2020 A Year in Review: The Perfect Storm for Art & Photography Sales

Join Nick Friend, CEO and owner of Art Storefronts, and Patrick, head of the marketing department, for a deep dive into the 2020 year in review. Discover how the pandemic created a perfect storm for art and photography sales. The duo shares key lessons, from the pivotal rise of live art shows and video commerce to the importance of merchandising and consultative selling via Zoom. They also highlight the success stories of artists who adapted and thrived by getting closer to their customers. Whether you’re an artist or a photographer, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help you prepare for the future and seize new opportunities in 2021. 

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: All right, coming up, we're talking about the year in review, the perfect storm for art and photography sales. Specifically, what we're covering today: going to be a little intro anecdote, we're going to talk about the Art Storefronts story, and then we're going to talk about essentially just the year in review. Nick, a fireside chat, if you will, because we don't have like a specific episode title that really is going to talk about the things that just shook this industry so crazy, and I think it'll be really good. Why don't you introduce yourself? It'll be awesome. We haven't done one of these in a while. How are you doing?

Nick Friend: Yeah, I'm Nick Friend, I'm the CEO and owner of Art Storefronts. Been in the art industry for over 20 years, multiple companies, founder of Breathing Color originally, which is a manufacturer of canvas, fine art paper, photography paper, all for high-quality reproduction.

Patrick Shanahan: You're really doing the quality background intro there. It's been a while where it is though. Yeah, I'm live all the time. Patrick, run the marketing department at Art Storefronts, been doing this six or seven years. Also been in this industry going on 20 years. I didn't have to do the math. A lot of times we have now more than 5,000 members of Art Storefronts who are all individual artists and photographers running their own businesses, right? And so we have been advising all of them, you know, obviously as more people have grown, joined over time for the past seven years. So lots that we have learned, and I think that when you look back on it, every year it's so important to look back at what happened, what happened in the landscape of the industry, what happened to individuals, right? Because getting the latest information and understanding the lessons that I've learned, the history that happened, is what's going to set you up for the next year. And I think that's so critical to do. So it's the perfect time, right?

Nick Friend: Perfect time to do it. Perfect time to do it.

Patrick Shanahan: Important, important. You know, the, what did you learn and everything else. Will you keep an eye on the comments because I'm going to flirt around my notes?

Nick Friend: Will do.

Patrick Shanahan: I have an intro anecdote. I've gotta just tell this story because it's so good. It's a quick story about the glass being half full, Nick. All right, about turning lemons into lemonade and, you know, essentially the universal truth that everybody has skeletons in the closet. The key is, you know, you got to make them dance. And, you know, as we record this, it is what, the year is almost over. You know, Christmas has come and gone, right? And yesterday, my wife is taking down all the Christmas cards and I've been so busy I haven't like looked at them at all, right? So she's like, "Hey, do you want to look at these before you throw them away?" So I go through the whole stack and, you know, everyone else I'm sure did this too. You looked at all your Christmas cards and, you know, of course you get some people that are being cheeky and funny and doing their themes, right? And obviously, what was the hugest theme? Like, "Bye bye, 2020," right? Like, "See you later, 2020. Thanks, bye. Can't wait for this thing to be gone. Dumpster fire." All of those things, right? I had one buddy that got windows, like physical windows, and held them up for his family photos. And the tagline was, "In case you forgot what we look like," right? Like, there were so many different creative ones that I saw this year, which I thought was awesome. But here's the story about the glass half full. So I was out walking my dog last night, and one of my neighbors around the corner is like, you know, let's just say he's a meticulous type of a guy, right? Whether it's the house, the car, the Christmas lights, his dress, all perfect at all times, right? Like, hair is perfectly coiffed at all times. He's just an extremely fastidious type of a man, okay? And it's important to the story for this reason. Currently, he's getting a new roof on his house, okay? And as such, on his driveway currently sits a plastic outhouse, okay? For the crew doing his roof, a porta potty, if you will. Now, knowing this guy, okay, his fastidiousness, his particulars, I can just tell you that the mere sight of this thing, the knowledge of it, is something that he takes umbrage towards, okay? It is just vexing him when he comes driving home, he has to see this thing. So, you just stated another way, getting his roof done and having this thing on his driveway is leading him to have a real shitty time, okay? So what does he do? He can either let that plastic outhouse ruin his day or he can take the lemons and make lemonade. So walking by his house last night, I noticed the porta potty has perfectly placed Christmas lights all around the outside of it. It's got garland pieces on the corner and it even had a wreath on the front door of the porta-potty, okay? And I almost died laughing when I saw it. It made my day, actually, because, you know, that's the metaphor for the year, right? Like really crappy in a lot of ways, you could either let it ruin your day or you can make the best of it. And that was him making the best of it. And so I think in terms of this episode, in terms of the year in review, I think it's a fitting metaphor for how things went, really, both for us and, you know, for the art and photography business markets. So I think to start off with, let's pivot to our story of what our year at Art Storefronts was, which has been crazy, right, in a number of ways. And I think start at the top, you had color as you see fit, but I would say wild year started out strong, economy was good, outlook was positive, and then March hit. You know, what started with Tom Hanks getting sick quickly turned into pretty much the most extraordinary event any human being alive has ever experienced. And the first massive remembrance I had of this as I was making my notes is like, you know, for lack of a better term, to come to Jesus, the war chant talks we had to have with the entire team about how scary it was and what it pretended and how it was like war, right? Like, do those talks not stick with you?

