, and it was also basically my first experience in, like, United States company. I am from Colombia and I used to like be an au pair. So, I used to have a host family, that was my job. And I was looking for other opportunities. And it was the pandemic and still I wanted to try.
Angelica Irenño:
You know, I was like, it doesn't matter the pandemic, the world is changing, but I want to find another opportunity. And then at the beginning, it was difficult. I didn't have experience, so I didn't know how to create content without being here. I was going through the files, through their photos, videos, but it wasn't the same.
Gregangelo Herrera:
True, yeah.
Angelica Irenño:
Even though like my boss in that moment, she was showing me everything that I had to do and explaining to me, until one day we just realized you have to drive there. You have to the house, and then you can understand what we do because I wasn't sure, like, what this place was.
Dave Charest:
Which I'm sure is probably the same for a lot of people. Right? Hence, Marcelo's question, like,
Dave Charest:
what is this house?
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah. And every anybody who visits it and has experience, like, I don't have any words to this. You have to visit. But, you know, I would say meeting at Helica is nothing short of one of those beautiful miracles that happens in life. It was the darkest time, specifically for the arts and entertainment industry because we were public service.
Gregangelo Herrera:
So we were we were actually the first to be shut down because it was, you know, public gatherings. Other businesses followed. San Francisco was not sure, you know, what to do. So we were just sort of, you know, irrelevant. What was that thing?
Gregangelo Herrera:
Nonessential workers. Yeah. And then we fought it. One day, I was up at the ranch, at Marcelo's Ranch, and I saw these beautiful moss covered rocks. And I said, can I bring some of these to the garden at the house?
Gregangelo Herrera:
He's like, sure. And that rock, the first rock we set down, it set us on a path where, like, we can work outside. This house has outdoor property. The city's saying we can work outdoors one pot at a time, six feet apart. We have a circular garden that goes around the house.
Gregangelo Herrera:
We can get them in one end, out the other. Before you know it, we had about 40 interns here in the arts, young, high school, children that were with you know, in in youth programs and youth theater programs were just showing up. And we just created all these makeshift art studios outside, and we started turning the place inside out, still are, and making art and and of installations that then we actually started curating for the first time is when COVID hit real stories that were going through the outside of the house. And then Helica was here to kind of help launch it and figure out how do we market this thing. Well, it was quite a challenge, but we were the only entertainment venue in San Francisco open for two and a half years.
Gregangelo Herrera:
So it became so it was a great opportunity, and I'd like you to elaborate on that. Yeah. About the marketing aspect of during the darkest days. You know?
Angelica Irenño:
Yeah. I will say when I first came here, I remember, like, seeing everyone working outside. So was like, oh, because in my mind, it was just so pleased with art. That's all. But then when I realized all the, like, effort and the hard work that they put into creating this little piece or finalizing this project, then I say, it's more than that.
Angelica Irenño:
It's more than just the art itself. So then I would say at the beginning, I didn't quite get well like the sale of point. It took me like a month when I started like driving here more often. And then I realized it's more the stories. It's more like the experience that they get here.
Angelica Irenño:
It's not only the art itself. So I started like doing marketing more, like telling a story rather than like selling tickets, I would say, like storytelling through art. That's how I would say we started.
Dave Charest:
So, Marcelo, what are your responsibilities in this then from your position as creative director?
Marcelo Defreitas:
Well, I work close with Greg. We, you know, we do all different things, but I wanted to bring just one point that we were talking about. One of the things that was great about working here is that we did all this art for you know, there's thousands of artists coming through here. Greg is always on the head of it. He gives you an idea, but he is not the person who is telling you exactly how to do it.
Marcelo Defreitas:
He actually gives the artist the liberty to come up with the art, which is it's unheard of. It's just, you know, you're free to do your art. And we created all these arts everywhere here, you know, hundreds of artists in the last few years.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Well, I sometimes smash it too. I just did that this morning. Was like, don't take it first at all. Start again.
Marcelo Defreitas:
The art is not based on this story that we're gonna tell, and that's the beauty of it. After we're done, we actually write a story to incorporate the art that is designed by the artist here. So what do I do? I do
Gregangelo Herrera:
I'll help him with that. He does a lot. So Marcelo is definitely an overachiever. I've never had somebody wear me out as much as he does, and I I'm a crazy guy myself. But he really is handling the nuts and bolts of the business.
