I’m John Friel, cofounder of Art in Res (https://artinres.com). Art in Res is an online marketplace where painters sell their art directly to buyers, instead of needing to work with an art gallery.
I studied art and moved to New York in 2008 dreaming of making it as an artist. It wasn’t easy. I lived in a maybe-legal warehouse space that doubled as a poorly-ventilated art studio. My first day job was stocking shelves at Trader Joe’s, which covered my rent and groceries but, at New York prices, not much else.
My best friend in NYC had a side hustle making artist websites by hacking them out on top of WordPress. He was great at it. Through that side-hustle, he got approached to make an online store for a small business. Shopify wasn’t wasn’t widely known back then and he needed help. So he proposed to me: “Hey John, I know you have a nerdy side. Do you think you could learn to program and we could make the website together?” I told him “No way! That’s crazy! It would take me years to learn to program!” But he said “Look, there’s this new thing called Ruby on Rails. At least just Google that before you say ‘no’”. So I did a Rails tutorial and thought “Hmm, maybe I _could_ do this.” We accepted the gig and I’ve been a happy coder ever since. (We did _not_ ship the site on time.)
I’m all in on coding now, but most of my artist friends are still making art, and still working day jobs. Their studios are full of amazing paintings that barely anyone gets to see. And for every one of my friends there are a thousand other artists out there, cranking out amazing work and not selling it because they don’t have galleries selling it for them.
A couple years ago, my cofounder John (we’re both named John) told me that he had bought a painting from an artist he’d met. He couldn’t believe how great the paintings were, how cool the artist was, how the artists’ studio was this cool warehouse space that was overflowing with unsold paintings. He knew me as a programmer – but wasn’t I a painter before that? He had the idea that we could put our experiences together and make a website where people could buy art from all the amazing but not-famous artists around them.
We started Art in Res as a nights-and-weekends project. We found lots of people who liked the idea of buying art – but we also realized that most people who aren’t hardcore art collectors think that paying over $100 for a painting is hard to swallow. The thing is though, that paintings are made by hand, often painstakingly over long periods of time, and so they don’t benefit from the economics of scale that create the prices that modern consumers expect.
We resolve that by having our buyers purchase art on _installment plans_, where each payment results in a payment to the artist. In normal circumstances, revenue for artists tends to be spiky and unpredictable. Once an artist on Art in Res gets a couple installment plans going, they have a nice, predictable revenue stream. And a buyer who is purchasing this way gets to live with a unique, hand-made painting for ~$30-60 per month. It works really well for both parties.
We’re working on Art in Res full-time now and our team has grown to 5 people (all creatives in some capacity or another.) We’re John, Dan, Noni, Emily and me. We think art should be affordable and artists should get paid. There’s so much amazing art out there, collecting dust in studios. It deserves to find loving homes. <3
Thanks so much, and we can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
–
PS - I’ve been lurking HN for close to a decade and this is thrilling for me!
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I want to love this idea, but I struggle to get past the lack of full price when browsing. It says "$48 • 24 months" and expects me to intuit that the product costs $1152.
Or rather, I worry that it expects me not to intuit that. Breaking the absolute price into a series of less frightening numbers to obscure the magnitude of a purchase feels slimy when cell phone carriers use it to trick people into buying new iPhones for "cheap". This seems like the same tactic. Especially since the payback periods vary between paintings, so you can't even compare apples to apples in terms of monthly dollar cost.
It's okay that paintings are expensive. It's less okay to undermine people's ability to reason about the cost of things.
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This is super helpful, thank you! The last thing we want to do is to deceive people.
There's a lot of information we want to convey in those little artwork thumbnails and we've been struggling with how to cram it all in. We thought that two prices in that small space would be confusing –– but I think you're right that it was a mistake and we need to find a way to work it in.
This seems like kind of a nitpick when lots of expensive things (not just cell phone plans) are priced this way. Apartment leases, car leases, internet/cable service, and insurance all come to mind. Saas subscriptions also commonly frame pricing in per month/per user terms (even for annual plans) and leave it to the buyer to figure out the total cost that entails. As long as it's clear that the price is a monthly installment and not a total, which does seem to be the case for Art in Res, I don't see a problem.
So given this idea does not seem different than the many before (and far from the 10x YC talks about when the needed improvement of a product to win a space), what am I missing?
Is there an underlying technology, unique community angle, or do you believe the timing wasnt before from the time of Artix to 2019 but 2020 is the year.
I love artists and design, and am shocked this has not happened yet, so Im rooting for you.
As someone with particular domain knowledge (I worked in the art world for years and have many professional artist and gallerist friends), I don't I've ever seen an online art sales platform that actually understand the purpose of an art gallery--for both collectors and artists.
