Sometimes, a change in surroundings is needed. Over the past year, most of our success and headway was made in Manhattan (particularly in the Union Square Artist’s Market) as well as ongoing interactions and collaborations with artists from Brooklyn despite being temporarily headquartered in Queens. After much thought and planning, Ecopatterns decided that change was a concept we’d dive back into.

This week, we packed our boxes and moved back to our old digs on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (where we originally set up shop for our first year in business). We couldn’t be happier. Not only is this move exciting for us personally, but we feel that it would benefit us professionally as well. See, we see a lot of promise for the Upper West Side artistic community. We know there are a lot of cool, hip folks here that would be open to talk shop and share ideas. Stressing the importance of community is key especially to the development and nurturing of artists and their businesses. While we are doing everything we can in the online circuit (with places like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Etsy, etc.) we can’t forget the local, physical aspect of networking. Hey, we can’t let Brooklyn get all the press.

That said, we’d like to give a shout to all of our artist neighbors. We want to hear from you in hopes of getting a dialogue or movement going. What do you work on? Where do you market your work? What are your artistic goals?

Photo credit: Jamie – “From Me To You” Photo Blog <-- please check out her site. it's awesome. also, check out her stunning Upper West Side FREE iPhone Wallpapers set.

We are wrapping up yet another fierce week for Ecopatterns as we have expanded our lineup of Note Cards as we close out January and look ahead to the rest of the year’s plans.

We have been getting a lot of questions on our plan for 2010 and whether we’ll be setting up in the Union Square Market and we figured we’d address it here. 2009 was a banner year for us in the Artist’s Market in Union Square (NYC) and we achieved our fundamental purpose of establishing brand recognition and raising awareness of our endangered animal concerns. That is not to say that we are done with Union Square but our presence there in 2010 will be less noticeable for the foreseeable future. No way! We love being there. Our plan is to select certain weekends throughout the Spring, Summer and Fall to once again set up our display and meet all our new patrons and friends as well as some of our awesome group of repeat customers. We’ve also pegged the Columbus Avenue Green Flea on the Upper West Side as another venue that we will certainly explore. In all, we look to expand our reach as we cultivate our growth with our business.

For more information and alerts about when and where EcoPatterns will be making appearances in 2010 and beyond, sign up to our Facebook Fan Page or follow @Malathip on Twitter!