This was our very first handmade ink. We still make a (much-improved) version of this product, a shellac-based ink for calligraphy and illustration.

Today, it's called Optimist Pigment Ink. We use the same kind of shellac flakes to make it, but that's pretty much the only element of the process that hasn't changed since 2016.

In 2018 we moved the shop from Cherokee Street to Olive Street in the Central West End. Since that's not in South City, we changed our name to St. Louis Art Supply.

This iteration of our physical shop (2018-2020) included an in-store cafe, which we're proud to say had excellent espresso and scratch-made pastry.

2018 also marked a change in our product strategy. We dropped some popular brands and replaced them with more interesting, hard-to-find alternatives.

During COVID, we closed our physical shop for two years. Our small team stayed in the building, creating the e-commerce website and warehouse that have powered our growth ever since.

We worked out of the Olive Street storefront for quite some time, gradually stacking stock up to the ceilings and replacing all the cafe equipment with notebook-making equipment.

Thanks to customers' support of our online store, we were able to forge direct relationships with vendors overseas.

Starting in 2021, we have imported many of our products from Europe (especially Germany and Italy) and Japan.

These relationships are a vital part of what makes our shop unique. We're so proud to represent our overseas partners in the United States.

We moved to the Grove in 2022, after our online store had taken over the entire retail space on Olive Street.

Our Papin Street warehouse is twice the size of our previous space on Olive. But for most of 2022, we didn't have any public retail area at all. We needed time to set up a modern e-commerce warehouse.

The hard work of 2022 and 2023 allowed us to decrease our processing times from two business days to one business day. Today, most orders ship even faster — our median processing time is just 14 hours.

We created a pocket-sized retail shop on Papin Street in 2023. That's the version of our in-person shop that exists today — but we're hoping to expand our sales floor in the next couple of years.

Meanwhile, we think you'll like it here: all our best-sellers are out in front, and everything else is a stone's throw away in the warehouse. We're happy to get you any item from the website.

We started production of Optimist Pigment Ink in 2023 and officially launched Federal Color, our manufacturing and wholesale brand.

Today, our products are in dozens of amazing indie shops across the country.

We achieved a longstanding goal in 2024, when we launched our very own line of watercolor — made in St. Louis and designed to compete with the very best brands.

It's called Tonic Watercolor, and today it's our best-selling color line. We're rolling out new colors as quickly as we can.

We're not planning to become a chain store. We hope to grow our local presence in St. Louis and reach more artists across the country through our online store.

We hope that this will be a chapter of collaboration with other small businesses — both our Federal Color retail partners and the family-owned manufacturers we buy from.

And we hope that we'll become even more useful to artists over the next decade. We're expanding our selection. We're cultivating new relationships. And we're always listening to you as we plan our next move.