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If you are looking to either attend or exhibit at an art tradeshow in the Western U.S., the West Coast Art & Frame Show is your ticket. Sponsored by Picture Framing Magazine, the show and conference will once again be held on January 26-28 in Las Vegas where it has reigned for more than a decade. It is interesting to observe The WCAF Show has continued to prosper in direct contrast to competitive shows such as Decor Expo.
Decor Expo Shows in Decline
The past few years have not been kind to the Decor Expo shows. They have either seen a steady decline in attendance and exhibitors, or just ceased to exist. Certainly, investment company ownership more focused on a bottom line driven management-by-spreadsheet mentality with a buy and flip strategy has proved to not be beneficial for those shows. You can draw a direct correlation to story to the larger economic one playing out now.
There Is a Moral to the Story
There is a moral in viewing how two competitive operations charged with the same tasks of putting on an industry tradeshow and serving the exact same art and framing exhibitors and attendees could have such different outcomes. What it amounts to is how you treat your customers. If you put profit at any cost before doing the right thing by them, you are likely to have some short term success followed by a loss of prestige and market share in the longer term. The nearly laughable desperate deals that were proffered to try and bribe exhibitors to show at the now failed Decor Expo Baltimore show are an example of how earlier decisions can turn into a nightmare.
There Is No Shame in Making a Profit, But at What Cost?
I'm not saying you shouldn't strive to make your products as profitable as possible. I'm all for that; it's why you are in business and not philantrophy. But, if you are in your market for the long haul, you have to be sensitive to your customers' needs. If the only master you serve is your investors, you will end up losing. The incredible financial meltdown that has affected every American is due in part to those making short term decisions that were not in the long term good for the customer.
Had such a quaint, but powerful notion of doing what is right by the customer been applied to decisions to grossly overpay executives, to create products that were in effect financial neutron time bombs and now in hindsight all the other stupid greedy decisions whose repercussions will wash over generations to come with the dread of unnecessary debt, the world would be a better place.
Can You Believe Some Companies Thrived in 2008?
I work days in marketing at a thriving high tech firm, (I choose not to name it to avoid having to worry about making proper disclaimers with every post.) It grew revenue by 40% in 2008. Not too shabby in this economy. It is on target for greater growth in 2009. It has done this by having great products and exceptional service. For example, our customers can call for free tech help 24/7.
Follow These Simple Rules for Success
My company makes its own products. It doesn't rely on suppliers or worry whether they will deliver or stay in business. Mostly though, I think its success has to do with corporate culture. Day One new hires learn these three things. They are expected to memorize them:
Now, had the brains bozos who peddled derivatives or ran Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and on and on truly followed these three simple precepts, we would not be furiously trying to plug holes in the dike with trillion dollar bailouts.
The WCAF Owners Also Are Its Managers - It Pays Them to Pay Attention to Their Customers
I believe the members of the Gherman family who own and run the West Coast Art and Frame show saw they needed to grow their show at a pace that allowed its exhibitors to get a decent ROI (Return on Investment). They have shown restraint from letting demand for booth space overwhelm the buyer-to-exhibitor ratio that when out of whack will cause a show to decline.
In the tradeshow business, your exhibitors foot the bill for the show, if they are not happy, you eventually will not be happy either. The Ghermans resisted making moves that would have generated greater income in the early going to help the show thrive in the long run. In retrospect, that was enlightened thinking with corresponding actions then that pay dividends to them today.
Tradeshows run on word-of-mouth. If the news and buzz is favorable, the show will shine and grow. If the news and buzz is bad, shows suffer, decline and in some cases cease to exist. So then treating your customers right results in taking actions that cause a company to have less revenue is not purely altruistic. It can be very smart marketing. Whether you are running a large publishing or one-person artist operation, you will serve your business and yourself best by abiding by the three simple rules above.
The WCAF Is a Good Show To Exhibit or To Attend for Art Marketers
The WCAF has always been more of a framing show than art show, but in the void of effective competition it has grown to be much more important as an art show with many more art companies exhibiting in the past few years. So don't discount the show if you are an art company. Besides, it is a good idea to up your framing knowledge. If you work with galleries, most expect work to be framed as part of the deal. If you sell direct, having the right framing can make your work sell faster and for greater dollars.