Gregangelo Herrera:
The best thing that he can do for this business is he easy interface between us and what very few clients remain. So with such, we lost probably 98% of our client base, and they're not coming back. The event industry changed. I'm really not that interested in the way it was anymore, and a lot of people are doing very irrelevant work in the event industry these days, and I don't wanna do it. So Marcelo's job is to be able to bring our relevance of what we do to beyond what we do at the museum.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And that's a really difficult task, and we're doing it. We've been quite successful at it. It's very rare, but, we have to find people who are also wanting to move forward on their life. You know, we can't anytime someone says we wanna go back to normal, we're like, we're not your people. We're not we're not going back anywhere.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And we're seeing a lot of the event industry fail. We're seeing a lot of people closing. We're seeing them fail by simply not interfacing with the guests in a way that's uplifting in them anyway. That's like the flower arrangement does more, to tell you the truth. And I don't mean to be a jerk about that.
Gregangelo Herrera:
But it's we've gotten our asses kicked, all three of us leading artists, and we really learned through experience what humanity needs right now and how to help humanity excel, to heal, to connect, to purge, to laugh, cry, whatever the heck needs to happen in the moment. Humanity has changed, and it's changing. Well, I wanna get into that
Dave Charest:
a little bit because what you're saying is obviously, like, people know what they know. Right? And particularly when you're looking for running events or outside things where people are gonna hire you to do those things, they probably have a very small view of what that can be. And to your point of it being challenging,
Dave Charest:
how do you overcome that? How do you start to get there where
Dave Charest:
you are succeeding at that? Because it's I got to imagine it's extremely difficult.
Gregangelo Herrera:
It's a very good question. So on a marketing level, it's very difficult because we're marketing something that's kind of not tangible. It's an experience. I always say we're not we don't use experience in that catchphrase trendy way.
Dave Charest:
Right. Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
No. Doing interactive immersive theater for decades and didn't even know what it was called. I I mean, we didn't know that's what it was called because we're so immersed in it, and that's always been the style of what we do. It's hard for us to figure out how do you sell the experience. So what we do is we invite people here.
Gregangelo Herrera:
We just invite them here. And those who come, they start to understand the brand of artistry and the impact it has on the human psyche and and as well as the aesthetic beauty of it and to meet the artists and the care to see the energy and the power that goes into creating this stuff. It's a magical place. In all seriousness, it is. I always tell people, be careful what you say here because it will manifest.
Gregangelo Herrera:
It and it does. I think you've all witnessed. You've all seen it happen. You know what mean? One of the artists downstairs is always like, Greg, know, where's the black fabric?
Gregangelo Herrera:
I'm like, oh my gosh. I don't know. You know, I have it all organized by color. She walks downstairs. She comes up.
Gregangelo Herrera:
She goes, you won't believe it, Greg. I walked downstairs. A box hit me right in the head, and there was a black fabric. So that that stuff like that happens all the time here. You know I mean?
Gregangelo Herrera:
It's it's kinda crazy.
Marcelo Defreitas:
What I wanted to say is that the difference between us and us a few years ago is that we actually went to different events and we performed, we did performative events. Today, because people are coming to the house and seeing the work that we're doing, we're actually getting hired because if we go to an event, even if we are dressed as a clown, we will go deep into what the clients, their idea, their function for their society is about. So we we express that.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Well, clients are now clients who have a deeper philosophy and a deeper understanding of what needs to happen in this age of information and how it's fracturing people. You know? There's a lot. We don't have to discuss all that or hiring us to be figure out, like, how do we get you there? In fact, if I took you downstairs right now, you're gonna see 15 artists working.
Gregangelo Herrera:
We're we're now gamifying, for lack of a better word, the kind of antics and activation that we do here and bringing them out into the world. Because this installation, do you see around the cities take seven, eight years to do? Yeah. So now we're doing sort of miniature installations, but the activations around them are quite inquisitive and evocative and provocative. And Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And we're being allowed actually to do that because a lot of times, these organizations don't even allow you to talk to people like they're human. You know? So now we're actually being hired to do that.
Dave Charest:
Yeah. So correct me if I'm
Dave Charest:
wrong here, but it's sounding like there's almost been, like, a switch almost where the events and things you were doing externally became almost like a marketing vehicle for the museum. And now it's almost as if, like, the museum itself becomes a vehicle for the events that you can do.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Really? It flipped. Yeah. I'm gonna say something I'm very proud of this week. You know, I've been doing this for a long time.
Gregangelo Herrera:
As you know, artists get their asses kicked. We're always I always say, it's like being a whack a mole. Like, you you think, oh, great. Good. And then you're knocked down.
Gregangelo Herrera:
You get up again. But I'm used to that. I'm fine with it. We're working artists. We're not famous or anything.
Gregangelo Herrera:
But San Francisco got really hard hit during COVID, very hard hit. We lost a huge portion of our artists, our culture, our creative scene. It's been tough, and we managed to stay through. And about a year and a half ago, our local supervisor, Myrna Melgar, called and said, this is a series of chains led up to this and said, I'm doing legislation to landmark your house, not just as a historic property, but as a cultural legacy in San Francisco. I didn't know what that meant.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Well, year and a half later, last week, we are now San Francisco's newest arts and culture landmark in the city. So that's kind of a big thing for artists who are not only alive, but actually still making it Yeah. To be landmark. And they give us a condition that the art can continue in in through perpetuity. So it's been pretty amazing to see how all of a sudden, you know, no one really knew we're here.