Galleries are not simply point of sale vendors for art. They establish a scene, they contextualize the art and the artists, and they make strategic decisions in how to cultivate the careers of their stable of artists via a number of different tactics:
0) By organizing solo shows. It seems silly to say this, but actually putting on shows is a critical element that is missing from these online sales platforms. Shows allow the artist to present a body of work and establish a narrative around it via reviews and and social scenes.
1) Connecting the artist, through sales or even social means, with relevant collectors. Collectors have different status' in the art world, different connections to other art world players, and have particular themes to their collections. By placing art in the right collections, a gallerist can make a significant impact on the career of an artist.
2) By organizing group shows, or using their influence to get their artists into other's group shows, which will then associate their artists with a scene or an institution.
3) Funding! A lot of art is _expensive_ to make. I have friends who have literally calculated how much it costs them per square inch to make a painting and it can be shocking. It is not uncommon for a gallerist to front a large sum of money leading up to a solo show.
Not all galleries will do all--or even any--of these things. However, these are the actions that define a good gallery. A good gallery is invested in an artist, much like a good VC firm is invested in a startup.
If a startup wants to 'disrupt' the art world, I think the first step would be to figure out how you are going to make a business that cultivates an artist's career over the long term and which establishes a real art scene involving both artists and collectors.
As an aside, this view of how to establish a startup and 'disrupt' an industry isn't a very positive one. I hope artinres aren't aiming to take over the existing art market, but instead they want to grow the whole market and bring together new buyers who haven't bought from galleries with artists who want to sell their work.
Whenever a startup's pitch deck includes something like "The global market for this is $X billion, and we want to get 5% of that.", I always wonder why they want to fight the established competition who won't give up their business easily. Competing is hard. If you can find a way to grow the market by 5% instead you'll get the same result for much less effort (still a massive amount of effort though, obviously).
Also nothing here says that I represent a viable customer segment either so there's that.
Perhaps they make large scale installations that are difficult to sell, perhaps they are performance artists, or perhaps they are simply having a down period in the market.
A good gallery will leverage the sales of their more successful artists to support the production of work by their other artists
Any medium/cost data you can share?
I really appreciate it! And I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your questions.
One aspect is that we're not business people looking at this problem in a cold, analytic light: we care about the wellbeing of artists and the joy that people get from having art in their homes. I know from my experience as an artist that most artists are suspicious of new businesses – but we've found a way to work with artists where they really trust us. We do more for our artists than just provide a self-service tool for them to list commodities and get some sales – we coach them on selling; we help them build community with other artists; we're building new features to fit their workflows; and we'll even hop on the phone with them and let them vent to us about life as an artist, haha.
Artsy seems like a great platform, but we're mostly targeting a different type of buyer than they seem to be. We're also working with artists directly, rather than through their galleries. So, despite both being online art marketplaces, I think it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison between us and them.
Regarding the rest of the startup graveyard, when we talk to our users on the buyer side of our marketplace, they haven't heard of things like Saatchi, or even Artsy, in many cases. So I think that, to a significant degree, the mental category of "place to buy art online" is still open, at least for people who aren't already experienced art collectors.
So I think in our case the answer is timing + obsessive attention to our users.
I've personally found the entire industry off putting at how much it's about prestige and how specific collectors see an artist or a piece.
But at the same time, I don't think normal people want to pay high prices for art. It just doesn't serve much value to them. If your users haven't heard of Saatchi or Artsy, what are they doing buying art and why do you think this is going to be a large market?
It seems like you'll end up with low priced artwork and artists who want to graduate to a "real gallery" when they get bigger, and so you really need volume to make to work. Respect the hustle from one YC founder to another but scratching my head on this one.
Im not sure your argument that your buyers have not heard of Saatchi is a good thing (you're right artsy is different market). This means its going to take more education and cost for discovery. They should say I looked online and found these four places but dont like them because of X. Then you address X.
Here's all I'll add; you should really think about what problem you are solving and why. Is it true that artists don't sell art because buyers can't find it? Or is it rather that buyers are very specific about why, and from who, they buy art when they buy it?
One of the most important things successful artists do is market themselves well, even the "best" artist won't sell art without an audience and a brand, period. Perhaps instead of creating a marketplace you can create tools to help artists market themselves and build that audience, GL to you and the team.
I won't comment on the art for sale, because I think it is too much in the eye of the beholder but I will give some feedback on your website and concept.
- Why fixed installments? Why not say "this piece costs 300$ buy now, or pay 10 installments of 35$ or 20x20$" (forget the numbers, just an example).
- why are there so few pictures of the work? If I buy a piece of art I want to look at it from all angles, get up close, see the structure, see it from far, see the frame etc.
- since you got excited from seeing artists' workspace, why not show them to us? Why not show those cool warehouses/storage containers/houses where the art is piled floor to ceiling?
- When I click on an artist's bio, the last thing I want to see is a full-bleed picture of his face. I want to see where he works, how he is inspired or how this piece was formed.