If you haven't been before and you are considering exhibiting, try walking the show this year with an eye for exhibiting next year. If you are an artist seeking a publishing deal, or just getting started in the business, it's a good place to get a feel for shows and you'll see some really good art and how it is exhibited as well. Let's not forget that in late January, Las Vegas is much warmer than most of the country. So whatever your motivation, get it on your schedule and come to learn and enjoy!
Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and bestselling author of Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America
Phony Prosperity Too Good To Be True
In the phony prosperity propped up in great part due to our partnership with China, where we bought ever cheaper stuff we thought we needed, but really didn't, while they bought our deepening debt, it worked until it didn't. That's where we are today. Now Chinese workers are feeling the same pinch as are those in U.S.
Chinese Oil Painting Suppliers Feeling Economic Pinch
To illustrate his point, Friedman used the example of how the art village of Dafen, the world’s leading center for mass-produced artwork and knockoffs of masterpieces — had been devastated by the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble. Apparently what used to be said about our neighbors to the North and South is now a global phenomenon. That is, when the U.S. sneezes, they would catch a cold.
Art Business Has Sex Appeal
Friedman could have picked from any of thousands of other industries where low cost Chinese manufacturing has knocked the pins from under them. It proves that although relatively small by comparison to giant businesses making furniture, machinery, etc., the art market is intriguing. It will good to remember on the days when you have second thought about painting for a living you are in a sexy intriguing business. The kind a well known columnist will showcase in an Op-Ed piece.
Sex appeal aside, you have to instinctively realize that this news from China is as much a cause for concern as it is an opportunity to look up the meaning of schadenfreude. So, take a moment to feel some glee for knowing your knockoff nemesis has hit a very rough patch. Then take a breath and realize there is little upside for you in their downfall.
Holiday Sales Hit Retail Businesses Hard
The news today on retail sales is it is alarmingly abominable. The deepest discounts and desperate bundling techniques failed to shake dollars from consumers wallets. Considering that we are in a business providing a product that is to most a completely dispensable luxury, none of this is good news.
There has been a slew of articles from business pundits, art and otherwise, offering untold guidance on how to survive the current downturn. It ranges from the practical to plain pollyanish. There seems to be so much that if one were to digest and act upon all of it they would soon find themselves enveloped in a paroxysm of paralysis induced by a potent combination of overexposure to bad news and bland advice. Undaunted, yours truly weighs in with observation and opinion.
Consumers Have Spoken - Make Sure You Are Listening
The consumers have spoken; they get it. They are scared and not buying things they don't need any longer. Keeping up with Joneses has given way to keeping up with the mortgage. This puts artists in a bad position, especially those who have not yet developed both a strong dealer and collector base.
Anyone who would seek to soothe you now offering advice laced with few bars of "Everything's gonna be alright," or "Don't worry, be happy" is be taken skeptically. While it's not time to get a gun and head to the hills, it's surely not time to be laying out grand plans for major expenditures either. Certainly, it's not a time to take lightly that economic conditions are eroded nearly beyond comprehension or to be persuaded a turnaround will be measured in months. Here is the unvarnished truth. It's going to take years to fix the problems we are dealing with now. And, that is if we don't take more unexpected shocks on the economic, war or terrorism fronts.
What Can You Do?
Watts Wacker, the brilliant futurist, a subject of a previous post here, who along with co-author Jim Taylor wrote the 1997 international bestseller, The 500 Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next
The 500-Year Delta ultimately is about the shifts of perception needed to prosper in a future that is fundamentally, unrecognizably different. It is about surviving and thriving in an economy inhabited by two kinds of workers: owners and temps -- in a marketplace where customers must literally be bought, one at a time, and where mass merchandising utterly ceases to exist. It is a world, in short, where borders -- political, economic, and technological -- simply disappear.
