East Hampton Entrepreneur Dresses Up Walls With Decals

Ten years ago, Allison Krongard was a single woman living in a New York City apartment with her toy poodle, Leo. She never imagined that someday she would found a wall decal business on the East End. She also never dreamed that her product would be distributed internationally.

Leo by her side, that’s exactly what happened—and in an industry now dominated by similar designs and fierce competition, the entrepreneur said her company, WallCandy Arts, is standing out from the crowd.

“To take an idea that occurred to me as I was walking to work and turn it into something that has supported me, and then my family, has been incredible,” said Ms. Krongard during a recent interview, noting that she worked at design company Knoll for a decade before venturing out on her own.

The East Hampton resident shook her head with a modest laugh. “It’s unbelievable. I’ve been so lucky and so blessed.”

Before she started WallCandy Arts, and before marrying her husband, Randall, Ms. Krongard said she had all the time in the world—so much time, in fact, that she was the designated baby-sitter in her group of friends, most of whom were married with children. Those same friends constantly turned to Ms. Krongard for design tips, familiar with her work as a saleswoman at Knoll, she said.

“They’d always be asking me, ‘What can I do in my child’s room that’s fun, sort of stylish and easy?’” she recalled. “So I started helping my friends decorate their kids’ rooms. And I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t something around that was a sticker and could come off without ruining the paint, without making a huge mess.”

And with that, Ms. Krongard said she thought, “It’s now or never.”

She sold her apartment, which gave her a chunk of money to kick-start her wall art company. After that, Ms. Krongard dove head-first into researching films and plastics. She even attended an adhesive convention in Ohio.

“I just felt like such a fish out of water at that place,” she said. “I just had to learn how to do this. I walked up and down this convention center and couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a whole world I knew nothing about.”

Her product needed 17 attributes. To name a few, it had to be wipeable, cleanable and cutable, but couldn’t tear easily. It had to be printable and durable, but the adhesive needed to be light enough so that it could be removed without damaging the wall—or the decal. She said she nailed the combination in 2001. Success followed shortly thereafter.

“It just grew from there. I started going to trade shows and then, all of a sudden, I started making money,” she said. “It was thrilling.”

Ms. Krongard’s most recent milestone was in February when she acquired a patent for her chalkboard decals—her company’s best-selling items, which range in price from $18 to $58 per decal. The patent was four years in the making, said Ms. Krongard, who was initially turned on to the idea thanks to her 6-year-old daughter, Lilly, who decided at age 2 that she loved drawing on her walls.

“I thought I’d just paint her room with chalkboard paint so she can write all over the place, and then that would be fine,” Ms. Krongard said. “But then I thought, ‘It’s such a small room, and I’m going to paint the wall black? What if she doesn’t like it, what if it makes it look really, really small? Then I’d need 20 coats of white paint to cover it up.’”

And so the chalkboard wall decals were born. Today, they panel the lower half of one of Lilly’s bedroom walls. The rest of the walls sport many of her mother’s colorful designs. Decal letters on the ceiling read, “I am loved.”

“The rest of her room is like Grand Central Station, but my son’s isn’t that bad,” Ms. Krongard said, referring to 4-year-old Brandon. “Because they’re kids, they won’t let me take anything down. It’s ridiculous. It’s sensory overload.”

Ms. Krongard said she finds herself overwhelmed by the wall art market, which has exploded since she started her business. “Now, there’s a million companies, and because a lot are sold online, it’s really hard to tell the difference between high quality and garbage,” she said.

It’s the original art that separates WallCandy Art from the masses, Ms. Krongard said, along with the fact that each kit is enough to create a whole space, or scene, of that design.

“I’m focusing on quality and value,” she said. “So the dot design, for example, may retail for $54, but it’s 80 dots in a kit. It’s enough to make a whole dot room. It’s cheaper than a can of paint, and you can keep changing it around.

“I could make the cost a third of it if I took most of the kit out, but as a parent and a consumer, I want to have enough to do my decoration,” she continued. “I feel like it’s so annoying to have to keep going back to the store to buy another one.”

It was this school of thought—quality versus quantity—that forced Ms. Krongard to take a different path after partnering with Target in 2009, she said. A representative found Ms. Krongard at a trade show and she was hired for two designs. “It was an amazing, amazing year,” she recalled, “but they’d come back to me and say, ‘Alright, this needs to be $7.’ I got to the point where if I made a chalkboard the way they were telling me, there’d be no writing surface. That’s garbage. If you can’t write a note on it, who needs it?”

Outside of the chalkboards, the company’s biggest sellers are “Happy Flowers,” a kit containing eight bright pink, orange and yellow flowers that can reach 40 inches tall, and “Seasons Tree,” which can build one 65-inch tree or two 45-inch trees, complete with 28 leaves, two birds, two butterflies and four flowers. Each kit costs $54.

Last year, Ms. Krongard’s company shipped out approximately 52,150 kits. WallCandy Arts is distributed in Japan, Europe, Turkey and the Middle East, she said. She sells in 2,000 stores across the country, including Giggle, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, which is launching her collection in its back-to-school line.

Locally, WallCandy Arts can be found at Pink Chicken in Amagansett and Twist in Southampton. Twist store owner Valerie Revere said this is the first time she has carried wall art in more than nine years—and she’s looking forward to seeing her customers’ reactions. Currently, she’s selling three different chalkboard designs: a heart and “Rococo,” each retailing for $38, and a cupcake decal, which sells for $58.

“If the customers love it, I’ll buy every variation [Ms. Krongard] has to offer,” Ms. Revere said. “I’m very choosy about what I decided to put in the store’s new gift department, and I just felt like this was something that’s not out there. It’s unique, and it’s helpful, too.”

In the future, Ms. Krongard said she hopes to stay in business and keep moving forward, perhaps by teaming up with a bedding company to take one of her designs and make it into a sheet line.

“At this point, the company has sort of grown beyond what one mom can do,” she said. “My hope is that I built a reputation and a company and a presence in my industry that one day, I can sell it and spend more time gardening and mothering. I could probably do more good in the world if I now helped other women entrepreneurs who are starting out, more than helping the world by coming up with more decals to compete with every other decal.”