- out of curiosity: how did you come up with the 30/70 split between fees/artist's check? How do the artists respond? Have you had anyone say the fees are too high?
We're considering adding more options like that. The only reason we haven't so far is that we're weighing it against overwhelming people with too many options and also other features we want to implement.
> - why are there so few pictures of the work? If I buy a piece of art I want to look at it from all angles, get up close, see the structure, see it from far, see the frame etc.
I totally agree with you on this. This is actually one of the features we want to add before adding additional installment options.
> - since you got excited from seeing artists' workspace, why not show them to us? Why not show those cool warehouses/storage containers/houses where the art is piled floor to ceiling? > - When I click on an artist's bio, the last thing I want to see is a full-bleed picture of his face. I want to see where he works, how he is inspired or how this piece was formed.
Again, I couldn't agree more. For the time being, we've been getting our photos from the artists themselves and they tend to have better portraits of themselves than shots of them visible in their studios.
- out of curiosity: how did you come up with the 30/70 split between fees/artist's check? How do the artists respond? Have you had anyone say the fees are too high?
Traditional brick-and-mortar galleries take a 50% cut so we're taking significantly less than that. We also 'insure' the art ourselves: if someone stops paying and the artwork can't be reclaimed, we pay the artist their full cut anyway, even if it's a loss to us.
The difference is software on Google's store has infinite leverage and takes almost 0 to scale sales. Every piece of art takes lots of work and cannot scale in the same way. Art works do not scale like software.
With this cut, I feel your platform is taking advantage of artists (they do not know where to sell) rather than helping them.
Even auction commission is only between 12 & 25%.
A good gallery--emphasis on good--does a lot more then simply sell art to the highest bidder. They strategically place artists into 'important' collections, work with museum curators to bring the artists into a more critical narrative, get the artist into group shows and fairs internationally to contextualize the artist in a current scene or trend, collude with art critiques and magazines, and generally help to promote the artist's career over the long term.
All of this sounds somewhat silly outside the art world, but you have to remember that this is a very particular industry based around historicizing high-brow cultural production. When a good collector buys a painting, they are doing more then just buying a physical object they like. They are throwing their own clout behind the artist and saying "I think what this person is doing is important and I stand behind it."
All of this is done with the intention of increasing the profile of the artist which benefits--each in their own way--gallery, the artist, and the collector over the long term.
As far as the sales split between gallery and artist, standard split is roughly 50% with some variance around material expenses and whatnot.
Note, everything I am saying is the sort of ideal story and there are a lot of bad actors in the business. In reality I find the art world rather gross and the premises it is built upon to be deeply flawed.
Auctions take a small cut because they are resellers of art. The artist doesn't get paid when a work sells at auction, the previous owner does.
Art is usually sold by galleries, and the standard cut there is 50%. On top of that, artist and gallery often share discounts, so a work that is sold for a 20% discount means the artist will only see 40% of the total price. For artists, this will be a pleasant surprise rather than a steep expense.
While the customer facing portion of the website appears like a more traditional marketplace, our artist facing website contains tools for artists, and we do more than just list their art, we help them get better at selling, help them promote and market their art, and we provide support wherever needed.
We are artist centric first and foremost, and always heavily consider and consult our artists point of view.
I hear you that, when looked at in a certain light, it might seems high – but we work closely with our artists and they seem to all like that our incentives are aligned. Plus, we do our best to use that 30% in ways that benefit them, e.g. by guaranteeing that they get paid if someone absconds with their work without paying it all the way off.
This feels right. The site name seems to promise something it doesn't deliver: the process of production as education / entertainment. This could be a major differentiator vs bricks and mortar galleries. Lots of streams of the work in development.
We're so used to the paying-in-installments piece that we must have gotten blind to the fact that people seeing it for the first time would think it's the total price.
Same thing with the delta – it's always 1 / 24 of the final price (you pay the artwork off over two years), with a minimum monthly price of $30 (for the artist's sake.) Put differently,
if ( fullPrice / 24 ) > 30
monthlyPrice = fullPrice / 24
else
monthlyPrice = 30
end
I feel like Etsy used to be a place where individual creators created things… and now it's mostly used by industry professionals with a specific vibe or aesthetic feel.
Is the thing that distinguishes Art in Res from something like Artsy that you're buying directly from the artist? How do you all plan to deal with, for example, galleries that might want to use or abuse this platform?
There are outliers, but it's not unusual to see art being churned out by factories, or shops full of stuff from AliExpress.
After looking at several paintings, I found it difficult to get excited about any of them. Not because I didn't like them, but the web site just doesn't give the art presence. I mainly looked at oils and acrylics, and I could not get any idea of the brushwork, the texture. I just could not connect with any of them across the intertubes.