Nick Friend: Guys, they do. And I mean, look, I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and, you know, you have for a while too. And it's like, I've gone through, you know, multiple recessions. And so that was obviously, you know, brought upon by me and just saying that when you're in a recessionary scenario, you do not go on defense, you go on offense immediately, right? And so obviously I shook the tree, you know, I rang the bell company-wide and everybody was at home, but we were in this, everybody, everybody in the country, everybody in the world was in a state of uncertainty, right? I felt like the economy, everything just paused for all of March. Like it just kind of paused, you didn't, you know, people weren't spending money, they're at home, it's like, you know, what's gonna happen? We have no idea. You know, our storefronts, we've been around for a while, so our company is pretty stable. So it would just be a matter of like, how are we gonna navigate through this? But uncertainty was like the first thing. And I think that, you know, everybody was really scared about like, is this gonna be a five-year thing? Is this gonna be a two-year thing? Is it gonna be a couple of months? Uncertainty, you don't know.

Patrick Shanahan: And did we start the year with an office?

Nick Friend: Yes, we did.

Patrick Shanahan: Do we have an office now?

Nick Friend: No, we don't.

Patrick Shanahan: Ever going back to that?

Nick Friend: Nope, we're not.

Patrick Shanahan: So, yeah, so that part was crazy. It, you know, like the Hunger Games talk and, you know, I think our team responded so brilliantly to that, like, you know, a whole lot of people realize like, whoa, this is serious, it's war, you got to do everything we can. And so many of us stepped up. And as I think back and even like go back in our timeline, I mean, you and I started going live six days a week, sometimes multiple times a day. We had never done that before, right? And I think looking back at it is like one of the most profundities is I am not sure, you know, God forbid anyway, that we will ever live through another time where that many people were online, where you had access to that much attention, everyone being in lockdown, on their phones, on their computers, on Facebook, on Instagram. I mean, in hindsight, we hit it so hard, but if you had one thing to go back and tell yourself in March, what would it be?

Nick Friend: Hit it even harder.

Patrick Shanahan: Hit it even harder, which is even harder. We hit it harder than anyone, if not what you didn't even think was possible, right? If that would have been possible. And you know what? And at the same time, we were advising our members, right, to hit it just as hard as we were. It was in all of our advice the entire time starting in April. And I don't want to jump ahead, so go ahead.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, no, it's okay. I mean, I think we're just sort of summing up our year. So that is a profound fact of it. I think, you know, in March we introduced the Zoom sessions for our customers. I think that fundamentally and forever changed our business.

Nick Friend: The way let's talk about what that is, right? So what we implemented was every Tuesday and Thursday, we had private sessions for our members to get direct consulting on their art business and art marketing, right? Now at that time, we already provided everybody with a marketing plan, you know what I mean? And like all the advice, the art marketing calendar, 365 days a year of how to market and run your business, right? But because of the situation, it required a new plan, right? The old plan wasn't going to, you know, it's not that it wouldn't work, right? It just wasn't going to be as effective in this time. And so we created a new plan, you know, we called an audible, we created a new plan and we got everybody on it.

Patrick Shanahan: Yep. It was rise to the occasion. And I mean, going from, we were never on video, period. We were a podcast, we were a blog, we were digital education, never live teaching. I mean, talk about a fundamental change to change things forever. Crazy. Also in this year, we started a marketing agency, right? An in-house marketing agency that only services our customers, well, and even some non-customers now, right? Specifically for selling art and photography. Talk about another massive change to this business, right? Like crazy.

Nick Friend: And I've been saying on the Zoom calls, because I think it's so interesting, I think it is the biggest one that exists, period, already in terms of customers served. That is a profundity, right? Like starting an in-house marketing agency that only works on selling art and photography, I mean, big, big deal.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. The part that's so profound about that to me is just, you know, and this is part of the lesson of what happened to every artist and photographer and us at Art Storefronts as well, is getting closer to your customer, right? There's this phrase that you and I live by, right? It's a mantra at our company. He or she who is closest to their customer wins, right? And we feel that way, okay? We feel that way about being close to the artists and photographers, you know, and we are advocating this as advice, you know, to our artists and photographers, to our members, right? To be as close as possible to your customer. Why? Because that's where you get the exact pain points that they're having. That's how you understand what's resonating with them, right? And then when you understand that so deeply, you can create, you know, solutions that actually matter and give them value, right? It applies to all of us. And so what we did was we just got as close to the customer as you probably could be, you know? We thought we already were, which is crazy, you know? But we took it to a whole nother level. And like, that was the big thing. And so when you do that, you learn all of these different things. And so we learned, wow, we need to be running workshops, you know, on Zoom for our members that are private, where they can ask us questions directly to our team. And guess what? So it started off as, I think, one workshop a week, right? Then it went to two. And now how many are we running?

Patrick Shanahan: Six. Six days a week.

Nick Friend: There are workshops six days a week, right? And so that's now included in what we do. Then we also started the art marketing agency. Why did we do that? Because we found out that a lot of our members just didn't have enough time to do their own marketing. And they're like, hey, can you do it for us, right? Now, the way that it works is we provide everybody with exactly what they need to do so you can do it yourself. But if you want to use our art storefronts agency, we'll literally just do the exact same work for you as your assistant because you just don't have time, right? What tends to happen is that the more art people are selling, the bigger they get, the less time they have or the less they want to do that administrative type of work, right? And so you got to have a solution for it. You can't just sit there and not be generating leads, right? You've got to be like increasing the size of your email list, increasing the amount of traffic that you're getting, or your business is going to stall out. And so, you know, if you can't do it because you either have like another job or you're a stay-at-home mom or dad and stuff like that, and you've got kids to take care of or whatever it is, right? You still have to get those things done if you actually want to grow the business. So just by getting closer to the customer, we learned all of these different things and we improved on the customer experience and our products that we offer, i.e., you know, the website software and the features, the marketing support and the marketing agency as a result.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, so agency, big one. You know, we added webinars for non-customers three times weekly, by the way, if you want to join one, call them art business workshops. And to your point earlier about he or she, you know, fundamental premise that you and I operate under, that we as a company operate under, he or she who's closest to the customer wins. How many of those things are we running now? I couldn't even tell you. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Zoom sessions that you can get on with myself, members of the team, and the sheer number of conversations that I've had with artists and photographers of every stripe imaginable all over the world, the sheer amount of learning that proximity to the struggles that they're having has also fundamentally changed how we do business. And again, we were not doing them before, right, at all.