Gregangelo Herrera:
We're always a secret. All of a sudden, like, yes. It it a switch did reverse and all came back to this little magical house. And now we're now we're at a at a reset. We're now we're trying to we are, in fact, bringing the work we do here back out into the world in a very renewed way.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And if we need to renew again in the future, we'll do that when we get there. But for right now, it's pretty intense.
Marcelo Defreitas:
And it's because people are coming to visit and seeing the change that happens to them into this house, and they get excited about that, and they wanted to repeat that in the world. And we've been doing it for many, many years now. It's they're seeing that and hiring us for that.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Right? Yeah. And to go back to any early question about when did the house really become a thing, it was during COVID. It was during COVID when it really became I was like, you guys. I think we built a theater and didn't even know it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
You know what mean? We and here it is. You know it. Because we're all thinking, what performance space can we go to? What's this?
Gregangelo Herrera:
And I was like, I think we're in it. You know? We opened the windows. We had we're using inside of stages. We're performers.
Gregangelo Herrera:
We're hanging out of the windows performing. We did everything we could, people on the roof, wherever we could use a stage. And that's really when it hit. It was just four or five years ago, we're, like, refocused here. And then Helica really you know, she's new in marketing.
Gregangelo Herrera:
It's a new country, a new language, a new everything for her. And she started navigating, figuring out, like and we still are. In fact, it's why we're excited to be on the call with you. What do we how do we do this? Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I mean, because it's a thing.
Marcelo Defreitas:
You know? But we didn't sit down and make it a strategy. You know? What are we gonna do? We just kept doing art and inventing things.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Taking risks.
Marcelo Defreitas:
We never thought, well, we have to reinvent ourselves. No. We didn't. We by doing it, we actually reinvent it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And once in while, I'll be like skating across the state. I'm like, hell, Kai. Okay. This might be really dumb, and I'm thinking of these SEO words that maybe we'll get people. And so, like, like, that was dumb.
Gregangelo Herrera:
But then Well, I wanna get into some
Dave Charest:
of the marketing stuff here. But before we get fully there, I wanted to ask, you know, you've done a bunch of these things. I saw a clip of the Netflix thing that you had on your site and things you've done with, like, the Bravo Network, and you've been featured in these other I have to imagine those have been a good boon for you just in terms of bringing more people to the house and more people to the museum and to the site. And just to maybe to give us a sense of scale here too, like, how many people do you have coming through in a typical year, let's say? Or maybe there isn't a typical year.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah. I think we're finding typical right now. But what would you say on holiday? But how many guests do we have as we increase? It's new for us.
Angelica Irenño:
Last year, it was, like, 500
Gregangelo Herrera:
Okay.
Angelica Irenño:
People. But, like, every year, it's more. You know? Right now, like, by June, I think we are in that number.
Dave Charest:
Okay.
Angelica Irenño:
I would say. But I mean, like COVID time, it was way less than that.
Dave Charest:
Sure.
Angelica Irenño:
So we see like every year is increasing and increasing. And now that we offer more experiences and more tours through the house, like, we're getting, like, more demand.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I mean, we're really building a new enterprise with something that we already had. So it's kind of interesting. The tours are small. They only go six to eight guests at a time on on the experiences, four or five times a day, but now we're starting to add an extra day. We're growing it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
The house is being rezoned as a commercial entertainment venue. We're building right now. So it's we had to completely shift Yeah. Every business. But we do do small events over 25 to 40 people max.
Gregangelo Herrera:
So that that not included in the box office count. So it's probably double the number of what she said. So it's small. It's intimate, which makes it very interesting. It's never gonna be a place that has, you know, tens of thousands of people.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And that's the beauty of it. It's very intimate. It's very personal. It's a very new way for us to work because we used to work for, you know, the hundreds or even thousands of people at a time. And now we're like, oh But we were still doing immersive work, and now we're like, oh, man.
Gregangelo Herrera:
We're right up here with them. And their ninety minute experiences are they're nonperformative. Our guides, even though they're all performing artists, are just being their guides. They're not docents. They're not performing artists at that point.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Our biggest commission that we got in many years, the first words they told us were, we don't want anything performative at all. They go We
Marcelo Defreitas:
don't Costumes.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah. No. We don't know costumes. No production. Like, holy But we know you can do it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
It was a client who knew me well. I'm like Yeah. And then we figured it out. We figured out so we've taken this stance as guides, and our costumes were all gonna be white mechanic suits. We're all in black and white with, like, derby hats on, kind of a race, eagle less, and going into this place with about a 80 guests and guiding them through about 20 different experiences over two days.