Desire for Authentic Unique Goods On the Rise
Considering the book and review are a decade old, it is interesting how both now seem quite prescient in describing our current condition. A point made in the book that to me is yet more poignant today, one that carries a lesson and offers a path for visual artists in this most difficult time is this: In an age where nearly everything is mass produced there will be a very strong yearning for products that are authentic. You may feel it yourself. Sites like Etsy, EBSQArt and The Artful Home and publications such as NEET Magazine all respond to this yearning. These are just a few of many serving the market as conduits between independent artists and consumers.
As a visual artist, you are in luck.
You have more control over what you produce and how. You have ways to easily stretch what you do and how you offer it. A recent segment on the Oprah program was titled Wallpaper Makes a Comeback. Hand-painted wallpaper is an example and inspiration of how you might stretch yourself and fill that need for an authentic one-of-a-kind product. Can you make wallpaper? Are their other ways to utilize your talent and training? I'm betting there are once you put your mind to what is possible.
You don't have to paint wallpaper to make authentic products. You don't have offer originals only either, although there is a movement for that notion with the painting-a-day phenomenon as one example. There are plenty of other ways to stretch yourself and find niches for your creativity.
Tap the Knowledge of Your Giclee Printer and Other Suppliers
Talk with your giclee printer, they see way more than you do. Ask what you can do to collaborate to use the technology to create reproductions of your original that are each unique in some demonstrable way. Consider everything including substrates, sizes, colors and graphic wraps, etc. Challenge yourself to think of what you can do. Test your theories about what you would never do. There are certain to be things among them that upon second review might just offer a new opportunity.
You Don't Have Make Your Own Canvas To Be Authentic
Authentic doesn't mean it has to be made from scratch. If you bake a pie with pumpkin filling you scrape from the pumpkin and use a store bought crust, is it enough to say made from scratch? Or would a purist say you had to grow the pumpkin, wheat and sugar cane to make it authentic? You already know the answer.
The point is consumers have become fickle and not inclined to buy stuff right now as the dismal Christmas retail season bears witness. What they are inclined to buy are things that offer meaning to them in their lives and that bear the mark of authenticity. Your challenge is to find ways to connect your images to your audience, to provide them with work that goes beyond decor. Work that resonates with them so they want to live with it in their home. That mission is really the same as it always has been. It's just today your focus needs to be more intense and in tune with your art buying public.
Slow Down, Produce Less, Make It Authentically Right, Charge More?
If might just be the time to make less, make what you make more pricey and more unique. Doing so could be an antidote to trying to mount a marketing scheme aimed at production run sales. In other words, just because the Chinese artists in Dafen are getting clobbered, it is still not a good time to attempt to go after their market share.
2008 turned out to be one heck of a tumultous year. It undoubtedly will be looked back upon as a watershed year for reasons known all too well and too well covered to bother with a rehash here.
Instead, I'll use this post to thank all who take their time to read this blog and to wish each and every one a holiday season filled with fun and joy.
May 2009 bring prosperity to you in whatever manner you may need it. No one I know expects the near future to be anything but challenging, including me. What I seek to do is to take on the challenges and look for opportunity where others might only see problems. As from the still eye of a hurricane, I'll do my best to pass along ideas, information and inspiration to help you improve your business in 2009.
With great gratitude for your support and participation, I extend warm wishes for many blessings in this holiday season and the coming year.
P.S. Apologies if you saw a post come out titled, News, Views and Reviews, it was not intended as a post, but rather a new experimental page on the blog.
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If you have thought about giving my book, How to Profit from the Art Print Market, as a gift this year, you are in luck. Normally, I do not fulfill orders. Initially, I competed with Amazon on selling my book, but quickly realized there was no financial advantage. And, that was before shipping, taxes and trips to the post office were included.
I have a small amount of books on hand. If you would like one of them, they are available for $30, including domestic USPS Priority Mail shipping. If you order before December 20, you should get your book in time before Christmas. The book normally sells on Amazon for $31.02, so you save a little and you get it personally signed to you or someone you designate.