So I love the idea, but to me it seems the challenge you face is how to present the art. Sorry I don't really have any great suggestions -- more views of each piece that allow for examining the technique? More careful lighting of the photos in a way the best complements the art? It is a big challenge and I don't have any great ideas.
But there is something about being there -- we have all seen Munch's "The Scream" or Van Gogh's "Starry Night" a zillion times on the internet, on mouse pads, in cartoon parodies -- but actually standing in front of those paintings is an experience from another world. I want to get as close to that experience as I can when I look at your artist's works.
I think you need to up the curation somehow -- maybe some comments from the artist about the piece, or some very close images of exciting details.
Very sincerely best of luck, I hope you succeed for your artists.
I agree with you on this! We're planning to roll out detail shots and installation shots soon, and I think those will go a long way to helping viewers get a sense for the IRL presence of certain works.
Also, while we don't have a concrete plan for it yet, it's clear that some artists need help photographing their work.
> Very sincerely best of luck, I hope you succeed for your artists.
Thank you!
I think this is a great idea! This is probably not a core competency in your platform, but I can imagine a lot of artists don’t have a resource to get decent photos taken ( not good camera, or understanding of composition, etc). Would there be some way to partner with local photographers to have them come out using your platform to either connect or maybe even pay for it? For example, $50 for the trip out and to set up if within 30 miles, and then $20 per piece to digitize it with multiple angles and staging?
Either way, good luck with the platform and I’ve passed it along to my wife, who is an artist.
Absolutely. Photography is it's own media, with it's own techniques to master. I doubt many painters are going to have the necessary lighting equipment and the know-how to use it. Not that they couldn't -- it's just not their media. Some assistance from a specialist would help a great deal.
I think if I were choosing something I liked, I’d want to just look at the pictures first (a gallery I suppose) without much distraction. On my screen there’s a load of search controls taking up a third of my screen (but maybe other people have a better idea of what they’re looking for).
It’s probably also worthwhile trying to make the images work with the wide gamut displays that are starting to become more common (mainly on various apple products) as they will magically just look a bit better/more colourful.
Vectorizing - I don't see anyway to share these creations with the world. Why not have a Pinterest share button? The looky-loos who will never buy anything can share these creations for you and generate free traffic for you. Put them to work. Also, encourage artists to put their store URL as their Instagram bio link.
Authority - You kind of have a Kickstarter problem. They launched with thoughtful projects to fund so half the two sided marketplace was done. What happens when you get a few customers who then want to become sellers? When Aunt Marie wants to put her crappy poodle paintings on your site? How do you let her down gracefully? If you don't, why would I as a customer stay on site and sift through garbage?
Elitism - You are disrupting the gallery system but you are also accidentally creating a gallery. How do you reconcile that contradiction? Galleries don't make their money on selling out stock from the current show (this sometimes happens), they make money from generating press, becoming authoritative, and the wealthy go to the back room, where the great stuff is. Sometimes the gallerist will say, no, a museum is considering buying this. Are you going to do that? Say no to make more money later?
Lastly, you couldn't have picked a better time to launch. I would have to imagine the gallery system is getting flattened right now.
> I hope you are psyched this post hit the first page
It didn't hit the front page organically; we place Launch HNs for YC startups on HN's front page. This is one of three formal things that HN does to give something back to YC in exchange for funding it. The other two are job ads and displaying YC founder names in orange to other YC founders.
I'm sorry this wasn't clear. More explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I'd like to open this feature to non-YC-startups in some way. It's not clear yet how to do that. Also, it would be hard to scale: we do a lot of editing to help founders write about their startup in a way that we think the community will find interesting. That's time consuming and we don't have a lot of spare resources.
That said, if anyone is planning to make a post like that which you would like some feedback about, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask. Just please understand that we can't reply right away—the inbox is constantly piling up (and a bit higher each time it does).
That a login page is tacked onto this is a new twist though, I'll hand them that.
Were you a guest user or logged in when this happened?
I come from a fine arts background and have always had issues with the contemporary art scene for it's artist to curator/gallery process. In general, social status and popularity seem to be the main currency for getting great art visible to the public.
I would love to see a service like this that enables more "undiscovered" high quality work to be shown, and for more unrecognized artists to get paid for what they love, but at the same time opening it up too all work could lower the overall quality of the available work.
Curation is hard - what system do you have in place for it?
IMO, bad curation is something that is very apparent on sites like Etsy and Redbubble. So I do believe it’s worth it to try to find a good system for it.
