Design Sense, Local Logic

Five years ago Shana Victor was working a bread-and-butter job as a freelance graphic and web designer while playing around with a hobby website that was slowly but surely attracting a faithful following.

PixelgirlPresents.com, which Victor started 10 years ago, offered free downloads of artsy desktop images and creative icon sets. As another example of a one-thing-leads-to-another business venture, Victor began to notice and fall in love with the artwork, and other products submitted by artists and designers who were drawn to to the site. This inspired her create yet a third website for their handiwork.

As an art lover, self-professed borderline addicted shopper, University of Michigan photography grad and "techie who loves e-commerce," Victor gave birth to Shana Logic, an irreverent online store hawking one-of-a-kind and limited-edition wares of indie artists and designers from around the world - all from a little office warehouse near downtown Ann Arbor.

Victor, 32 and an Ann Arbor resident since graduating from U-M in 1999, launched Shana Logic, in 2003, connecting her to a growing class of Internet entrepreneurs and do-it-yourselfers. She could have done her techno-meets-fashion-meets creativity thing in New York City's SoHo, a hip Parisian neighborhood or from the Hills of Los Angeles. But A2 was her choice.

"I never wanted to leave," Victor recalls of her graduating and deciding what to do next.

At that time she met one like-minded creative techie after another, began her multiple online ventures and through Shana Logic watched her passion for the funky merge with finance as her website grew into a business that is expected to reach $1 million in sales this year.

"My business is here because I'm here, to be honest," Victor says. "Out of all the cities in Michigan, in my opinion Ann Arbor is by far the best. Plus my husband's job is here and now my employees are here."

While Shana Logic functions as a shopping portal, it sets itself apart from other online shopping venues by delivering products in a fun and creative way, starting with the online marketing (see shopping sections such as "yummy goods" and "punk rock sass") and ending with the packaging (lime green bubble wrap, boxes decorated by hand with silly stickers and packed with a free magnet designed by Victor). The online store is as bold and colorful as much of the inventory is. To become a Shana Logic product it must be cute, funny, silly, different. There is a heavy Japanese influence in the products, AKA modern craft or studio craft.

"I started the store to pay for the other site," Victor remembers of those frenetic but fun days of working all hours to pay the bills with her freelance jobs.

She did it while simultaneously maintaining the free, but time-consuming Pixelgirl Presents and launching Shana Logic. Eventually she left her freelance job with Morfia Design and scaled back Pixelgirl to focus on Shana Logic.

"I sort of just had a following and then it branched off so I had to decide what to leave. I could not be two people," says Victor, who in the process said goodbye to her 20s, hello to her 30s and matured into a legitimate businesswoman heading up an online shopping endeavor with thousands of customers around the globe.

Legitimate even if she's given to describing herself as "chilled" and her business as "awesome."

Legitimate even while trading in whimsical products like mini cassette earrings, skull and kitty throw pillows and iPod ear buds shaped in colorful character faces.

Victor's husband, Tobias, the webmaster for the University of Michigan Alumni Association and back-end programmer for Shana Logic, came up with the company name, borrowing from the moniker given to Victor to describe her unique way of conversing.

"A long time ago, because of the way I explained things, people started calling it Shana logic," she explains.

Shana Logic was a one-woman operation for years. Today, Victor employs one full-timer and two part-time employees to run it. Still, she is involved in every aspect of the business. She picks all the products, writes all the online descriptions, and photographs the models, all of them local.

"I used to ship everything myself too," she adds.

With 60-75 orders a day most of the year and up to 150 a day during the holidays, that's too much shipping for two hands. The shop, as she calls it, is an office warehouse on Rosewood Street. It's where the inventory is kept and where the shipping is done - except for items handled by the artists themselves. At least 85 percent of the orders come into and out of the shop each year.

Before May, when the office warehouse opened, headquarters for Shana Logic was just five blocks away in the basement of Victor's Ann Arbor home. She didn't stray far with the new location, keeping it close to the home she shares with her husband, two dogs and a cat.

While the operation itself may look small from the outside, its reach and financials are large. Shana Logic's top three markets are New York, Los Angeles and Europe, and last year she moved $700,000 in products.

Though Victor is coming off a record sales year, her slice of the profit pie is thin. Artists get the majority of the revenue while staffing and marketing expenses take another big chunk.

"It's still totally worth it," Victor says.

The artists also hail from all over the world, including the Detroit-area and across Michigan.

Ads and marketing campaigns in major magazines and Japanese publications have created a buzz around Victor, including stories in Cosmopolitan and the Wall Street Journal.

"The more success for Shana Logic, the more success for the artists," Victor says.

Even as the financial numbers have grown, the personal touch has remained and it will, Victor assures. She sees it as a hallmark of her indie business, setting her apart from behemoth Amazon and big box online stores. Mind you, nothing goes out in plain cardboard boxes pasted with mailing labels.

"It's a portal in the way Amazon is a portal, but we are small enough to have a personal relationship...We like to read every note that comes in and we like to write our own notes," Victor says. "Nothing has a bar code. Basically everything is done by hand."

Doing things by hand includes the pre-ship packaging in which Shana or one of her co-workers applies funky and funny stickers to boxes after having wrapped the goods in lime green bubble wrap and if requested unusual, unforgettable and time consuming gift wrapping.

On the bottom of each package is a handwritten note: "Thank you!" with a heart.

Depending on the gift or the occasion, notes are also inserted inside packages.

And whatever the customer wants the customer gets. Even if it's a five-page letter that Shana herself handwrote from a gift note attached to an online order. True story.