Nick Friend: There isn't a single person or a company, right, single person who has spoken to more artists and photographers in the last nine months than you or I and the rest of your team and the rest of our storefronts team, right? You know, there isn't anybody who's probably talked to more than what we have because with all of these sessions running all week long, even non-art storefronts members, right? I mean, you're talking about thousands and thousands a week, right? And in that, the learnings have just been insane.

Patrick Shanahan: Let's talk about non-members for a second because I know many people who are watching this are not Art Storefronts customers, right? And let's give them some value. Let's talk about what we've learned in those sessions, right, of just there's people that are starting their business, their photography business or their art business. There's people that had been disrupted by the whole pandemic situation, right? Galleries closed, art fairs closed, all of that. All these people are coming onto these workshops and talking to us about their different things, you know? And there's so many lessons learned. So like the patterns, there are so many patterns, right? Like people, we call it clogging, they clogging their brain, right? And putting things in their way as to why they couldn't start doing something, like mental hurdles, right? I don't know how to price my artwork, you know? How do I do that? Right? And just launch, just price it and launch, right? I don't know what niche I should use. I do this, but I also do this. You know, I have this niche, I have that niche. I do paintings, I also do photography. It doesn't matter. Just launch, right? I mean, we heard it all. So many people just getting in their own way, preventing themselves from ever launching, right? You hear people, I don't know if art, I really didn't know that art really sold online. I didn't believe it for years. And we're like, what rock have you been hiding under? You know, I mean, like what else? I mean, it's been, it's been incredible.

Nick Friend: And independent of that, like what did we do before? We created content, created learning teachings on what we thought was the most important, right? What we thought was the biggest problems. And then what do we end up doing? Talking to hundreds of both non-customers, non-members and members on a weekly basis. And guess what we found out? What the real problems are, not what we thought the problems were, what the real problems were from you guys, right? And that is fundamentally and forever changed. And we're never, we're never going back.

Patrick Shanahan: And one of the biggest things I learned from that is, you know, we were providing like, you know, like somewhat like, I call it like medium to advanced tactical advice that we would give away a little bit for free on our blog and in the podcast, right? That stuff was so over the head of everybody, okay, that the closer that we got for the artist in reality, yes, the more I realized like, oh my goodness, we were, we're given like, we needed to back up steps, you know, and deal with the problems that were way, way before like executing on marketing tactical. And that's one of the things that we learned was that I could give an artist or photographer right now the best or the best business plan in the world that is working for like thousands of artists and photographers that we work with, right? We saw the results, the results were there all of the fourth quarter, all of record, record, record results, you know, all over the place, okay? And it wouldn't matter. No, it wouldn't matter to the, to the newbie, right? Who can't figure out how to launch, can't figure out what their niche is, getting in their own way, you know, all these different problems, dealing with fulfillment things and insisting on that, you know, refusing to ever run a discount or whatever it was, right? Refusing to follow what is working for people who are selling hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, right? Refusing any of that. And it's like, hold on a second, we've got to deal with all that, unclog that before the good stuff can even get down, before they even have a chance at building a solid business.

Nick Friend: Literally, I'm just typing a note right now as you're saying this, the biggest misconceptions about selling art and photography. How's that? Oh man, did we learn, did we learn a lot of those, you know, through the title test. Phenomenal, phenomenal. So what else do I have? Hold on. Oh, the ability to sell merchandise. That's a big one too, dude. That was huge. True. So tell people what we launched because most people.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. So we did a major new, I mean, we're really big on fulfillment, okay? Highest quality art and print fulfillment, labels on your boxes with your logo on it, right? Like we want the quality of the prints is unsurpassed. You know, we are auditing our fulfillment partners constantly to keep them in line, to make sure the quality is there. And, you know, so we've had the art printing side, right? Well, this year we added the merchandise, i.e. shirts, sweatshirts, tank tops, puzzles, mugs, phone cases, tote bags, you know, yoga pants. I mean, you like tons of stuff, right? And we're in the middle right now of adding calendars, which are going to be awesome. Okay. Yeah. And we did it and we added this awesome UI where you can, you know, the, the, or sorry, your, your customer can increase the size of the image and manipulate it and rotate it on the, you know, material that they're going to buy it, that they're going to, it's going to get printed on and they'll buy. And what did we learn? We launched it. We got it launched right before the holidays, right before Black Friday. I think it was a couple of days before it went live. And for the people who launched it, okay, because we told everybody like, hey, if you've got a solid art business, just keep doing what you're doing. Like they were in the thick of their marketing at that point, according to our marketing program, right? If you've been waiting on these and you, you are keen on launching these launch. So a good solid amount of people did and the sales exploded, the sales exploded, blew my mind, totally blew my mind because at first I'd be like, why would you want to have an, uh, you know, like a, an iPhone case, right? Like it's just kind of weird, you know, but then I started the orders, you know, I started seeing the orders of one of our painters who sells over a hundred thousand dollars a year, every year. Okay. This guy had a banner a year. He started, I started looking at these merchandise orders and he'd have a phone case on there and it wasn't a $10 phone case selling it for $40. Okay. And then in that order, he'd have three, there would be two or three other items. The person bought a sweatshirt, you know, a poster, you know what I mean? Like, sorry, like an art paper print or something like that. And like, and like a tote bag or something, right? Or a pillow, right? A poem. And, and then again, I started seeing like more orders and we started realizing that, wow, this merchandise can end up, you know, creating to $200 orders, you know, and, and their impulse items, their impulse items, their, their gift items. In other words, you don't require wall space in order to buy it. You know, you don't require a, an approval from a significant other, both of which add friction to the buying process. Okay. And so those are really nice things that, um, you know, if a guy is selling that much art, uh, okay, here you go. You're going to pull it up right now. That's great. So, uh, yeah. So you just click on, click on any of those things and, uh, throw on the phone case for me and then go to options and show like the image resizing we're able to do that. Yeah. So just like increase the size a little. Yeah, there you go. And then, and then do the rotation. So yeah, exactly. It's that simple. Yeah. It's that simple on all the different items. Right. Add to the cart and you're done. Yeah. So this is what we're talking about. And this is actually the guy, this is actually the guy. Um, and yeah. Yeah. So that's all of them. You know, this, what's that? I don't even know. We had this, this is amazing. I know that was that, that was just released a couple of weeks ago. Okay. If you're on the podcast, we're on it. We're on a, if you listen to this later, we're on a website where you can kind of, you know, tweak and show them, show the merch. I'll put a, I'll put a link in the show notes just, just for the people that are listening to it on, on audio only. But anyways, more ways to sell your art, right. More, um, a great user experience. And, uh, again, just another, another feature added this year, we added, we added probably 50 features this year. Automation, you know, like email automation with pre-written language, marketing language specifically for selling art, right. For not just act like an abandoned cart email, an abandoned cart email for selling art. Right. Um, and upsell emails, automated upsell emails. So that when somebody checks out in your store, right, you can like the system knows all the different products or images they looked at. And if they didn't buy any of those, it sends them an upsell email automatically with pre-written language by our marketing department, right. Our marketing department, our marketing agency, and, uh, with the language that we know works for trying to get them to convert, you know, that sale into a, uh, or sorry, those products into another sale. So tons of stuff added all based on, you know, what we learned and, um, and adding as much value as possible.