You can pay with PayPal. You don't need a PayPal account, any credit card will work. Here is a payment button to make it easy to order.
Thank you in advance for any order you place. Provide your email and I will contact you with shipping details. Payments are made to Bold Star Communications.
Do you blog? Do you post frequently? If so, where do you get your ideas for topics? I don't have a method for finding topics,most of them find me.
I always try to stay open to opportunity. To do that, I read lots of things completely unrelated to the art business. My previous post about using the Ferrari model of selling limited editions of its $600,000 Enzo model is an example. It provided a spark of an idea that could just as easily be applied to the art print market despite the obvious price differences.
Besides finding inspiration in odd places, I usually have a few ideas for posts cogitating and rumbling around my brain and my other brain all of the time. Sometimes they are just waiting for the right stimulus to provoke the post. Such is the case today. My friend Mike Geraghty was one of the first to purchase my book. It was through the book and my newsletter that our friendship evolved into mutual admiration. Enough to survive agreeing to disagree about politics.
I have had the idea to write about Mike's intrepid adventure into another facet of the print market for some time. Alyson Stanfield's recent post, which mentioned a NYTimes.com story, Lucrative Art Careers, on her Art Biz Blog lit the fire for today's post. Alyson is having a BIG SALE on her I'd Rather Be In the Studio book with a whole bunch of freebies good only until December 21. Check out the image on the right sidebar for more details.
Mike is an extraordinarily gifted painter. He is an avid sportsman as well. Hailing from the Baltimore area, site of the Triple Crown's famous Preakness, he gravitated to painting thoroughbreds. You can see his work at his www.ipaintchampions.com Web site. Some say faces or hands are the hardest to draw and paint. But, there is plenty of argument for the degree of difficulty in painting horses as being the hardest. Put them in motion if you want to up the ante. However you come down on that debate, there is no denying Mike's obvious talent.
To say Mike is a smart guy is a given. He did after all jump on my book early on. In the book, I talk about unsung artists who have managed to carve out a successful career selling a steady stream of art prints, but outside of the spotlight that shines on such artists as Thomas Kinkade, Wyland, Robert Bateman, et cetera. Mike is that quintessential artist. Turning out the work, finding his own markets and managing nearly every aspect of his business singlehandedly. My hat is off to him for his success and perseverance.
Mike is an artist entrepreneur who keeps an open mind and looks to seize opportunity when he sees it. A few years ago, he encountered Andy Moursund, who owned a bookstore in a nearby Washington DC suburb. As a hobby, Andy had built up a collection of vintage college football posters. He had a developed a sideline business of inexpensively reproducing them for his customers. When the two met, Mike knew what he was looking at...OPPORTUNITY.
These posters are works of art just as vintage posters are. They may not be of the same quality as a Norman Rockwell Satruday Evening Post cover, but they nevertheless carry great nostalgia and significance, which makes them ripe for the collectible market.
These posters came from a day when illustrators were abundant and worked cheap. It was not huge cost to have original art created for each game poster. Mike and Andy have worked diligently to turn this sideline into a thriving print business. They have secured a professional distribution company and gone about getting proper licensing for each image. This in itself was a huge undertaking. You can see the result of their efforts on their site: www.historicfootballposters.com.
The business continues to grow and I predict it will be a cash cow for them for years to come. When you think about it, it is a near mortal lock type of business. There is a constantly replenished built-in audience of sports fans who love their college football teams -- show this work to some of them and they are going to have to own it. What is great is there is no competition. The images are vintage, the licenses from the universities involved is very hard to achieve, so there will be no knockoffs of this art. I wish them good luck, but am convinced they have already earned it.
As another example of seizing this type of opportunity, I have another friend who has secured the artwork for hundreds of garden and flower seed packets, all vintage. I predict he won't do as well as Mike and Andy, but he's got a potential for doing his own licensing and creating a print catalog that still will be timeless.
Keep your own mind open to opportunity. You might just find a great blog topic. Or if you are really lucky and truly paying attention, you might just find a fun lucrative side business of your own that will help take the pressure off having your art sales carrying your entire overhead.
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