Gregangelo Herrera:
So it's same style of thing that we're doing here. So it's more, you know, it's more, I think, what people are doing these days is looking for some inner peace, some self healing, whatever it is. But we're doing it in a very creative kind of a provocative way that's a bit more whimsical.
Marcelo Defreitas:
What happens when you take a tour here is that there's so much art to see and people come to see the art, and they don't realize that actually the art is just a catalyst for them to talk about themselves and to see what they're going through in life. What Greg's talking about this event that we're going to do next week is we're actually the way I see it is we're making it as a mini kit of the house and taking over there so that we can continue doing the same kind of you know, the art being the catalyst for them to be able to talk about themselves.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Sure. But to go back to your media thing, we've been very, very lucky over the years to be on, you know, Netflix and all these different networks, which always turns out being more about the house than anything else. Sure. That's interesting, and that's all cool, and I like it. And what's beautiful about it is to be back in the day because I'm older.
Gregangelo Herrera:
You know, we had a TV show. If you if you blink, you missed it, and, you know, maybe a few people saw it, and they buy a couple tickets or whatever. But now Netflix, this thing was on six, seven years ago. We continue to get new guests that saw it on Netflix, which is really cool, and it's changed a lot since then. So the marketing now these days, it's amazing how it withstands time a little bit more now.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah. And you can kinda keep recycling and upcycling older things like that.
Dave Charest:
Well, Greg, I'm curious. What level experience do you have with marketing? And I know having worked I come from a theater background myself, and so marketing is sometimes like a dirty word, right, in all of that. So what's your experience with marketing, and how do you think of it?
Gregangelo Herrera:
My experience in marketing is none. So what I've always done, and so I grew up in San Francisco. I used to always for years until I met these guys, I put on my roller skates. I'd skate across the city. I'd go to every little event that I was invited to, and that's how I did it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I would just show up places, and I I don't have any skill in social media. I'm a little bit rough and gruff to be, you know, the front man for the business, but I I love people. I love to socialize. I like showing up. So that my form was always show up, invite people.
Gregangelo Herrera:
What I do to this day, same thing as I invite once it used to be twice a week. Now once a week, I invite everyone over for lunch. We just did it yesterday. We had 30 people show up, and that's my way of marketing. Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And what's beautiful about that now is and here, and she can then take that and spider leg it out into the world in all kinds of little stories. But I I really have very little experience with it. I'm just a guy that shows up. That takes a lot of energy.
Dave Charest:
Yeah. Yeah. So where would
Dave Charest:
you say then marketing ranks on your list of priorities then?
Gregangelo Herrera:
Oh, it's number one. I couldn't we couldn't run the business without Unhelica. That's it's crucial right now. And I'm very I didn't under you know, I tried to understand it, and how it educates me more. I'm not hands on with it, but I wanna understand it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I wanna learn. I wanna be able to have good input. You know, she gets texts from me in the middle of the night all the time. Like, oh, you know, I thought of it. And we try it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I I like in Helica, I'm gonna say sometimes things that I don't let's just take a risk and try it. If it fails, whatever. We tried it. Yeah. And there's not one person who saw it fail might lead to someone else.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I'm not all about it has to be always expanding into the stratosphere, but keep being artists as well, but keep getting out there. You know?
Marcelo Defreitas:
Yeah. Elika has actually taught us was that we don't really need to spend a lot of money to do effective marketing, and that's the beauty of it. I don't know if she wants to talk more a little bit about that.
Dave Charest:
Please go ahead because I wanted to understand a little bit more how you think through it.
Angelica Irenño:
I mean, I remember when I started marketing, like, all the time my teachers were telling me about ads. You need a budget. You need to spend in ads, ads, ads, ads. I know everything about that. So, at the beginning, I came with that mind, you know, like, hey, if we need to sell tickets, we need to run ads.
Angelica Irenño:
But I will say after a year or even a few months, realized like those are not necessary. And it's more important the content that we create like for people rather than ads. Because we can spend like hundreds of dollars in ads and we realized that sometimes they weren't working. But instead, if we create a different content, if we invite content creators or influencers to their house, it's more the sales that we get from that than ads. So, now my goal is to do more like real marketing, like tell stories, as I say.
Angelica Irenño:
I asked Greg many questions that I have myself or other like people have about the house. And I think that's the role, not spending a lot of money in marketing.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah. Oh, it's a lot but it's a lot of effort and time, which equals money in a different way. But it's not throwing money at some corporation that didn't work because those corporations really do not give a shit about the
Dave Charest:
arts. Right. Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Marketing money. I mean, it got to a point where they can, Helica, what they're asking in money is higher than our ticket sales. Yeah. Who are we working for here? Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Just quit it. I'm telling you, the day after we quit, what happened? Remember when we quit the ads? I think we doubled in our following. Our ticket sales doubled, like, immediately, like, within a week.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah. You know?