Nick Friend: Yeah. I forgot to say like, you know, on the merge, right. Like a couple of things at play one, there's only three ways to grow a business. Only three get new customers, get more out of each transaction or bring existing customers back. Right. But getting more out of each transaction, the AOV. Okay. Average order value, um, stated another way that everyone makes sense for everyone. Would you like fries with that? Right. They were just coming in for a burger. Would you like fries with that? That's McDonald's attempting route number two, AOV to get more out of each existing order. The merge gives you an unbelievable way to do that. That's number one. Number two, the bell curve. Okay. Everyone's followers are a bell curve. Like see if I can do this. It's all reversed. And when you think of the bell, right on, on this side of the bell are the people that don't have any money. They're, they're, they're not going to buy anything from you. They don't have any money and everyone's followers are this way. And then you have lower, middle, upper class, and then the higher reaches the middle class. And then you have like the people that have a lot of money. Everyone's followers are like that. Right. And you have so many artists and photographers out there that are lacking any variability in the price point, right? All they have are really high priced items. And when that happens, you've got a whole bunch of people that are following you and love you. Okay. They want to purchase from you, but they don't have anything in their price range, right? It's like, you know, I had somebody yesterday on the, on the art business workshop saying like, I only sell originals. Is that okay? I was like, yeah, that's okay. But why would you want to go into a fight with one arm tied behind your back? Right. You have to have these various different price points so that people can purchase, have an incredible experience with you, build up to the higher price point too. So I think that's critically important. But the third that I loved in, in, in this, this is one of those areas where you out analogized me. Uh, uh, they're inventors, right? Go on that rant for a second. And then, and then, then I'll finish it up.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. So, you know, I, I, I've, I've always said that it is extremely important for you guys to know as photographers and artists that you guys are inventors. You invent your own product, your painting or the image that you shot is essentially your invention. No different than an engineer might, you know, create some sort of a widget that they invent. Right. And you have to really, really appreciate that. It's something that I appreciate. I know Patrick, you do too, as entrepreneurs, it's very, very hard to invent a product, you know, but the ability that you guys have to invent your own product means that you can, you can iterate so quickly, right. On your niche, um, or within your niche to create different types of work or shoot different types of work that resonates the most with your audience in order to take your business to the next level. That's something that other businesses can't do. You can't just like create a new widget out of nowhere. Right. Costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time and all that. That's what those are the, those are the restrictions that other types of entrepreneurs have, but artists and photographers don't have that. You know what though, Pat, the problem is they don't use it to their advantage. That is your biggest arbitrage. Your biggest arbitrage, the most successful artists and photographers that work with us. Okay. The most successful are taking advantage of that. They are not just forcing content on people that is not resonating. Well, and their stuff is selling well. And you know what they're still doing? Inventing new stuff. They're still constantly inventing new stuff. That Santa Claus image that you were just showing was just created three weeks ago. Okay. And he sold thousands of dollars of that. Okay. Well, the original sold thousands of dollars of prints and merch and all of that. And he literally created it three weeks ago. Wrap your, and this is a guy who already sells a hundred thousand dollars a year, Pat, you know what the lesson is? That's the reason he sells hundreds of thousands of dollars a year is because he's always been doing that. He's always been doing that. So you want to ask yourself, you guys, are you just forcing content on people that's not resonating? You know, or are you constantly listening to your audience, getting close to your customers, listening to what they want, you know, like, like paying attention to what types of social media posts resonate when you do them, what images resonate, you know, trying, testing new things, going out in left field. He did a Santa. He didn't do anything like that. You know, three months ago, he did a painting of Jesus and it totally exploded. Right. Did amazing. He didn't do anything like that. Nothing. Right. You go out in left field and try different stuff. You can't lose. You cannot lose from doing that. No one cares. You're not ruining your brand or anything like that. You don't like if you don't have million dollars of sales a year, you don't have a brand. Let me just say that. Okay. You don't have a brand. If you don't have million in sales a year, nobody even understands what your logo looks like or anything like that. They're not remembering anything of it. Right. You have the ability to bob and weave. Okay. In order to find greater levels of success with your talent. Okay. And I believe that you should be using your talents, you know, to in this sort of a way as an inventor to build a business around it. You know, and if you can find the things that resonate with you, then that's great. Like you'll have it'll it'll you'll feel great about it. But if you want to make a living from your talent, you know, that's it's not a bad life, Pat. It's not a bad life.

