I graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA in Photography. It’s been long enough that the lessons have had time to prove themselves. Since then, I’ve spent more than two decades running a custom branded product design company. Those two facts sometimes surprise people. They shouldn’t.
I didn’t learn accounting in art school. I learned that later. What I learned in Savannah was how to see, how to evaluate what’s working, and how to stay with difficult problems long enough to solve them.
Those skills turned out to be more transferable than I ever expected.
Craft, Concept, and Learning to See What's Right
SCAD insisted that craft and concept both mattered. On the craft side, that meant mastering the rigors of color theory, composition, and commercial photography—the essential grammar of visual communication. You couldn’t hide a weak idea behind technical virtuosity, and you couldn’t excuse sloppy execution because your concept was interesting. Both had to be there. You’d get praised for what was working—and called out on whatever was missing.
I think about this every single day.
Four years of studying aesthetics, learning to see, and being surrounded by people who cared deeply about whether something was right shaped how I evaluate everything.
I don't mean "right" in the premium, luxury-marketing sense. I mean the design fits the purpose. The materials match the application. The finish is appropriate. The pricing reflects honest value. Everything holds together with integrity.
We've built our business on that standard: the product has to be as good as the marketing. The craft has to match the concept. When a customer orders custom keychains for their company's twentieth anniversary, that's not just an order—it's a story they're telling about who they are. The product we deliver has to honor that story.
There's a market for right. It may not be the biggest market. It may not be the fastest path to scale. But the customers who find you—who recognize that you care about the same things they care about—they stay. They come back. They tell other people.
That instinct came from art school. From being trained to see the difference.
Professionalism as Practice
What I absorbed at SCAD wasn't just technique. It was watching how the professors carried themselves—the seriousness with which they treated creative work, not as performance, but as practice.
Professor Earl warned us about sentimentalism. It's pleasant, he said, but dangerous if you linger in it too long. Sentimentality blurs judgment. You have to be willing to see clearly and pivot—even when it’s uncomfortable.
My brother, who spent years as a Chief Digital Officer for major governments, used to visit over the holidays and marvel at our ability to do this. He saw the power in that creative agility—the way we could recognize a shift in the market and move the whole business to meet it—and wished it were possible at the scale he managed.
But there is a flip side. Professor Flowers taught me that you also need the conviction to stay. I was struggling with a piece once—composition wrong, technique off, a total mess. He didn't intervene for days. When it finally came together, the lesson wasn't about the work; it was about endurance.
It’s a tightrope. You have to know when to blow it up and when to trust that "spark"—that subconscious guide built on years of training. Like a composer who stays at the piano because they know the melody is in there somewhere, you learn to trust the scaffold of your experience. You don't quit just because something isn't working yet.
That endurance is what allows you to handle the seasons of growth and change. Significant parts of any business will inevitably cycle through phases that are half-formed or unresolved—and even stable processes can be upended by outside factors, forcing you back into that state of uncertainty. If you’ve learned not to abandon the work when things become uncomfortable, you develop a completely different relationship with risk.
The Enduring Scaffold
Professor Christman once told us, in the middle of a critique, that we might someday look back and realize those years were the best days of our lives. Learning, young, healthy, not yet worried about money.
I remember pausing on that. Not because I fully believed it at 20, but the comment struck me then, and the moment has remained with me since.
PromotionalKeychains.biz launched in 2004. We've survived the 2008 crash, industry upheavals, and a global pandemic. We're still here—still growing, still serving customers who value quality.
Those years at SCAD were, in fact, some of the best days of my life—not because they were easy, but because I was learning how to see, how to work, how to trust the process.
To anyone wondering whether an art degree is "practical": business is an art practiced under constraint. It requires creativity, craft, and the willingness to sit with uncertainty until the picture comes clear. It requires trusting yourself to find the solution.
My BFA gave me the foundation for all of that; Savannah was excellent preparation for everything that came after.
