A negative experience with the cinema studies equipment room sparked a new business idea for current sophomore Craig Chisholm, who now is the founder and chief executive officer of Common Studios.
Common Studios is a workspace that aims to connect independent creative student artists with clients who are searching for services in media, content, marketing, design and other business ventures.
“There was inaccessibility to resources and there was lack of support from the university, both of which hindered creativity,” Chisholm said. “And so that was kind of the breakthrough, where I was like, ‘Here’s a problem, and I would really love a solution for it,’ because I’m a creative person.”
The remainder of the executive team of Common Studios includes Chief Project Officer and sophomore Isaac Dubey and Chief Marketing Officer and junior Mel Ritter.
According to Ritter, the official formation of Common Studios was through the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship’s Oregon Innovation Challenge, where a pitch deck was submitted and approved for financial support of $7,500.
“Everything I was learning, I was finally able to implement into something,” Ritter said. “And with OIC specifically, if I was just feeling demotivated with anything, I would go to, like, ‘Startup&Slices’ on Tuesday, and I would hear from a real entrepreneur.”
Chisholm and Ritter were the members involved in the OIC and said that they had used the experience they learned from it in various different ways with Common Studios.
“I’d never pitched before. I’d never even spoken to an investor like that. And they’re not really like investors. They’re not taking equity or anything. They’re just mentors, giving their time,” Chisholm said. “They’re seasoned entrepreneurs. They’ve been places. They have things to say and things to teach. So it was just such an uplifting experience, really.”
According to Dubey, the company currently has eight creatives on its staff, some of whom are junior Connor McWard, sophomore Max Unkrich, sophomore Clay Baime and junior Elizabeth Lucas-Lucas.
“It’s such a great opportunity because you’re in a creative environment at a university where there’s so many people looking to do work, and you just need a person or an agency to just get you that work,” Dubey said. “There’s so many people willing to do it. It’s just finding the right opportunities and finding the right people who are willing to pay for it.”
According to Dubey, he credits the tight-knit community of Allen Hall for the various opportunities with Common Studios and the people who have formed the company and its creatives.
“Allen Hall deserves a lot of credit. Working in creative central upstairs and in the ‘J cage’ downstairs, and having classes here like Gateway and just being in this kind of very small area where, Allen Hall is not very big,” Dubey said. “Honestly, if you go up the stairs, you’re probably going to see somebody you know, I feel like it’s like that for me.”
Common Studios also has a founding advisor who was recruited through her clientship, Debbie Aharoni.
According to Aharoni, she moved to Eugene to start a senior legacy video series and was searching for videographers and creatives to help her with that.
Throughout her search in and out of Lane and Linn counties, she had trouble finding creatives to match her needs, so she decided to go through the SOJC, she said.
“I put an ad in and within hours, I got a contact, which blew my mind just for the fact that somebody got back to me in a more than reasonable amount of time and answered all my questions at a very reasonable cost, of course, because college,” Aharoni said. “It wasn’t so much the money for me, although who doesn’t want to save money, it was the idea that I want somebody locally that I can depend on and I’m trying to be very flexible.”
According to Aharoni, through this established relationship, she was appointed as the company’s founding advisor to serve as a role model and volunteer for the students.
Aharoni described her relationship with Common Studios as an experience “where you feel like the stars are aligned.”
“I was looking for some way to have a passion project, regardless of my legacy videos, just something where I could give back to the community as I’ve done in other communities where I’ve lived,” Aharoni said. “The timing of meeting this group and having available time to help be of support, in exactly the kinds of things that I’ve done in my life as a working person, totally aligned with this. And I thought, ‘This is this is where I was meant to be.’”
According to Ritter and Dubey, the creatives of Common Studios are paid per project and a slight percentage of the transaction is allocated as an “agency fee” to maintain the upkeep of the company and the pay of the executives.
“A lot of our projects, like our videography ones and our websites, are for projects, so a base fee forms on a whole project,” Ritter said.
The executive team takes a small percentage of the funds from projects as their “agency fee,” and the creatives take the remainder, according to Ritter.
According to Lucas-Lucas, when getting hired as a creative, the executive team clarified all of this information beforehand.
“As a creative, when I got hired, they did clarify all of this and were very communicative about how it won’t be consistent,” Lucas-Lucas said. “And like Debbie said, it is an agency, so it makes my life easier because I’m not really the one having to keep track of it.”
According to Chisholm, he does envision the future of Common Studios to be spread nationally and wants every college town in America to have its own Common Studios.
“I want to go to OSU and then Washington State and go to the local Pacific Northwest and use that Pacific Northwest connection,” Chisholm said. “And then kind of gradually expand from there, and, it’s all about networking and just reaching out.”