Nick Friend: And to the point where I was going with that, it's like we realize fundamentally Art Storefronts as a business is to create the set of conditions such that artists and photographers can succeed. Right. You take Nick's inventor sort of analogy like you have a talent. Okay. You guys have a creative talent, either as an artist or perhaps with a lens if you're a photographer. If you have the ability to monetize that talent in as many ways as possible, why would you not take advantage of that? Why would we not offer that? Right. And so we realize, you know, looking back on the lessons of 2020 and 2021 is like our job is to provide as many different revenue possibilities for these inventors as possible. And it doesn't need to you don't even need to get more complicated than that. Leave it at that. Right. And so, you know, the challenge sort of the takeaway and and we'll use this to wrap up sort of, you know, our section is like you have a talent to create always be thinking about additional revenue sources to monetize that talent to create a successful business. And I think I think that's massively profound. So I think I think that because we're already going I think that wraps up, you know, our we'll get more into that. But, you know, on I titled this thing, you know, the perfect storm for art and photography sales. Right. And as we get more into sort of the lessons of 2020, I want to hammer this one at a high level. And if you think I've left anything out, I'm just going to rattle through it super succinctly. But kits all offline venues to buy art or photography are instantly closed, gone in an instant. You know, poof lockdowns, whether forced or not, are the new norm. Everybody is working from home. E-commerce adoption takes 10 years of normal projected growth and squishes it into three months. People start to flee the cities. New home sales explode and still are across the country. Home decor across the board, of which art and photography are a big part, explode. The only places left big picture anyway to buy art and photography are online galleries or directly from the artist. All of the venues to sell art or photography for the most part, you know, are are not in a revenue split situation. Right. You don't need to pay booth fees. You're not going anywhere. You're selling direct. You're keeping all of your customer data. Amazing. And I think collectively, if that doesn't constitute the perfect storm, I doesn't I don't know what does as a result of what took place in 2020. It set up the perfect storm for art and photography sales, a set of conditions the likes of which we have never seen. And it's still going. It's still going now.