A few things I noticed when looking at your site: - I like the detail views you have on your pieces, but a the higher resolution, you may want to consider a watermark—and it's possible it will help with artist trust, as well. - The "Apply as an Artist" link is kind of buried. It took me a while to find it. Might be worth moving that up, if getting more artists on board is a primary goal? - As a buyer, I'm still interested in the total price, and it's a little hard to comparison shop when both the base price and period for works are different - I actually really like the "message artist" functionality. That's a great touch! I'm sure artists appreciate it too
To that end, I'd like a view where the focus is the art itself. Not who made it, not what it costs, not even the name of the piece. Let me discover that as I go, show me full screen pictures I can swipe through on my screen, and tap or click to learn more about the piece. Make the art the focus and put everything else in the background, Not even showing it till I'm interested in learning more. That's what I love about going to galleries – the art takes center stage and if you want to learn more there's a tiny sign next to it, and if you want more still you talk to whoever works there but the art comes first. I feel like your site is trying a bit too hard to make a sale. I absolutely agree that artists should be paid for their art, and I'm happy to pay for art that I care for, but ultimately I just want pretty things. Show me the pretty things first, then let's talk business when I find something I like. I'm sorry if this comes off as too callous!
Also – and this is probably a really difficult problem to solve – I don't really know what I'm looking for in art. I just know some things I like, but probably not all. I love Monet and other impressionist painters, but I also love old Japanese woodblock prints like the great wave. I'm also a huge fan of cubism and I can't get enough of art nouveau. I'm not a huge fan of abstract art, but I like some. I love evocative photography, especially in black and white. I feel like maybe my taste profile fits a multi-spoke radar chart, where each data point is a relative preference rather than a binary I like this or that type tick box filter. I'm not exactly sure what I mean by all this, just that your search does nothing to help me, and I'm probably not gonna spend too much time looking at page after page of stuff that may or may not be interesting to me. I would 100% subscribe to a feed that fits my profile though, and especially so if it's smart enough to also understand other types of art I don't know about, but perhaps might fit my profile anyway. I guess what I'm saying is, if your site could be my personalized art dealer, there's a good chance I'll spend more money then I probably should.
This is something we've been trying to figure out! If you have an account, you can view this: https://artinres.com/recommendations -- you're randomly shown one work at a time and you can like, dislike or skip. We use the data to recommend you additional artworks, and soon we're going to roll out a digest / news feed of new recommendations for users.
> I don't really know what I'm looking for in art. I just know some things I like, but probably not all. I love Monet and other impressionist painters, but I also love old Japanese woodblock prints like the great wave. I'm also a huge fan of cubism and I can't get enough of art nouveau. I'm not a huge fan of abstract art, but I like some. I love evocative photography, especially in black and white. I feel like maybe my taste profile fits a multi-spoke radar chart, where each data point is a relative preference rather than a binary I like this or that type tick box filter.
I'm very much with you on this. In my experience, taste has less to do with discrete, obviously-nameable qualities like a certain color or subject matter, and much more to do with the way the parts fit together to make a cohesive yet surprising whole. That said, we had to start somewhere -- and the filters have been pretty useful to a portion of our users.
Like you mentioned, as more people use the site, we're building up the ability to recommend art to people and we anticipate that being a rewarding way to discover new art.
A few suggestions:
1) Structured artist bios. Right now it's all over the place: some of your artists have a single paragraph, some a wall of text listing everything they ever did and attended.
As a buyer, I'm looking for the usual reassuring signals: this artist went to school X, exhibited at gallery Y that I've heard about, and their work was purchased for collection Z that sounds fancy... Maybe make it easier for artists to highlight those and even search by those criteria?
2) Generated preview images showing size of the work next to a human. I think Sotheby's uses these on their site. It's super helpful to be able to see the work on a simulated gallery wall next to a person.
If you need a beta tester, I'd be happy to help. My email is in the profile.
I've found some amazing things there for ~$50 to $100.
Personally I would find it hard to spend a great deal more than that based on a web view. The difference between 'meh' for me and 'amazing' is very subtle / really shines when you see it in person.
Still a great idea.
It's hard to replace seeing something in-person but we would love to bring some of that experience to our site. We are currently working on ways to display this better and give more context for the art.
Hard to say when we'll be hiring next, but let's talk: jf@artinres.com
If you are interested we have an artist on the site currently that is influenced by video games: https://artinres.com/artists/lee-mora
Personally, I'd prefer to see a "total cost" comparison of the purchase price vs financing rather than calculate it in my head anyways, but I'm not sure if that would discourage sales at all for other people.
Quick semi-thought-out idea: you could have a "buy it now" price that is higher than the financing price, and indicate that customers will save 5% by financing, for example. This would add some more transparency, and maybe even make people feel psychologically more into the idea of the payment plan. You said one of your goals included creating a revenue stream for artists to normalize their income a bit, so I thought this might help incentivize that even more, while still giving the option to purchase outright (some people will never want to finance). Personally, I try to never finance anything. Probably still wouldn't for 10% off. But for 20% off I would be much more tempted to finance rather than buy outright
* https://artinres.com/artworks/rebecca-kaufman-pre-experience
edit: side note/question. Any plans for including sculptures?
