The story behind KNC: How I began building websites for opera singers.

It started with a research rabbit hole in 2013.

As an undergrad, my professor recommended I look up young artist programs to see where singers worked before entering the YAP system. So I did what any determined music student would do...I looked up every single artist in every program I could find.

And I kept running into the same problem.

Only about half of them had a website.

Here were the artists I was looking up to, the people whose careers I wanted to model my own after, and I couldn't find basic information about them. What did they sound like? Where had they performed? Where did they study? The artists who did have a website often hadn't touched it in years.

It frustrated me.

I built my first website as a junior in college. A little early but hey, I genuinely thought employers could be looking for me! Even though that first site didn't truly serve me until graduate school, I was building something more valuable than a webpage — I was building the habit of showing up online with intention.

By graduate school, I was redesigning my website every few weeks. I loved it. Out of curiosity, I started looking up what my colleagues' sites looked like.

There was the problem again.

So many incredible artists and they were nowhere to be found online. That's when Kaylee Nichols Creative was born. (Elephont Web Design, at the time) My mission was simple: give these artists a website so the world could find them.

For years, KNC was a side hustle alongside my performance career. It got me through grad school, through the season of somehow holding down four jobs at once, through all of it. Clients came in almost entirely by word of mouth, which I'll always be proud of.

In 2023, I joined the EMITHA team as a Web Designer, working alongside Gillian and learning what it means to do this work at a higher level and in a team environment. It sharpened me in ways I didn't expect. (EMITHA has since shifted its focus to artist marketing through YouTube and Spotify, go check them out!)

I took everything I learned and brought it back to KNC.

This year marks almost ten years in business and I'm finally making it my full-time job. I'm deeper into my education than ever, completing digital marketing courses and expanding into new platforms. I'm not the same designer I was in 2013, or 2017, or even last year.

Instead of a side hustle, I'm showing my whole heart for this business.

Singers deserve to be heard. They deserve to be found. That's still the whole point.

Work with Kaylee