Patrick Shanahan: And I think like one of the biggest things, too, is like it's the it's the traditional gatekeepers of the art business that got disrupted, you know. And why why that's so important is because like, you know, guys, think about the music industry. Everybody knows how that works. Not everybody understands how the art industry works. Right. But in the music industry, all the bands, all the musicians used to have to go through all the record labels, you know, the five big companies. And they had their onerous fees and restrictions and contracts. Sounds a lot like the way that the gatekeepers of the art business have have been art publishers and art galleries. I'm not saying all of them are really bad, but it's it's just the way that the industry worked. You know what I mean? And and so the people who the the rare, rare, rare few of artists and photographers that were actually doing well with galleries, very hard to find those people, you know, but they were out there got killed. OK. Why? Because they were like, I think what what really got exposed in 2020 was did you have a fragile business or did you have an anti fragile business? Anti fragile, meaning not fragile, not you know what I mean? Strong. And and if you were operating through the gatekeepers or if you were primarily earning your your income through art shows in person, you had a fragile business and it got exposed. OK. You got crushed. What does it say? It's when the tide comes in, you can see who is swimming without any shorts. Exactly. This situation. Nice work, by the way. The segues directly to my to my to my point. It's like, yeah, there was a perfect storm for art and photography sales. But the next biggest theme of 2020 is the tide came in and there were a whole lot of people swimming without any shorts and zoom sessions week in, week out artists that have been at it for years. Pinnacle of their career, pinnacle of their success, thriving mega healthy businesses, instantaneously cut off nothing work in bar stuck in galleries, checks that they were owed not being delivered, no ability to sell their or whatsoever. None. Yeah. I mean, that would be a staggering theme. One of the most staggering themes of the whole year. Yep. And and and like the the the thing that's so interesting about it is like you have you heard the phrase about the digital pivot, right? Like it's what every every business has been doing since, you know, the pandemic began as this they they're trying to take their business digital, you know, if it wasn't there already. And so going back to, you know, the the artists and photographers that were fragile versus not fragile, right, the the ones that were not fragile had done the digital pivot years before. OK. And what happened to them, Pat? What happened to them this year? Beyond records, beyond a record broken, they had they had the best art selling years ever by far, not just I'm not talking about like one lucky person. I'm talking across the board. The people who actually had validated art, right? They've sold their art before they had validated or they had a business and they did the digital pivot in years past. They they realized that the future was online. And so they already equipped themselves with the proper art gallery website with all the tools and technology. And they already learned, you know what I mean, how to market themselves, how to communicate directly with their audience. They already got close to their audience, right? So you understand it. They understood what type of content they should create that would resonate and all of that stuff. Those are the ones that destroyed it. I mean, it absolutely killed it. And you know what? There's such a huge lesson in there for everybody, such a huge lesson in there. OK, you didn't a lot. Yeah, you cannot like be the last guy when when when markets are moving in a direction. But things have been moving online for the last 20 years. Everyone knew it. Everyone knew it. You had to be living under a rock if you ever thought in your head art didn't sell online when you have companies like art dot com selling hundreds of millions of dollars a year, right? People selling everywhere. You literally had to just be so close minded. You wouldn't accept it, you know. And if you're one of those dinosaur types of thinkers, like you've got to change that philosophy because I even talked to some people today, Pat, who are still like, oh, my goodness, I can't wait for the galleries to open again. I'm just going to wait for the galleries to open again. I'm like, have you not learned the life? There's a lesson that you are refusing to learn. You can't stay behind the times because always being behind means that you're going to always have a fragile business. That's why you got killed. Right. So do both. You can make your digital pivot, understand the way that you're going to have an anti fragile business, you know what I mean? And set yourself up for 2021 and beyond so that you don't get crushed ever again. There's no need to do that. Yeah. And I can't underscore enough like I literally talked to hundreds of photographers, an artist a week. Right. And in week after week after week, these poor people coming in phenomenal sales, doing great, never had a website, never did anything on social media sites, didn't need to gallery, told them not to never had an email list. Right. And, you know, there's this line from a movie can't even remember the title of it's whatever gets shorty part two is. But what do you tell somebody, Nick? It's got two black guys. What nothing. They've already been told twice. You cannot ever allow this situation to pop up again. Right. You know, it perhaps for the cynical amongst us, it might sound self-serving because it's the solution that we provide. I don't care where you get the solution. OK, do not ever be in a situation you are you are an artist, a photographer for life. These are these are not career choices that people have midlife crisis and quit. If you want to build a business, you have to have your own website. You have to have your own email list. You have to be marketing regularly and you need to be building a list of collectors that you can market to for the next 20 years. You cannot leave all of your eggs in a basket where you have no control. It is fundamental. If the pandemic caught you, OK, swimming without any shorts on, do not let the next whatever it is that's going to come down the pike have you in this situation again. You have some other things that are working for you. Fantastic. But don't ever let it be in lieu of building your own operation. OK, in addition to not in lieu of well and just to wrap a bow on it, if everyone who broke their all-time records by far by a mile, right, this year, right, or in 2020, if that's what they did, right, have their own art gallery website, take control of their own destiny, do their own marketing, have their own email list, etc, etc. If that's what they did to succeed, right. Yeah. And you want to follow the people who are successful. That's more than likely the thing that you should do. Number one. Yes. Period. Don't do anything else. Do that. That is the only thing that you should do. Anything else that you want to do gravy. But if you want to know what made people successful in 2020, OK, in the heart, arguably the hardest year that's happened in the last whatever century, maybe, you know, in selling art, that's what that that's what did it. That's what made them successful. So now, you know. Yep. So, again, critic critic just critically important theme of 2020. I mean, we've been saying it for a long time. And again, it doesn't it doesn't matter how you go about doing this, but just ignore this one at your own peril. Right. 2021 is coming. It's time you build your own business. It's time you put some of your eggs in your own basket. Sounds simple to say, but, you know, so few so many people got caught. My next big theme for 2020 is the rise of video. OK. And I think there are a ton of facets here. If the rise of video at a macro is the father, there's a bunch of children. But I think, you know, for us individually as a company became a year premises, right? Like which premises are we operating under? We have we have a very strong premise on video. OK. And it's just what we're doing now. Live video zooms all of it. Video. OK. It is just more efficient and more effective to do whatever. Right. Whatever. And, you know, on all these calls going back for a while, I always say my trick question. Right. What's the best way to sell art of photography? What's the best way? Trick question. Of course, it's in person face to face. OK. No one will ever be disputing that. If you have the ability to sell in person face to face, you do that. The problem, you're geographically fixed on this earth. You have to sleep and you're incapable of having 20 conversations at once, which is why you have to have a website. A website can do that. Best way selling face to face in person have a website for all those aforementioned reasons. Video is in between. It's the new step that's in between. And I want to talk about some of the child cases. But I think in our case, Art Storefronts this year, starting in March, went from an online nameless, faceless digital business in terms of video to now we are a retail store that's rapidly moving to being open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. six days a week. Where's the retail store located? It's not Main Street in your town. It's Main Street on the Internet. And it's completely revolutionizing our business. We have live video sessions of which this is one going almost nine to five, six days a week. We're already almost there. I mean, we are we are we are essentially doing 40 hours a week, probably 50 hours a week, which is eventually going to get about 60 hours a week of one to one, one to many video interaction, teaching customer customer support, marketing support, tech support, teaching live videos, webinars with our customers. And that can just the profundity of that is probably the biggest, you know, smack me right in the face theme of the entire 2020. And I have sort of three child themes that I think we should riff on one at a time, one of which is the live art shows. The next one of which is just going live on the socials, period. I want to talk about merchandising. And then I want to talk about one on one consultative selling. So you chime in where you like. But I believe fundamentally the biggest disruption, OK, for how art photography had been sold in the last 60 years is the live art show. OK, many out there are calling it the virtual art show, which I absolutely hate. But if we, Nick, were to pull our customers, OK, prior to the pandemic and said, what percentage of art or photography have you sold via leveraging either one to one or one to many video or having a live art show, that number would have been tiny. Show of hands. No one. How many of you have leveraged video to sell art in 2020? Now, what percentage of our customer base's hands are going to go up?

Nick Friend: A very high number. I don't know. We'll have to we'll have to pull them. But I think the rise of the live art show, OK, directly selling art that we saw this year, it represents the single solitary biggest disruption to how art of photography sold last 60 years.

