Interview: Havana Street’s Emery Wang

Today are talking with Emery Wang of Havana Street- a retro clip art service located in Austin Texas.

AJ Garces and Emery Wang started Havana Street in 1996. Havana Street markets very clean and unique retro clipart. Today we will be discussing the Havana Street and their unique position in the clip art illustration marketplace. Whether you need a robot, a baby, an airplane or an alarm clock, you’ll probably find it at Havana Street. They have the finest collection of original (they draw ‘em themselves) retro-style clip art on the planet!

Listen to the Interview: Interview with Emery Wang

TDc: Tell us – how and why did you start Havana Street?

Emery Wang: Well, let’s see. We started, like you said, in the mid 90s and both A.J. and I were working as graphic artists for the city of Austin, and we used clip art. At that time, there wasn’t a whole lot of custom stuff out there. We used – about the only custom images we could find are those by a company called Art Parts which continues to do really cool stuff. And they were one of the first original clip art company then so we thought – “Well, we might want to try doing something like that ourselves.” Especially, shortly thereafter, A.J. went on his own as a freelancer, and he was doing a lot of black and white images that look like they would be perfect for clip art. So that’s kind of how we got the idea together and started from there.

TDc:When you started, did you start with the retro theme or were you doing more general –

Emery Wang: Yeah. It was always retro. Havana Street’s driven by A.J.’s illustration style, and he has always been retro, I think, in his almost all of his freelance work. Everything has been in that style. That’s just his thing and it’s something that I enjoyed a lot too. So, that’s pretty much just all we concentrated on.

TDc: Where did you used to look for like reference or – You’ve got a very whimsical style. Were there other things that you – or where did you look to get that kind of style?

Emery Wang: The style is basically his style, his take on the world. So that’s something that comes out of him. The imagery is just from everyday stuff.

In creating our clip art, we use some reference material like – actually we look through different stock photography books just to kind of see what types of imagery, and gives us ideas on the type of imagery that were out there that people evidently were buying. And from there – but the images basically came out of his head. There wasn’t much reliance on –

TDc: Looking at anything or pulling from anything?

Emery Wang: Yeah. It’s just – basically we look at things to see that “Okay, it looks like in transportation, there are cars, boats, planes, and oh here’s a train. Yeah, you can put one of those in there too, and this and that.” And so, those were basically for the ideas.

I imagine if someone could’ve given us a visual or just like a written list of “this is what you would need in a volume for holidays or something.” In fact, we kind of created those ourselves. We kind of wrote down all the things that we thought as designers that we might want to use as clip art, and so from that, probably more so than from pictures. We got our ideas on what to draw, and then it just pretty much flows out of A.J.’s head in some mysterious way. Onto the paper.

TDc: And you’ve been doing this – so, you guys have been doing this since 1996. Do you see – are there trends that retro comes in and out of style or has it been kind of steady the whole time?

Emery Wang: I think visually, it comes and goes in popularity. I remember the whole swing thing that took off in the late 90s right after we got started, which made us want to do a swing volume of swing dancing and some swing music.
So those kinds of things come and go but the retro – one thing nice about retro is this is the kind of the stuff that we do, more of the 40s style. It’s that it pretty much stays the same. So you don’t have to keep reinventing yourself.
It’s primarily a matter of just expanding your library, but the style is pretty much set, and it comes and goes in terms of popularity, I think, but it never goes away. I think it’s always recognizable and I think people always like it. It’s not something like maybe leg warmers from the 80s or something. Sometimes people thought they were cool but then at other times, they think they just look really awful.

Retro stuff from the 40s seems to have a good staying power in that people always think it looks classy or whimsical pretty much.

TDc: Whimsical. Yeah.

Emery Wang: Yeah. Whenever the time. No matter when the time period is.

TDc: How do you stay fresh when you pick the 40s style. How do you stay fresh staying within that style?