Dave Charest:
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about the storytelling piece of this here, though. Right? Because, like, I think I was telling Kelsey this the other day. It's like, you know, having been in in I was marketing for theaters and doing all that.
Dave Charest:
And as I was explaining it to people, again, marketing, dirty word. But it's like, no. Our marketing is storytelling. And if you are some of the best storytellers there are, and if you just thought of it that way and this is a vehicle through which to tell that story, corporations would be paying you money to be able to do it. Right?
Dave Charest:
And so They
Gregangelo Herrera:
in fact, they used to.
Dave Charest:
Yeah. Right? And so, I guess, how do you think through it? And do you guys meet regularly? Like, I guess, what's this look like in terms of, like, okay, here's what we're gonna try.
Dave Charest:
Here's what we're gonna do. Maybe what's something that's worked and maybe what's something that hasn't. Like, tell me a little bit about the process you guys go through to to think through it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
We do meet once a week together, and we just kind of it's kind of my job to sort of brainstorm about what can we try, what we can do. It's their job to kinda push me to be like, hey. Try this. Do this kinda show activation. So we do meet for about an, you know, about an hour just specifically for marketing.
Gregangelo Herrera:
We check the analytics, what's going on. We decide if there's gonna be a newsletter that goes out through Constant Contact, what's our message? We don't like to hammer people over the head with it, but to just kind of we have a message or an offering. Our tickets are expensive because it's six to eight people. So lately, you know, we've been trying to figure out what are price points, what are combo toys we can offer.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Some of them fail, and some of them have been successful. So, yes, we always try on new stuff. One happened the other day on accident where we have there's indoor and outdoor tours, but we don't have a combo indoor outdoor tour unless you book it through me and Marcello, which is stupidly expensive because we have to, you know, curate we have to do the whole thing ourselves. Mhmm. And some customers showed up for a morning tour that was outside, and then they bought a ticket later for an indoor tour for lunch.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And I was like, oh my god. This is great. We could just combo this package, and we did it, and we've been doing the sales went up. Yeah. All of a sudden, people combine indoor outdoor the accessibility of going through a box office, making it easy that they're self booking, that's what makes it work.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah. They don't wanna be calling and booking and doing all this stuff unless it's an event.
Dave Charest:
You know? Right. So what are you looking for to measure success out of the activities that you are doing from a marketing perspective? Is it is it just ticket sales? Or
Gregangelo Herrera:
Well, for the Gorgonzola Museum, yeah, it's ticket sales. It's also getting stories out there. It's knowing that we have a following base that might not be able to afford what we do and then being able to make you know, to offer them certain specials and to create content that they can still understand what we do. I mean, that's and how it does that brilliantly. I'm not really involved too much in it other than she's a director, and we do what she tells us to do.
Gregangelo Herrera:
She's getting poise out there all the time and mixing it up, and some are popular, some aren't. A new thing that would that I like to work on now that we're a landmark is that, you know, there will be a plaque out in front. But what I wanna do is for people that can't come in or can't afford to, I wanna put several QR codes in front of the art outside so it gives them not just a story of it, but activations that they have to do right there on the spot and other directives that take them to other public art installations in San Francisco that are free. So we're gonna do a whole kind of a thing where and that's, I think, is good marketing because it's gonna pique their curiosity to not just explore the city, but to come back and be like, you know, we gotta check this place out, and and we'll save the $80 to do this or whatever. That's not really my intent, but I know that that will be a little bit of a fishing line to give people a taste of, like, here's something here.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And and, you know, I like to welcome everybody in, but if you can't afford it, can't afford it. We still have to pay the artist.
Dave Charest:
Sure. Of course. Of course. Well, let's get into the Constant Contact piece here and and how are you using that. I guess my first question, Greg, would be to you.
Dave Charest:
Like, what brought you to Constant Contact in the first place?
Gregangelo Herrera:
Oh gosh. Probably somebody that was working here said, hey. There's this thing called Constant Contact. Alright. Get it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Alright. Sounds good. Let's get it. In fact, I I remember I remember the days where I had one of the costumer everyone here wears many hats. One of the costumes was our database, and I think we had to go to some, you know, kinkles or something at that time to kinda keep adding our our database for our mailing list, so we actually were literally physically mailing things out, then comes the Internet.
