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Rob: Thanks for joining us today. I’m Robin Cowie. Art is a big market, big online. In fact, it’s one of the most popular categories on eBay, but you’re not going to find any wholesaler or manufacturer who can supply your ebusiness with art to sell. Retailing art successfully requires understanding how to find sources for it and here to shed some light on that topic is art consultant, appraiser, and renounced author, Alan Bamberger.
Rob: Alan, welcome to the show.
Alan: Thank you for having me.
Rob: If an internet retailer is considering selling art online, what do they do, I mean, where do they get started?
Alan: Actually it was interesting in the opening there. There are places that do have large amounts of art, they’re almost like art factories. I can’t give names really, but they’re mostly in Asia, China, Thailand, places like that, and I have been to tradeshows where they do sell. Essentially they can paint the same picture over and over again or they can basically paint any picture that you want, and sculpture for that matter.
Rob: And they will actually wholesale those products?
Alan: They do wholesale those products. In fact, I have a couple here. Some of them were so remarkably good that I had to buy them myself and I don’t normally buy those types of art, but just as examples of what’s currently being produced overseas. They were two still life paintings of grapes hanging on a wall done in 19th century style. A bunch of grapes nailed to a wooden wall in the background, it was very, very well done.
Rob: Wow. Are there quite a few of those types of places?
Alan: I don’t know about quite a few, I get emails from them from time to time. There is a large tradeshow which is held at the Javitz Center in New York City once a year called Art Expo, I believe their website is artexpos.com, where commercial art aspirants as well as individuals, companies, printing companies come there every year to show their stuff and hopefully get some sort of representation.
Rob: Well, that’s a very valuable piece of information there. Can you sell art if you are not an expert in art?
Alan: You don’t have to be an expert in art in general, but you do have to know what it is that you’re selling. Art is a very large area, there’s all kinds, so you really have to zero in on what it is you like the most and then start acquiring a knowledge base from there.
Rob: So really kind of figure out what kind of niche in art that you want to sell.
Alan: Yeah, because art has no tangible value really, so you’re going to have to get behind it in some way. You’re going to have to feel that this is a good thing for people to own so you’re going to have to feel that it’s a good thing for you to own. You can’t just randomly pick stuff, I mean, you can, but it’s going to be more difficult.
Rob: Right, sure. Are there any art categories that are easiest for a beginner to break into or are there things where there’s a sweet spot underneath that art category that’s more popular?
Alan: Well, you could look to general types of imagery that wide ranges of people find appealing. You can think about some of the great commercial artists of our time like Thomas Kinkade or with the kind of soft country path and soft city scenes and those kinds of things. But then again there’s a fellow who paints blue dogs, blue dog imagery.
Rob: Oh sure, yeah.
Alan: These sort of trademark imageries are what it is that really catapults an artist to mass commercial appeal.
Rob: And when we’re talking about these types of elements here I presume, and maybe incorrectly, that the majority of elements you’re talking about are original art pieces. I mean, we talked about some that are being duplicated, but I guess the question is is there more margin in selling original pieces than there is replicas?
Alan: It depends. There are different margins in different areas of the business and you really can’t segment it out too generally. It’s almost like artist by artist. But regarding originals versus reproductions, as an artist gets more and more well known or their prices go up and become less and less affordable to more and more people, those are situations where you will find that the artist will successfully be able to make limited editions reproductions of their work and sell well. Artists who don’t have a track record, who don’t have a great deal of name recognition, to start producing limited edition prints or to try and sell limited edition prints by such artists if you are a seller, that’s not generally a good idea.
Rob: Hmm, really interesting. So give us a little bit of an idea of how to focus in on a niche. We’ve definitely established it’s not a good idea to sell broad.
Alan: No, you can’t try to have one of everything, that’s a surefire recipe for unsuccess.
Rob: Right.
Alan: But let’s say you like beach paintings, seascape paintings with a beach and some land in it. Next you would narrow it down to like where do you want it to be? Would you like it to be Hawaii? Would you like it to be Connecticut? And then what would you like to have in it? Those sorts of things. Once you figure out exactly what it is that you want you’ll be able to find a handful of artists or maybe more than a handful in some cases. And then your next step from there would be to learn about those artists and learn about their histories and learn about their selling records. You can get all this from the artists themselves or from people who represent them, it’s not a big deal.
Rob: So that’s interesting, you’re identifying a category by kind of subject matter. I presume you could also go the other way and build it by artist reputation perhaps?
Alan: Yes, you could also do it that way. You could decide to carry artists of this caliber and they would all by within a certain caliber within a certain price range. That’s basically how an art gallery operates, they sell a certain type of art in a certain price range by a certain type of artist who is advanced to a certain level within his or her career.
Rob: Okay, so I’ve decided I’m going to go for this kind of niche, I like your beach landscapes, and then I want to become an expert in beach landscapes.
Alan: Right.
Rob: What kind of questions should I be asking both myself and artists that I want to approach?
Alan: When you approach an artist or an artist’s representative you have to look at it almost like you’re looking at any other product, like a washing machine, like a car. You want to see the artist’s resume, where they’ve exhibited, how many shows they’ve had, how consistently they have shows. This is all available in two or three sheets of paper usually from a dealer at a gallery or online on a website. And no nebulous statements like, “this artist is world famous.” If anybody makes a statement like that you say, okay, please let me see the list of international shows that this artists has participated in and competitions that they’ve won and that sort of thing. It’s almost like doing a market analysis on a company before you buy their stock, you want to make sure they’re a going concern, you want to make sure they sell consistently, and you want to make sure that they’re prices are fair, etc., that you have room to mark up.
Rob: So where specifically can we find that information. You mentioned sometimes there are dealers, I mean, how do you actually access those dealers or how do you find websites that might have that kind of information available?
Alan: You can almost Google in the type of painting that you like like “coastal scene paintings” or something like that or you could go take a look on eBay. EBay has a category called self-representing artists, there are thousands of artists who represent themselves on eBay.
Rob: eBay to the rescue yet again.
Alan: eBay to the rescue yet again. And you can go to places like theguild.com or I believe it’s called guild.com. They angle more towards arts/crafts. There are some very large sites, absolutearts is a very large site that has hundreds, maybe thousands of artists on it. There are some very large artist sites where each artist essentially has their own gallery. If you want to go high end there’s artnet. The last time I talked to them they told me that 60% of the world’s best galleries have staked out territory on artnet and it’s probably higher than that now.
Rob: Wow. And these people are approachable?
Alan: Well, yeah, but they want to make sure you’re serious. They’re approachable, but as it gets to very high levels of art, very expensive, then you’re going to get qualified before they talk to you.
Rob: Sure.
Alan: But generally, the overwhelming majority of artists and galleries are more than delighted to talk to you and sell you some art.
Rob: Time for a break. Subscribe to our free product sourcing newsletter at ProductSourcingNews.com. Stay up to date with the latest product sourcing news and find spotlighted suppliers you can use in your ebiz. We’ll continue learning more with Alan Bamberger when we return. Thank you for listening. I’m Robin Cowie.
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