Emery Wang: Well like I say, it’s easier perhaps in other styles in that we don’t have to keep reinventing things. And staying fresh – perhaps we do the opposite. We try not to be too fresh. We try to stay classic or stay nostalgic.
As far as coming up with new stuff, it’s mainly expanding the library. The style doesn’t really change. Perhaps finding new applications for the style, the media has obviously changed. You’ve got websites and so the way images are presented is a little different now than they were on paper. You kind of keep up with those types of things. But yeah, perhaps unlike other styles, we don’t have to – we don’t think too much about coming up with new things other than new imagery.

TDc: Right. As far as licensing, how do you guys apply the license? I was looking at your custom work and you have the different usage and things like that. Can you talk about that for a little bit?

Emery Wang: Yeah. That’s always the fun one. Licensing – how does that go?
It’s not a real exact science as you probably know. It’s also a question of – it’s mainly a question of usage. And obviously, you’re going to charge something different from a restaurant using something that’s local compared to a big restaurant chain that’s national. They want something for their menu, you’re going to charge something – a different price than someone who just has 2 or 3 locations in town and that’s it.
It’s basically a usage thing. Once you sort of nail that down, you kind of figure out what kind of a ballpark you’re in, and then you just negotiate what you can do. We have some standard minimums that we use for what we call small companies that give us a base of where to start the pricing at.

TDc: That is why people know that that is the minimum and then you can go from there. And again, it depends on whether you’re being used in a local market or nationwide.

Emery Wang: Yeah. Like I said, it’s not an exact science because you’re never sure about the potential of things. Right? Somebody could be regional and maybe it’ll get national later, or maybe they’re never going to grow.
It’s really an inexact thing and you just kind of have to work with your client. Sometimes you feel like – “Well maybe we should charge more for this guys but this is all they’re willing to pay, so do you want to do the deal or not?”
So, it’s a real subjective-type of a thing and you just do the best you can.

TDc: As far as the stock art and the clip art business, is that something you add new libraries and new things? Obviously because it’s a 40s retro style, the things don’t – we talked about the style. They don’t – they stay fresh and they have that whimsical –

As far as a business, is this something that as you introduce new libraries and as you go forward, you’re always seeing sales. It’s not like you have one hot sale of library maybe other than obviously for a holiday season or something like that, but you can build on it and it’s an investment for down the road.
Is that kind of how you guys go forward with the business aspect of it?

Emery Wang: Yeah. That’s how we do it.

We don’t count on one big sale of something at one time. We add to the library steadily and then it’s – we count on people just needing to come back for it; come back and get another image.

We sell all our items individually. We find that that’s how most people buy them. They’ll buy things for years but they’ll buy a couple of items here, and they’ll come back a few months later and buy a couple of items there, and just as they find a need for them.

For us then, we just would like to have as many types of images as possible so that people can find what they’re looking for when they’re doing a search. Yeah, it’s definitely a long-term, kind of a slower steady type of stream of income rather than a big

TDc: A big hit.

Emery Wang: Yeah. New Year’s Day sale or something and everybody buys at that time.

TDc: You seem quite dizzy when you have your own freelance work or your own design studio. How do you manage between the two?

Emery Wang: Yeah and now I’m in law school too so I’m even busier.

Our – sort of – business model is kind of maybe unconventional. A.J. and I both have a lot of different things going on. Like right now, he’s primarily a freelance illustrator but he has been spending a lot of time recently directing movies and a soap opera actually.

Somehow, I guess, it all gets done. I don’t know why we’re so diversified, you might say, in that we kind of have a lot of different irons in the fire.

But in Havana Street, we spend a lot of time creating the initial volumes, and spent like a lot of our time on that for the first few years. And then once we got it going, the way we add images right now, it doesn’t require us to sit there and draw on it everyday.

A lot of our images actually – things that come in out of stuff that we do, commission work that we do – that after the usage license is over, that we can then take those images and put them into the collection. So that way, we sort of – I don’t know – kill two birds with one stone there; take care of two things at the same time.

TDc: That’s a great model. You mentioned you’re going to law school. What type of law will you practice once you’re finished?

