LessWork Lifestyles, located on Madison’s near east side, is a lifestyle brand that solely focuses on helping local hip-hop artists succeed by offering solutions in photography, song recording, songwriting, graphic design, custom apparel creations, social media hosting, and event planning.
“LessWork Lifestyles is a group of individuals embracing delegated roles to complete common goals. If I do music as a rapper, I’m going to need a producer to make my beats, I’m going to need a videographer, I’m going to need a blogger, I’m going to need a graphic designer — I’m going to need a lot of things that go around the art that I put in as the artist myself,” Breyon Sommerville, creator of LessWork Lifestyle, tells Madison365. “So at LessWork, we realize that it’s going to make more than talent to make it in music.”
Sommerville’s partner at LessWork Lifestyle is local rapper K.I.L.O aka SkitL’z. Sommerville’s stage name is Oneofmani.
“When you get a group of individuals that delegate themselves to a task and everybody has the same end goal, in turn, you will do less work. So that’s why we ran with that,” Somerville smiles. “Cuz it sounds slick. And you know I have an urban tongue, and we don’t pronounce the ‘t’ …. so we just say ‘lesswork.’
“What we want to do is to create a lifestyle for local artists,” he adds. “Our sole focus is on local recording artists in Madison.”
LessWork does that by specifically specializing in three areas: music, photography and social media. “LessWork Lyrics is the music. LessWork Lens in the photography. LessWork Literature is us blogging, writing, and covering all of our stories,” he says.
The operation runs out of their office space at 1444 E. Washington Ave., in the building formerly known as “the art-in” and that also houses Parched Eagle Brewery. The COVID-19 pandemic has really negatively affected LessWork to the point where they are facing eviction at their East Wash location — mainly because its business model for its commercial office is based on social gatherings like parties, pop-up shops, and event hosting for other businesses. Every Saturday, LessWork hosts a weekly Pop-Up Shop that is usually pretty popular, for example.
“Our whole business model is based upon engagements. Before we started hosting events at our place, we were hosting once-a-month events at restaurants. That would bring us a lot of our income because it was like a party – people paid to get in at the door,” Sommerville says. “They got food and merchandise. It was a way to introduce our brand, our sound, our way to our audience.
“COVID has really affected our crowd at our Pop-Up Shops on Saturday. Most of our revenue would come from contact with individuals and that often came from having real face-to-face conversations with people at our space,” he adds. “COVID has really hurt the Pop-Up Shops attendance. The traffic is not what it was.”
LessWork Lifestyles has been outreaching to the community as it tries to raise $2,000 by Wednesday, Nov. 18, to cover office expenses. Donations can be made here to help them continue to inspire local artists.
“We’ve really been hurt by COVID and we’re hoping to get through this. We really appreciate the community support as we want to keep supporting our local black artists in Madison,” Sommerville says.