Patrick Shanahan: I completely agree. I think it's the greatest thing that's ever happened. I've never been more excited about one one thing before. And it just completely blew my mind. I think it's the reason why, you know, the art sales at on the platform were so high this year. You know, so it's a major reason. And again, it makes me think about the disruption of the gatekeepers. You know, like it when when individual artists and photographers have the ability to be their own gallery, have their own gallery show where they make, you know, the most money from their own artwork. OK. And they can do it whenever they want, however they want in terms of running their own show. Right. And or going live and presenting different products or doing other things like there's nothing in their way. Right. And it just means that they're going to have they're going to have greater abilities to to sell more and achieve higher levels of success. And we saw it. We were seeing it happen. And the fact that like we're now like what, nine months into this, this is going to be the big story for the next five or 10 years. Right. So getting really good at it, understanding this, you know, and of course, your your your your live, you know, performances or whatever they are, are only as good as the marketing that you've done, the email list that you have, the following that you have. Right. So the marketing underpins all of it. But it is so big and it's so exciting. And I'm just happy for every individual out there. You know, I'm I'm because nothing's in your way. There's literally you don't you don't need a single gallery. You don't need a publisher. You don't need anything. You can run this business out of your house. OK. Go take pictures, go paint, you know, be creative, be an inventor, find your way there, you know, have a good marketing plan, you know, be smart about it. And you can make a very serious business that like that sells hundreds of thousands of dollars a year out of your house.

Nick Friend: Yes. That is not a guess. That is not a idea. That is literally a fact. OK. That is literally a fact because we have plenty of them that are on our platform living that life.

Patrick Shanahan: No question. And I you know, when I say the biggest disruption, it is not hyperbole. OK. And and I have a number of different ways that I could explain this. A whole bunch of other industries are figuring this out, too. Right. The smartest if let me state it this way. OK. The number one thing that I am most proud of the entire year that we accomplished as a business was learning this before anyone else and teaching our customers. Yeah. On that I'll hang my hat on that for years to come. Right. Because you're seeing it on the fringes now and all of these various other industries. You've got some of the biggest VCs talking about video selling video commerce, biggest thing video commerce being the next biggest thing. And we were so far ahead of this tooting my own horn dot com. OK. We were so far ahead of this. It has been profound. And what let's put some teeth behind it, too. OK. Because I think I like. So when this all began, right, you and I started running live art shows with our members at the beginning because that's what we do. We get our hands dirty. Right. We run it ourselves. You and your team running it. You specifically ran the first ones with with a painter in Canada, Matthew Locka. Right. And and it was a basement art sale. OK. And he did right out of his house. And you helped with the whole tactical, the marketing before, after, during and all of that. And what did he what did he sold in like three or four days?

Nick Friend: It was like sixty thousand Canadian over two. OK. Sixty thousand Canadian. I think. But you ended up running like two or three of them. Right. And so the total ended up. Yeah. And then he was complaining that the his biggest problem was was packaging and shipping all of the artwork.

Patrick Shanahan: I told him don't do the shipping. Why would you do the shipping? I know. I know. But back but back to the point was that this was art accumulating in his basement for years. OK. He is in galleries. He was this guy is great. He is a great artist. He is in top galleries. You know, his art sells for high numbers. Right. Twenty thousand, thirty thousand, forty thousand. And this is the stuff that he had accumulated inventory that he had over the last like five or ten years. And he just was he sold like dozens and dozens of them. And that and so anyways, I wanted the teeth behind it because that's just incredible. We have like 70 year old, 80 year old, 90 year old's doing it. Right. For the first time and like actually getting great results and like we could collate so many different results.