We love sculpture and we're really excited to have it on the site. Sculpture is tricky, though, because shipping is usually more expensive and it's trickier to pack sculptures in a way that keeps them safe. That said, we're gradually rolling it out. We have a tiny number of sculptures on the site right now and we're going to add more as we get more confident in shipping them.
Curation is a very important aspect of helping people find things that resonate. We have more things in our roadmap to keep improving this for people, and for artists to provide more details about their work.
1. About art normal people can’t afford
2. A full time speculation job
Unfortunately neither of those worked for me. I don’t know if things have changed in the last years, it seems that there are a couple more platforms around nowadays. I can go into detail about all that stuff but my personal takeaway was to completely ignore investment value in art until the price tags get close to seven figures. And yes, I still am a couple orders of magnitude away from that last price tag. I also don’t care, whatever art I own I am happy with and if I fall out of love with one piece I usually just gift it somewhere. On that last part, there are also usually some good opportunities to give art away for a good cause. Such auctions happen from time to time. I can imagine though that other people have had considerably different experiences with affordable art than mine :-)
Note: art in the above is meant to be paintings and sculptures, never bought anything else.
https://decordova.org/join-give/corporate-membership
They rotate the art through the year. Its DeCordova so the quality is highly variable, but its kind or decent. The artists don't get a lot out of it, membership and publicity...
Is a Gazelle-style site for art a thing, that's not eBay? I don't know that you'd want to get rid of art you bought very often, but if you move and it doesn't fit with the new aesthetic, you might want to swap it for something more on point.
I'm interested to see how your pricing hypothesis plays out. I say this as someone who enjoys art and owns a couple of pieces.
how the artists’ studio was this cool warehouse space that was overflowing with unsold paintings
There’s so much amazing art out there, collecting dust in studios.
It could be that people want payment plans, or that artists need better marketing tools.
My hypothesis is that a lot of art is priced significantly above what the market considers acceptable. The alternative to buying one-off art from an artist is Pier1, Target or posters.com not an art gallery. How does the typical consumer justify a X00% markup?
If artists priced their goods at a price-point that drove sales, would there be an increase in renown that would allow them to sell at higher prices later?
I have a suggestion and a question.
Suggestion: your site does not have an About page of some sort to talk about the story behind the creation of the company and the experience of the co-founders. You have truly remarkable story, as I read in this post. So please include it to your site!
Question: I am curious about how COVID-19 has impacted the art community? My classical musician friends are certainly suffering financially and mentally because all of the concerts are suspended. I wonder how are artists doing in the pandemic.
Thank you and keep up with the great work!! Wishing you all the success.
FYI filters don't seem to to do anything for me (Brave, desktop)
Interestingly, me and my team developed and launched a very similar service early last year - https://goldcanvas.com/artworks
One of our core ideas is that if the artwork gets flipped by collectors and it changes hands multiple times, the artist gets a royalty (which is often not the case in the offline world).
I like your concept of monthly payments.
From the research that we did, it was surprising to us how much the artwork marketplace works offline and how opaque this entire world of Collectors and Curators is. There's definitely space to disrupt here.
We have canceled our open studios event for May. We're always looking for ways to help our Artist's sell (being a non-profit we don't have the resources to broker the transactions.)
If you don't mind I have questions: Do the artists have their own portal? Is the art Currated? Are you handling delivery and payments?
Maybe in the future, you could expand into the EU market..?
If you haven't ever lived with art made by people who care deeply about making it, I suggest you set down $30 and try it! You'll be surprised how much it can enrich your life.
But - let us suppose this does take off and you end up with a large community of artists and buyers. How do you plan on letting artists get seen in what is now a crowded space? Many of your competitors frustrate artists because it becomes about marketing just to get visibility on the sites. Or it turns into a curated site, which puts the artists right back where they are with the galleries.
Any plans for how to scale this while avoiding such problems?
I loved your website, and I would find myself using it or sharing it with friends if I would be in the US. By the way, I will check your job openings from time to time because this is one of the startups that I would be passionate to work on! Kudos and best of luck!
Couple things that I'd like to have:
1. Filter by full pricing
2. Filter by canvas / wood / etc.
3. Filter by oil / acrylic / etc.
May be a long term thing, but I also think you should focus on expanding and growing your market size. Create blog posts, and videos on art, artists, art appreciation and advertize them. Educate audiance and get more people interested in it. That might percolate to making your business bigger.
Pricing art is harder than pricing most other things since artworks are, by definition, non-fungible / unique. This makes it hard for there to be a "correct" price. For the most part, we address this by letting our artists set their own prices (they have more information than we do.) Other factors that play in are the cost of materials and labor (often hundreds of dollars per painting) and the potential for the artwork to go up in price some day, like a stock.