Gregangelo Herrera:
So she kinda managed the database, and we we would kind of create our own emails that were kind of a mess. But we we we a website or whatever, then the website built, and then the website quickly became a dinosaur. You know, we couldn't keep up. So I think somebody said, oh, there's this thing called Constant Contact that'll, you know, keep the framework and they have your you know, they keep track of the database and people that unsubscribe this and that, blah blah blah. And I was like, oh, that's great.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Get it. So I think we've been subscribing for it to don't know how many years now. It's been
Dave Charest:
a while. You've been around since 02/2005, I believe. So Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Thank you
Dave Charest:
for that. Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Long time. What how long has Constant Contact been around?
Dave Charest:
We've been around since depending on who you asked, '95, '90 '8. So we've been around for while.
Gregangelo Herrera:
There kind of at the beginning. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we're in San Francisco, so we're right in the heart of technology and all these platforms.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And most of our clients, not so much anymore, were always that industry. Yeah. We were this huge cultural bridge between the culture of San Francisco and the whole new tech boom, and I loved it. And then that kind of ended. Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And I'll but I think I'll start again. I think with AI and all that, we're gonna start again.
Marcelo Defreitas:
I work within the interface. I'm the one who actually put together the newsletters. They come up with the content and they give me the content and we work. I look for it. I actually love working with there's a few things that I would love that would be better, that maybe the colors.
Marcelo Defreitas:
There are more colors that we can choose and typefaces and stuff like that, but I know we are limited because of the Internet usage. But it's a very easy interface to work with. We came up with a very small newsletter that is very effective.
Gregangelo Herrera:
More like a pamphlet. More like a just to keep it because we we're so inundated with stuff. Marcelo was born and has a background as a graphic design and
Marcelo Defreitas:
packaging design. Yeah. I was an art director for a big packaging.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Like when you go to Safeway, he designed a lot of those packages. Real. He understands packaging.
Marcelo Defreitas:
So I do all the newsletters and I think Inhaleka send them out, You know, it's always a collaborative thing. So I love working with them, contact.
Gregangelo Herrera:
So that's kind of easy interface, and then I kind of do the writing, and I'm the writer. He does the graphics, and Angelica makes sure that it's all going to the right place. And and, you know, always trying to learn. I'm always trying to push her to be like, okay. What I'm which is why we're on here now.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Always very interested to learn. Like, how do we interface with all these platforms that we're using, and how can we put a face to it, how can we better utilize it, and what's evolving, what's obsolete. It's I don't know. I just like to keep ahead of it.
Dave Charest:
Well, yeah. Well, I was gonna ask you because it sounds like you embrace what's happening just in terms of technology and those things where a lot of times people don't. Right? And so I I love to see that you do that. So well, I'm curious from you, like, I guess when you start thinking about what you are doing from an email perspective, right, and what you're sending, it looks like I think you you are doing a very good job in terms of, like, thinking through different segments.
Dave Charest:
And I'd be curious as how you think about that just in terms of, like, the different lists that you have within Constant Contact. And then just how do you think through frequency in many ways? Like, how often are you sending emails, and how do you think through that?
Gregangelo Herrera:
That's a good question. So right now, our main focus is a museum. So our our entertainment industry has pretty much fallen off a cliff, though it hasn't. We're still doing it right now. We're very blessed to have a big commission, but there's very little volume in it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
So we we kind of stopped doing our marketing for like, hey. Hire us to do your events or fairs or festivals, whatever, and we just focused on the museum now. So, really, to keep it fresh, you know, we do seasonal offerings. I you know, sometimes you do it once a month. Sometimes you do it once a quarter.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I don't like going much more than once a month. Mhmm. I get a little annoyed if I'm getting newsletters from people once a month even if I'm interested in them. Yeah. You know, I'll hold it on to it for a week or so and see what happens.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I don't completely understand. You know, I like how you guys send the analytics of who clicked, who opened, who went on the website. That's always helpful for Anhalika. We always discuss that at our meetings as well. Like, you know, but sometimes it's hit or miss.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Sometimes there's we oh, well, I hear a huge click rate, but why? You know? And then we'll try the same format again, and it waft, but we keep trying. What's great about the three of us being a graphic artist to creative and marketing, like, we're really working together on it, is that we know that the content has to be very crisp and very current and very relevant. I like color.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I know a lot of people are sexy. I'm not the sexy black and white type of guy. Like white color. You Even I'm in all in black. I like to hit it with a lot of color, so does Marcelo, so to speak.
Marcelo Defreitas:
Strategy is really we always make a short, Uh-huh. A lot of photos, very relevant short texts, and, so the and fresh.
Gregangelo Herrera:
And several buttons throughout. If you have to scroll, at least three buttons that click right to the box office exactly where your interest is, whether it's for kids or adults or whatever it is. Got
Marcelo Defreitas:
it. I think most of the times when we got a newsletter that is very long Yeah. Halfway through, you just give up on it. Yeah. So we are three or four photos, three or four texts, and the buttons, and that's it.
