It all started with a blank wall and a bucket of paint. For more than 10 years, Beautify Earth has been transforming urban spaces, one mural at a time.
We had a chat with one of our latest Business Members, CEO of Beautify Earth Moral Masuoka, to find out more about this innovative enterprise. Read on to find out more about why they moved their business to Edinburgh from sunny California, and the power of street art in bringing together community.
How did Beautify Earth get started?
The year was 2010 and Beautify Earth founder Evan Meyer was fed up with the abundance of empty walls in and around Santa Monica, CA. As an active community member and leader of his neighborhood association, he took up the charge to connect artists with building owners to create a grassroots street art movement that continues to this day. After a couple of years organizing community-based street art projects in Los Angeles, the greater United States, and around the world; brands began approaching Beautify Earth interested in integrating street art into their marketing campaigns or sponsoring street art initiatives in their communities. These brand partnerships led to the formal establishment of the Beautify Earth’s Street Art Agency that currently focuses on local street artist collaborations for social marketing, packaging art, and cultural placemaking initiatives. In addition to our agency, we’ve taken our knowledge and experience and built an online platform where businesses or individuals can hire street artists and manage their projects from proposals to payments to paint.
What are the challenges you face when managing creative relationships between brands and artists?
The biggest challenge is navigating the collaborative process to develop the artwork. We are proud to work with local artists who are selected based on their artistic style, technical experience, and connection to the project. We do everything we can to give artists creative freedom around a theme or concept but that requires building a lot of trust and quality communication between us, the client, the artist, and the building owner. While we believe in a collaborative approach to guide the artwork towards a specific message, designing by committee can quickly turn art into a sign or advertisement which never achieves the depth or connection of original art. People crave storytelling and creativity from brands but it’s hard for a lot of businesses to let go of their strict brand guidelines and self-promotion tendencies. Visual art is a powerful tool that is able to communicate emotions, experiences, and imagination in a way words cannot fully capture. When brands embrace creativity to focus on telling a bigger story around a cause or experience it cuts through the advertising noise we’re surrounded by and connects with people’s humanity in a memorable way.