I love all of these suggestions! We're currently working on a content strategy that will cover a lot of the topics you mentioned. I agree there's a piece of education that is needed, especially in understanding the process of artists, why things cost what they do, we plan on doing more in-depth interviews, and hopefully videos that can convey a lot more information.
At first I found it hard to find the "next" arrow at the bottom. After scrolling through the first page, I gave up trying to find the next arrow and moved on to looking at the filters. Because all the text was greyed out, at first I thought they were unavailable, like perhaps you have to first sign up for an account before you can use the filters.
I would have liked the "size" filters to be multiple-selection; I wanted to see all medium and large art, but couldn't select both.
One suggestion: add the ability for some people to create curations. I know I'm not going to like a majority of the art that's listed, so being able to find a couple people with similar taste and browsing their selections would make it more likely I'd stay more engaged with the platform.
But perhaps I'm just not the target audience, too. I'm an art collector with a couple dozen pieces, in the $X00 to $X000 range. I prefer galleries to online marketplaces, because the curation provides real value to me; I consistently patronize the couple of galleries that match my preferences, and the limited selection in each exhibition reduces decision fatigue while providing reasons to come back consistently over time.
Good luck!
Thank you, this is super helpful! We'll find a way to make it more clear that those UI components are there and should be used.
> One suggestion: add the ability for some people to create curations. I know I'm not going to like a majority of the art that's listed, so being able to find a couple people with similar taste and browsing their selections would make it more likely I'd stay more engaged with the platform.
This is in the works!
> But perhaps I'm just not the target audience, too. I'm an art collector with a couple dozen pieces, in the $X00 to $X000 range. I prefer galleries to online marketplaces, because the curation provides real value to me; I consistently patronize the couple of galleries that match my preferences, and the limited selection in each exhibition reduces decision fatigue while providing reasons to come back consistently over time.
You seem like the target audience to me! This is insightful and helpful feedback and I'd love to talk more if you want: jf@artinres.com
I can't thank you enough for this - as an artist it's something I personally want and I know many of my friends need - would love it if you'd put the artist application button somewhere more visible, people are gonna look for it.
This makes me jittery, I hope I fell ready to submit an application soon.
Any chance you expand beyond paintings?
Thank you and keep up the great work!
We're excited to move into more types of art other than paintings. We currently have a small number of sculptures on the site, and have been taking baby steps towards other types such as limited prints.
Whenever you're ready to submit an application we would love to read it!
# The Artix Phase
We should have expected this. It's very common for a group of founders to go through one lame idea before realizing that a startup has to make something people will pay for. In fact, we ourselves did.
Viaweb wasn't the first startup Robert Morris and I started. In January 1995, we and a couple friends started a company called Artix. The plan was to put art galleries on the Web. In retrospect, I wonder how we could have wasted our time on anything so stupid. Galleries are not especially excited about being on the Web even now, ten years later. They don't want to have their stock visible to any random visitor, like an antique store. [2]
Besides which, art dealers are the most technophobic people on earth. They didn't become art dealers after a difficult choice between that and a career in the hard sciences. Most of them had never seen the Web before we came to tell them why they should be on it. Some didn't even have computers. It doesn't do justice to the situation to describe it as a hard sell; we soon sank to building sites for free, and it was hard to convince galleries even to do that.
Gradually it dawned on us that instead of trying to make Web sites for people who didn't want them, we could make sites for people who did. In fact, software that would let people who wanted sites make their own. So we ditched Artix and started a new company, Viaweb, to make software for building online stores. That one succeeded.
We're in good company here. Microsoft was not the first company Paul Allen and Bill Gates started either. The first was called Traf-o-data. It does not seem to have done as well as Micro-soft.
In Robert's defense, he was skeptical about Artix. I dragged him into it. [3] But there were moments when he was optimistic. And if we, who were 29 and 30 at the time, could get excited about such a thoroughly boneheaded idea, we should not be surprised that hackers aged 21 or 22 are pitching us ideas with little hope of making money.
Do you charge a fixed fee or a %?
- Also, do not penalize artists who do not want to donate to Covid-19. That's their business. They might be giving more, through other ways, to the community. They might be tight with money. Whatever. But the way the website is presenting it is that these guys are the generous guys.
- I don't know how New York is but this photo is NSFW and probably not so for families: https://artinres.com/artworks/marika-wagle-day-13-2020 You might want to have a filter for that.
More than anything else, we rolled out the 'COVID-19 support' features because of what our artists were telling us. We got flooded by artists telling us that they wanted to use their art sales to raise money for COVID-19 relief. But we also knew that many artists are tight on cash, so we said "instead of sacrificing your cut, let us give our cut, and you can keep yours during this insane time." The last thing we wanted was to penalize anyone.
> - I don't know how New York is but this photo is NSFW and probably not so for families: https://artinres.com/artworks/marika-wagle-day-13-2020 You might want to have a filter for that.