Dave Charest:
So I'd be curious to wonder if you've ever thought or attempted or tried to think of email and the things that you're sending through those channels. I mean, this goes for social as well, but as a creative extension of the work that you do at the museum. And by that, I mean instead of it being strictly about, you know, here, purchase your tickets or here's how you can book an event. But here's like a small experience. Like the email becomes part of the experience that would entice somebody to want to learn more about, wait, what's going on here?
Dave Charest:
Like, it becomes the art in many ways to get people excited about it. I'll give you an example of of somewhat what I mean here is so when I was marketing director for theater, a lot of times, right, similar people are always like, buy tickets, buy tickets, buy tickets. What I was like, well, wait, like, why should anybody care about buying tickets when they haven't even like they don't really know anything about the story, like what's going on with the thing that we're building. So what we started to do was leading up to a show, and these were a little different situation, obviously, than you're in. But what we would do is leading up to a show, we would then start sending a little bit more frequently.
Dave Charest:
But each week it would be more about like the production and what's happening and the people involved in it and like introducing like, here are the artists like and here's the artistic director and here's what here are like the stories and interviews with people. So we're storytelling leading up to the launch of the actual story. And then it became buy tickets. Right. And so people started to, like, look forward to the emails because they were learning more about the thing that they were interested in, which was the art and how that was being created and getting excited about wanting to see it.
Dave Charest:
And so I wonder if you've ever explored anything along those lines to, like, instead of it being just like, you know, we talked about ads earlier where that's like one thing. But, like, what if you flip that on its head a little bit and make it part of the story?
Gregangelo Herrera:
I like it. We I mean, Angelica does that a lot in the socials. Yeah. I really only look at our own social media, like, what's the we doing? Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah. And I enjoy the kinda surprise. She has her to do everything. I I love that to me. And I love that when I see it from other artists or creative people.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I love to see the story, what they're working on, what's going on, because it's it's a nice window into a life you wouldn't see. I I like that. We just haven't translated it to Yeah. Not the content we're doing more as of, yeah, I like that. I mean, I'd like to hear more about how that can be successful and, you know.
Dave Charest:
Yeah. Well, talk to me a little bit about maybe how you obviously, right, you need the database in order to be able to send to people and all that. Like, are there any particular things maybe, Anahelica, is a question for you. Are there any things that you're doing to grow that list to have more people to send to?
Angelica Irenño:
We always get, like, new inquiries through our website. We have our forums, so we get inquiries from there, also from our social media. So whenever I get an inquiry from anybody, I always like add them to our list. I would say like going back to your question about the storytelling and how can we implement that to Constant Contact, my focus is that, but in our social media. So it's probably a good idea to implement that in constant contact some way how?
Angelica Irenño:
Because on social media, I see that and they are asking like, how did you do that? How did you start? Do you have any advice for like young artists like me? And those are the questions that I have ask Greg, and then we create content based on that. So, I'm pretty sure we can, like, utilize that for constant content
Gregangelo Herrera:
Yeah.
Angelica Irenño:
To keep growing our database. Have you
Gregangelo Herrera:
seen some good examples in growth from doing that kind of a well, kind of using social media.
Dave Charest:
Yeah. Like, so personally, you know, when I've done that, like, we saw that really help us a lot just in terms of, like, when we would get to that place where we're asking people to buy tickets. Right? And we would always focus on because we were doing a limited run of, like, a show, for example. And so it would be, you know, buy tickets for be over three weekends or something like that, and we focus people on purchasing for that weekend.
Dave Charest:
And so it was always a buildup. Like, people were getting excited for, oh, when's the show coming and when can I get tickets? Right? So it's like people are looking forward to it rather than it it being a thing. So we've seen that work just in terms of engagement and people sharing those things.
Dave Charest:
Like, people are always more apt to share the things that are entertaining, as I'm sure you know, right, versus the thing that's maybe, like, the buy this kind of thing. Right? And so we would always see the engagement kinda go up on those types of things that incorporated that idea in it. Anyway, just a thought. Just an idea there.
Gregangelo Herrera:
Oh, I like it. I'm thinking, like, right now because we've working really hard. We're building a new installation. Yeah. It's for a client, but it's gonna end up back in the house.
Gregangelo Herrera:
So, like, maybe that kind of thing. We're building it. It's like a new attraction.
Angelica Irenño:
You know?
Dave Charest:
Yeah. Like, I think that's the interesting thing. Right? It's like you're inviting people in. Right?
Dave Charest:
Like, here's what we're working on without you know, I know there are some things, like, maybe you don't wanna give away, but even that is in itself is like, you know, we don't want to show you everything because we don't want to give it away. But like, here's kind of the direction that we're going or the thing that we're working on. And if you can tell those stories, I think particularly to people that well, I think both ways, right? Folks that are artistic and have that creative thing like people like, oh, cool, what are they doing? Right?
