How To Earn Up To $500,000 Per HOUR As A Designer | With Cat Coquillette

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 215

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. And if this is your first time joining us, this is a show all about how we can monetize our passions as creatives without selling our souls, giving up and going back to corporate life or working a day job somewhere. I just celebrated my 5,000th day of unemployment recently, this month, and I'm hoping to help any of our listeners get to their 5,000 plus days of unemployment. That's my goal for you, where you're self-employed, working for yourself. And our guest today is no different. She took a different path than most people we talked on the podcast, because most people we talk to are freelancers.

Usually that's because the easiest way to monetize your skills as a creative is through working for clients, creating art for clients, whether you're a music producer, helping bands produce music, whether you're a photographer, taking photos of your clients, whether you're a videographer, taking videos for corporate clients or whatever you do. Usually you can monetize your skills the fastest way through just directly offering services. Well, our guest today, Cat Coquillette, has done none of that. She skipped the freelance game altogether, and she went straight to something that I think is the end game for most freelancers, and that is something called Scalable Income, where you're taking your creative skills and passions and using it to create something one time that gets monetized over and over and over and over again, hopefully until you die, and then maybe even far past that. She has mastered that. Just five episodes ago, we had James Victoria on the show, and his art has been displayed, or has currently displayed in the Louvre. Well, our guest today, Cat Coquillette, is much different. She has art that's displayed in places that I think is probably a little more accessible for people, places that most of us have been at least a few times.

Her art is displayed in stores like Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Nordstrom, Home Goods, Barnes & Noble. These are all stores that, at least here in America, this is like household names, and her designs are in all of these stores, which is impressive to me. And she does it through something called a licensing model. So if you're doing any sort of art creation where you're creating assets, this is the episode for you, because she has mastered this, in my opinion. I don't think she even did the math on this, but I did the math live on the show. She has made as much as a half a million dollars per hour with her art. That's all I'm going to say about the show, is we dive into the deep, deep weeds of how do you get started in licensing, specifically as a designer, but this really applies to anyone trying to do any sort of licensing deal as a creative. So this episode, again, we talk through how she has done that, how she has achieved the half a million dollar per hour mark as a creative, which is utterly insane, but is achievable for her. And you might have a fraction of the success as her, but it's still, I'll take $5,000 an hour, maybe not a half a million, but $5,000 an hour is pretty cool to me. But anyways, this episode, we talked through everything from how she got started, how you can get started as a designer, how do you get clients, how do you get placed in these stores, how do you get an agent if you want one, how do you build your personal brand so that all of this can all work together. This episode's all got this chock full of great stuff from Cat Coquillette. So without further delay, here's my interview with Cat.

Cat, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Cat Coquillette (3:16)

Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Brian Hood (3:19)

I want to start at a place that I usually don't start interviews. And this is a place that I feel like is good for your story because there's a really overused quote from Stephen Covey that says, begin with the ending in mind.

And I would love for you to talk about, before we even get into what you're doing and how you're doing it, because I've already gone over a lot of our story in the intro. You're one of the unique people that I found has built your business around your life and not your life around your business, which I think most freelancers are the other way around, where they set up their entire lives from where they live to what they're doing from day to day, all based on what they need to do for their clients. And because of your unique business and what you're doing, you've actually set it up to where you have so much freedom in your life to do all these extraordinary things. And I'd love to talk about what your lifestyle looks like, because you are what some people would call like a digital nomad, and you have some of the cool things you're doing. I'd love for you to just talk a bit about what this business you've created has allowed you to do.