You're right! It's time for us to implement filtering based on sensitive content.
I'd love to understand the differences between Art in Res and Saatchi Art.
Incredible website that is both feature rich and succinct to the content. As far as marketplaces go, there are some known platforms (e.g. ShareTribe) and payment options (e.g. Stripe Connect) - did you all "build" from the ground up or "buy" in putting this together?
Here's the stack:
- React & redux on the front end
- Rails on the back end
- Postgres & redis for persistence
- Stripe (including Connect) for payments
(edited for line breaks)
If I am paying $XXXX for my apartment each month, $XXXX + $50 to have a beatiful piece of art in it seems like a good idea.
I bought my first piece of real art last year from a gallery and it was a good and bad experience. Good because I was able to see the art in person next to other pieces and actually meet the artist. Bad because the gallery owner was somewhat rushing me and even when I pulled the trigger I didn't get the piece until a few weeks later when the show ended.
Other than that the design is excellent. I like that you list SKUs on the main page and that there isn't a lot of cruft or excessive negative space.
Is there a way, as a buyer, to figure out how much shipping would cost?
For now, we charge a flat price for domestic shipping (with two tiers based on parcel size.) A near/medium-term goal is to integrate with shipping APIs for more nuanced shipping prices.
But that little MBA demon on my shoulder is whispering that targeting low willingness-to-spend consumers will result in, at best, strongly limiting growth and, at worst, a perpetually money losing business. I’m just speculating since I don’t know your financials, so if you’re already in the black, my apologies. If you’re both in the black and don’t care about growth, apologies again.
But assuming you want to grow and/or aspire to be profitable, you’ll either need to grow the size of the art market (hard) or sell to wealthier (or at least, people who spend more of their money on art) consumers (less hard). Social proof is a huge factor for buyers of substantial art, to the point that a handful of people/galleries/etc get to define what constitutes great - and therefore very expensive - art (there was a great Adam Ruins Everything episode on this https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dw5kme5Q_Yo). My mom is very involved with the main art museum in my city, going on trips with other benefactors to buy art for the museum. She also buys art herself - not crazy expensive super known pieces like Damien Hurst’s shark, but still high-end pieces from up-and-coming artists (to put it another way, she buys pieces that aren’t in the $1 million+ range). She uses her own sensibilities primarily, but to find the art itself and ensure the price she’s paying isn’t for a dumpster, she relies on people in the art world.
So, I’m just suggesting you consider two characters of art consumers: (1) social proof drives their decisions and (2) there are often wealthier. Your creative juices might find something really innovative for the social proof component; I don’t have any specific suggestions at the moment. But on (2), consider targeting people in between Steven A Cohen (bought Hurst’s shark for $8-$12 million) and the <$100 art buyer. Given the success (until recently) of Restoration Hardware, I believe you could find people willing to pay $1,000-$10,000 for art. People pay thousands of dollars for a sofa, why not the art that’s on display in their homes? You could imagine quite a few professional, internet savvy DINCs (dual income no children) in their 30s or 40s being interested in having a substantial art piece. They may be intimidated by galleries and not know what to select. Just something to think about to boost your margins.
1. Because curation is important to us
2. So we can learn about the artist and how best to help them
3. So we can take time to help onboard artists and show them how best to make use of Art in Res
We built Art in Res so that anyone can apply, and we take our time to consider every application.
Otherwise, good luck with the project; I love the concept!
Suggestion: Maybe move the pricing filters on the left side to the bottom of the filtering choices, just as a way to emphasize the works over the dollars.
Bug?: No matter which filters I select, or how many (even none), I'm shown there are 92 pages of results.
Best wishes with this.
Have you thought about adding details about what materials the artists used besides noting the basic supplies like “canvas” and “oil stick”?
As a buyer, some may be interested specifically on what colour name / brand of materials the artists used. And if ambitious, why they used those items over others?
Also, no contact information on your site. Boo.
In other words, artists who are trying to build their career are demand, not supply.
(I really want to find a less expensive one that I like)
Idea: sell some AI generated art for charity.
Does the financing model work by offloading all risk to the artist?
Are there some protections?
This is the first Show HN I've sent the link to friends! Found several things already, like it.
One word of caution, we launched things years ago with a Show HN and took all the suggestions into account and total failure. HN isn't the average crowd and their preferences aren't the usual preferences. It's like how the whole internet seemed to support Bernie Sanders but he ended up flopping bad (not getting political, just am observation). HN, Reddit, Twitter aren't the real world, take all advice and popularity from said sources with a grain of salt.
That said, my partner and I are looking at art on your site now and will likely be spending thousands this week via the site. Love it!
if i scroll to the end of the home page, then go to "how it works", i'd expect not to be at the end of that page.
love it, though!
> Art should be affordable, and artists should get paid.
Why is this?