When Life Gives You Project Lemons

What began as a simple means to augment the financial difficulties of the mounting hospital bills of her Dad, Project Lemon’s humble beginnings can be traced back to 2016 with Mycah Santos and Kenji Siao.

“Back then it seemed like life was throwing us a lot of lemons and we thought why not turn it into something and earn from it, hence the name Project Lemons. ”

Founded by two self-proclaimed corporate slaves,  are artist entrepreneurs who needed an outlet to be creative and generate additional income. Hence, the passive-aggressive designs relate to day-to-day work frustrations.

Back then, Mycah used to make custom invitations as a side business but quickly realized how draining custom work was. She halted her commission work and began Project Lemons to sell her own designs with mugs as the primary product.

“There was no Shopee then so we started selling them online and in bazaars and art fairs, we then ventured on making stickers as a freebie for the mugs.”

Then in 2018, Project Lemons took a hiatus. “We stopped selling in 2018 as things eventually got better and we got busy climbing the career ladder, but in 2021 we decided to start creating again, this time for ourselves and to just let things grow as a business.”

When asked about challenges with their business, they share that they have to balance their business with their day jobs, especially working in a corporate setting in which work meetings sometimes extend until late hours at night.

“We currently make everything in-house, from sticker printing to mug production, and it takes a lot of time and effort. It gets tiring, and we don’t get a lot of downtime because most of our free time is only on weekdays but the good thing about Project Lemons is it doesn’t really feel like work because we love what we do and we have fun with it.  The other challenge is that we love our day jobs as well, so we can’t just quit and go full-time (at least not yet).”

The duo was able to apply their business skills with their art and call themselves artist entrepreneurs.

“We’re an artist entrepreneur and as evil, as that may sound we have incorporated techniques from sales, marketing, recruitment, and all the things we learned from corporate into growing our brand, we have applied six sigma into our production, as silly as that sounds, and that’s how we make sure our growth is fast and sustainable (even when we have our day jobs)”

Despite this, the partners love being able to share their art with the world all while receiving love from their art being supported and bought.  “You also get to meet a lot of people along the way and be part of a community of creators.”