ArtStation Marketplace Success Story: Jonas Ronnegard
Jonas Ronnegard is a 3D artist and resource creator who is passionate about creating tools and resources that can help other artists. His past 8 years of experience as a 3D environment and texturing artist has led him to work with top studios and companies such as Ubisoft, Capcom, Allegorithmic and Nvidia, just to name a few. This past year, he has been focusing on his online store full-time and has quickly become one of the top sellers on the ArtStation Marketplace.
While he started out selling on other platforms before the ArtStation Marketplace was released, he was one of the first to start a shop on ArtStation.
“I like the idea of keeping as much as possible in one place and to grow my following together with my store sounded ideal to me. ArtStation already had the perfect demographic of people for my type of products coming to their site daily, so it was a no brainer for me to join. Rather, it would be a loss for me not to.”
Working Around the World
Ronnegard’s love for movies and games led him to take 3D courses in high school, even though he descibes himself as “not the doodling type” when growing up. He went on to study at PlaygroundSquad in Sweden in order to enter the industry as an environment artist and scored his first games job at Funcom in Norway. He worked at several studios in his career (EA Dice, Capcom Tokyo, etc) before working at his final studio job at Ubisoft Osaka. Although he loved living in Tokyo, he found working in the studio environment there was not for him and started working as a freelancer while working on his store on the side.
Recently in need of a more flexible schedule with his newfound fatherhood, he has started focusing on his online store full-time this past year. While he enjoys the flexibility and says it’s a lot of fun, he admits it also has its challenges when it comes to knowing which products will be well received by his audience. Still, he says “I will probably continue doing this unless there is an offer I can’t refuse or I go down burning.”
Check out his ArtStation Store >
Recipe for Successful Products
Having created several best selling products, he shares that the key is trying to keep content fresh. “I would rank strong content as something that hasn’t been done yet [where] you bring something new to the table that artists didn’t even know they needed until they saw it. Second would be improving on existing ideas, something that is commonly used but you add something or you make it better. I see too many resource creators that are just throwing rocks into the sea, basically just creating bad copies of popular products in the hope of taking a chunk of the market, when they could easily have taken a slightly different angle to their product and attracted a lot more interest and sales.”
Ronnegard attributes his early success to spending a lot of time on visual presentation and making art around his products to actually show his audience how it can be useful. “My main goal has always been to create content that inspire the artist to start new projects where they can use my products rather than just having content that is in the right place at the right time when someone needs it, although that is probably a big bulk of my sales.”
Japanese Ornament Alphas on the ArtStation Marketplace
A final piece of advice he shares is to be mindful of the timing of the release. “Timing can be very important not just in being the first one to make something but releasing content that fits the time. Artists get inspired by newly released games/movies, popular characters and awesome art created by popular artists and because of that, they start projects with similar themes or make fanart based on that.” Being mindful of the timing of these events can lead to a boost in sales.
On promoting his products , Ronnegard says he posts on all his social platforms quite evenly though tries to keep the posts high quality. “In the end it’s all about getting seen, no matter how good your products are, if the views are down your sales will be few.”
Since the ArtStation Marketplace was developed specifically for artists, relying on artists’ feedback was important ensure the team was on the right path. As one of the first sellers when the Marketplace was first released, Ronnegard was able to contribute ideas for improvement in the early stages. “It’s always nice to feel you have a voice and a way to help the platform be what you want it to be and I feel like it’s really getting there.”
Follow Jonas Ronnegard on ArtStation >
SPTool – Masked Alphas on the ArtStation Marketplace
Sell on the ArtStation Marketplace
Upload your products onto the ArtStation Marketplace and start selling today! In just a couple clicks, you’re set to sell to the largest community of artists in the industry.
For more information on the ArtStation Marketplace, check out the FAQ here.