Emery Wang: I guess the most logical kind would be Copyrights and Intellectual Property to mesh that with we’re doing in the design world. Actually, I’m not really sure since this my first year. It’s really hard to say. We’ll have to take the same classes right now and then later on, we’ll see what type of law appeals to us. But definitely, it would be nice if I find that intellectual property type law would be something that I’m good at, and that could work really well in – I could sort of stay within this industry that I’ve been in.

TDc: It’s definitely changing with the – on the music side – and I’m sure that on the imagery side or the image side, it’s going to change somewhat too. But probably with music being the forefront – whether it’s going to push a lot of things to change.

Emery Wang: Yeah. A.J. actually does a lot of music, and he was thinking about somehow integrating selling music clips with Havana Street as an idea we’ve had that I don’t know exactly how we’ll do it yet. So that may come into play too.

TDc: That’ll be interesting. Tell us a little bit about The Little Guys Network.

Emery Wang: The Little Guys Network was put together by Ron over at Art Parts that I had mentioned earlier. They’re a couple of guys similar to us in that they’re 2 guys that do clip art. They have a really neat business there and they’re really prolific guys.

We really look to them as sort of pioneers in this field. They seem to be the first as far as we can tell – really good custom clip art guys out there. They started this Little Guys Network as sort of just – basically a link – kind of a glorified link exchange thing for small custom clip art and image vendors.

You’ve got the big guys out there. You got the Getty’s and the image bank type people out there that have just everything, and then you’ve got little guys basically like us. And so we thought that maybe if kind of bonded together and kind of created a place where you could access all of our site from one spot, that would just be a way to drive some more traffic and awareness to our individual companies.

TDc: Do you see any of the larger clip art services like iStockPhoto, which is generally more of the photography but any of those were they’re such a – with photography, you’re seeing a big change in the way that people are buying stock photography. Has that affected you guys at all?

Emery Wang: You mean stock photography specifically?

TDc: What I’m getting at is – with stock photography, it used to be like with Comstock or some of the other larger – you would be paying $200-$300 a shot. Now with companies like Photela and iStockPhoto, you’re now paying anywhere from $1-$3.

Emery Wang: Oh yeah. The pricing has come down a whole lot.

TDc: And they’re offering illustration as well. Have you seen any impact on that?

Emery Wang: We haven’t noticed any direct impact because our business seems like – it doesn’t really go up and down that much. And, it hasn’t really – there doesn’t seem to have been any real big shifts since we started. So it’s just been pretty steady probably because we –
People that look for our stuff primarily find it just on our site, and our prices have always been pretty low. Our per image download price right now is $7. I guess people are pretty comfortable with that, and I don’t see that they feel like they need to get it a lot cheaper somewhere else or anything like that. But yeah, since we pretty much just sell it on our own sites, it’s just “come here and get it” or you don’t find it.

And since the price isn’t really high, it seems like it works out.

TDc: Okay, great. I guess going to law school and running Havana Street and doing other things, you’re pretty busy. I mean what do you do for fun?

Emery Wang: Laughter.

What do I do for fun? Well for fun, let’s see. That I don’t do law school and I don’t do Havana Street, and then whatever else is left there – sleep, I guess.

Actually, being a guy that is in front of a computer all the time, I suppose I do the normal guy thing. I like to play video games sometimes. You can find me sometimes on Battlefield 2. If anyone out there is playing that, look for a character named “beer runner” and that’ll be me running around blowing things up.

Other than that, it’s just – I like to watch movies – probably a normal thing. In law school, there’s a lot of networking and stuff going on so you actually do drink a lot of beer and meet people and go do things and so, those kinds of things pretty much occupy the spaces in between.

TDc: Well great. I appreciate you talking with us today, and thank you very much, Emery. If anybody wants to take a look – it’s havanastreet.com and they’ve got incredible clip art. Thank you very much.

Emery Wang: Thank you.

TDc: You’re welcome.