Dave Charest:
Because they're interested in it because they want to do things the similar. And then you have the people that aren't creative but are fascinated by the fact that like, how do you even get to this place? Right? Like, how do you create it? And so you tap into people's on both fronts, their curiosity by sharing the journey of how you're creating it.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I like it. You just inspired me. We we have a new experience called mysteries and meals. We can kinda tap it everything where they get to go into the studio to see the artist work. Yeah.
Gregangelo Herrera:
But we don't let them do that except for this one day. That would be actually really cool to do, like, a show a little bit of the mystery, and then you can come just on this one day in time. And, you know, if you well, there has to be a cell somewhere.
Dave Charest:
Of course. Of course. Of course. Look. We're getting to the top of the hour, so I don't I wanna be respectful of your time here.
Dave Charest:
I'd like to ask maybe each of you or one of you, but what would you say would be your best piece of advice? And this could be marketing. This could be business. I'll let you decide it just in terms of like, what would you say to somebody who's maybe in a similar, maybe earlier in their journey in terms of, like, where they are marketing, maybe their creative endeavor. What advice would you offer to them?
Angelica Irenño:
So I would say my first thing is to enjoy it because sometimes, and I learned that from Greg because sometimes, you know, you think that you are doing marketing or you have these tasks or responsibility and you have to do it and you take like too serious because you have to make that call. And when I'm like in a bad mood and I'm like, Oh, what I'm going to do this week for marketing, you know, and I don't have more ideas, then I just like pause and I said, Okay, this is fun. And then I ask Greg, you know? So having someone, your team, I asked Marcelo, how can we like create more content? I have this idea, but I don't know how to implement that idea.
Angelica Irenño:
And some way how we find always like a fun way to like bring that into the real life.
Gregangelo Herrera:
I'll add to that. I'll build on to that. You gotta enjoy what you do. I don't care what you do, but you have to collaborate. So I always tell young artists, you cannot do this alone.
Gregangelo Herrera:
You find a brother, a sister, mother, a father, cousin, a friend, anybody. You gotta work together with somebody because you have different ideas. There's gonna be yin and yang, and and you need help, especially creative people. Artists that try to do it on their own are not focusing on their work enough. So I I think it's important that it's always collaborative.
Gregangelo Herrera:
One or two people. There's been times I've had 10 people on the team or 16, but right now, Favi is good. You know? So
Marcelo Defreitas:
I will elaborate on that as well because to me, it's just that the analogy that I have is when you buy a gift for somebody or a birthday gift, you think too much about the person that you're gonna give instead of thinking what is it that you like that person to have. And so if you're doing something that you really like, that's what you're doing. If you start thinking too much of in a strategy, who to reach and how to do that, then sometimes you screwed up. And if you're doing something that you really love, then that helps a lot because you're just doing being real.
Dave Charest:
Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number one, focus on the content you create. Instead of pouring money into ads that may or may not work, invest your time in storytelling and real engagement. The Greg Angelo Museum found that creating compelling content, whether through social media, influencers, or organic storytelling, drove more interest and ticket sales than paid ads ever could. The key, understand what people are curious about and craft content that speaks to them.
Dave Charest:
Real marketing isn't about spending more, it's really about connecting more. Number two, try new things. Sometimes the best ideas happen by accident, like when guests at the Greg Angelo Museum unknowingly created a new offering by booking separate indoor and outdoor tours on the same day. Instead of sticking to the old model, they adapted, bundled the experience, and saw sales increase. The lesson, stay open to new possibilities.
Dave Charest:
Listen to what your audience is already doing and make it easier for them to say yes. Number three, collaborate on the marketing bits you enjoy. Marketing doesn't have to feel like a chore, especially when you make it a creative team driven process. When you hit a wall, step back, find the fun in it, and bounce ideas off the people around you. Whether it's two, three, or 10 people, collaboration brings fresh perspectives, keeps the energy up, and ensures that you're not carrying the weight alone.
Dave Charest:
Here's your action item for today. Reimagine how you market your business or creative work. Instead of focusing solely on selling a product or service, consider how you tell a compelling story that resonates with your audience. Is there a deeper purpose behind what you do? How can you make your audience feel like they are part of the journey?
Dave Charest:
What experiences can you create that engage people on an emotional level? Then take one small step. Create a post, an email, or an event invitation that shares the story behind your work, not just the product itself. See how your audience responds and refine from there. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be a Marketer podcast.
Dave Charest:
Please take a moment to leave us a review. Just go to ratethispodcast.com/bam. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. That's ratethispodcast.com/bam. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.