Nick Friend: And you know, to to to the point of lock is it's like, yes, those results are super sexy. OK. But yes, you have a guy that's been working on hard on his marketing for the last 10 years. Right. He's got massive Instagram following massive YouTube, massive Facebook. But he did the digital pivot years ago. He's one of those. Yes. But independent of that, like watching the the show go down and watching multiple of his shows going down and seeing all the comments. OK. And in it, you know, this is like learning is is that building the airplane is it's already taken off. Right. Like we're on the ground learning like no one didn't run a tremendous amount of shows. And so early on, the first couple, I'm like, people are saying like, hello from Costa Rica. Hello from Hong Kong. Right. Hello from Russia. And I was like, OK, this is wild. And then, you know, somebody's name is like completely in Arabic. Right. And I'm looking at the show and and and I'm going, whoa. So on the next couple, I was like, you know, I'm putting the comment banner up saying like, let us know where you're from. Right. You know, like, you know, our little banner down here. You won't see that if you're in the podcast. But and then all of these names are just coming in from all over the world. Right. And so he's got a worldwide audience. And then after the show is done, he's telling me I'm shipping art to Canada. That's where he lives, to the United States, to Europe, to South America, to Central America, to Asia, a couple to Asia. And then I think he had one, maybe one to the Middle East. And you look at that and like just zoom out of his situation for a second. That's a worldwide business. That's a worldwide business from from his garage in Quebec. Right. You can never have accomplished that with a gallery, a local gallery show. I mean, he like that is unreal. It's it is it is profound on a million different levels. And and like, look, yes, it's a it's a thing I'm proudest about. No, there's no two ways about it. OK, that we learned it. We're continuing to learn. We're getting better at it, that we're doing it now ourselves every other industry is figuring it out. But now look what all the shows are doing. Have you seen what all the local shows are doing? They're scrambling to and keep their booth fees and God bless them for it to do virtual art shows. Right. But there's so much to learn. There's so much for them to figure it out. What are the smart galleries doing? If they're smart, they are having live art shows for their artists. Right. Like this is the future. Full stop. The biggest disruption in the last 60 years. Not kidding. That's number one of of this whole child theme. The other one is just what we're doing right now. Going live on the socials, period, by which I mean going live on Facebook and Instagram or YouTube. And yes, Nick, this was around before COVID hit, but not that many people were making use of it. Right. COVID changed all that. And, you know, one thing that we fundamentally know. Another thing that I'm very proud of is we understand how art and photography are sold. OK. And we have the data of customers. We're probably at 6000 by the way. No, I got to get the official update. You know, my deals what becomes what comes before an art sale. Not all of them, but most of them. No, like and trust. They want to know the artist. They want to like the artist. They want to trust the artist. Right. What is one of the most efficient ways to do that? Live video. I don't care if it's live painting. I don't care if it's talking about your process. I don't care if you're a photographer and you're schlepping through the woods to go and get a shot or you're Andy Crawford. You're schlepping through the swamps. Right. Or you're just doing a Q&A. Whatever you're doing, there is just no better way. Are you going to send him another email, Nick? Are you going to do another social post? Right. Like, let's say right. Like, what are we on right now? Yes, it's live video. Right. So so all of you who are watching this right now, like you've got the CEO and owner of Art Storefronts, you've got the marketing director right next to you. Right. And and here we are. You get to see how we think. Right. How we think about the business, about the industry. You know, you get to you get to know you get to know us. Does it make you like us and trust us a little bit more than the other company who you have no idea who's behind it or what they've done or or the way that they're thinking about things. So look at how much closer this can bring you to your own art buyers. Right. By getting them involved in your artistic process. Right. Showing them your your products. Right. Talking about them. Why they're special. There's so many different ways we could do. I mean, there's obviously shown my but you get the point. Right. Yeah, it's it's another one of the just transparency, the absolute massive boost. And and, you know, I can tell you, I'll tell you this. A whole bunch of other podcasters will. OK. I've been podcasting for a long time. We've got the art marketing podcast, been doing that for years. And what what I will say, what other podcasters will say is that when you do a podcast, OK, and you do it regularly, there is very little that's more intimate than having the headphones in in there and hearing it. And how I see it is like all of these people will reply to emails or send emails saying, oh, I talked to Patrick or I'd like to talk to Patrick or Patrick and I were talking the other day or I need to talk to Patrick. I don't know any of these people. Right. I don't know any of these people, but they feel so intimately connected to me because I've been doing these years of podcasts. Right. And every I hear this all the time from every podcaster imaginable. The relationship that is formed via audio is just so intimate. Right. Video just takes it off another level. Yeah. No, like and trust. One of the most powerful things and and going live is just is such a critical part of it. It's why we've invested so much in coming up with the best playbooks on teaching you how to do it every way imaginable because it's just so profound. The next little child of video. So a the rise of video. Right. And then you're the father rise of video. Huge. The biggest disruption. The first child of it is the live art shows going going live on the socials. Another one. But I would also argue the era of merchandising is now upon us. And this is really it's a childhood video, Nick. And yeah, the 2020 became the era of merchandising. And I need to I need to get my presentation and I think.

Patrick Shanahan: OK, go ahead. And while you're saying that, I'll preface it and say the thing that we learned from this was that almost no artisan photographers were doing any merchandising. OK, well, people were not doing video anyway or enough video. But merchandising, in other words, showing the actual products that you are selling to the people that you are asking to buy them. Right. And nobody's doing it. And so, Pat, go ahead and give an example.

Nick Friend: So it's going to look a little circusy on the green screen. But when I say the era of merchandising, how many of you had your actual products that you could show off on a regular basis and extremely explain the nuances and the particulars about it? Right. How many of you have them now? Yeah, yeah, exactly. How many of them have them now? The fact that it that you could have the what was I want a textured fine art paper and a photo paper and the fact that it's ready to hang and you're showing the frame and you can talk about the paper type and a canvas print and what it looks like and how it's gallery wrapped and how long it lasts and the fact that it's ready to hang and oh, Nick, do you not know the difference between a canvas print, probably one of the hottest for a long time and a metal print and what a metal print looks like and the fact that it's ready to hang. And, you know, this is one of the great the great ideas that you can do. Here's a shot of Positano and you can see the detail on it and how long this thing lasts. And here's what it looks like. The era of merchandising is upon us. Also acrylic. Right. My green screen is just making these things look so circusy. But I've got even more. I mean, like one of one of the major initiatives, OK, going forward for us is like, you know, we're going to have like, you know, Q Bootcamp for lack of a better term. Right. When we when people actually get back from this vacation and it's like, guys, you have to order every single solitary type of merchandise that you're selling, that you have on author. If it's a gift card. Right. Or I mean, what do we call these the greeting cards? You can put a message in something that you include with every print posters. Yeah. What I'm doing right now, though, is something that is fundamentally an unknown, an unknown quantity. Artists just didn't realize they needed to do it. And if they did, they didn't have it. They assumed that their customers knew the differences between an acrylic print or a metal print or anything in between or the originals or any of it. And we are now, as a result of what video has ushered in here, we are entering the era of merchandising and every single solitary artist or photographer needs to get good at it. They need to get comfortable at it. They need to be able to explain the different nuances of their products. They need to use it for consultative selling, which we'll get into in a second. It has truly become the era of merchandising. And by the way, we need to get like some sort of merchandise deal for all our customers so they can do it. Like if you're selling throw pillows, I need you to be able to show off throw pillows.

Patrick Shanahan: You already do when you become your storefronts member, there's a special discount to buy your own samples to do the merchandising. But I want I mean, whatever you're selling, you need to be able to show it off. Right. And, you know, what's what's the analogy I always use? If I was going to hire you to work for me selling knives door to door, what would you show up with at the front door, Nick? Maybe the knives, maybe the knives. You know what you wouldn't show up with your pictures. Here's what the knives look like or stupid 2D images of what the knives look like. You would show up with the knives because you have the knives. You essentially have an arm tied behind your back and maybe two. It's going to be very difficult to sell.

Nick Friend: Yeah. And you've got to think about the psychology of like when you're actually showing these products. Like how did you feel when we were showing all of these? Like all it takes is for is for somebody that's watching one of your one of your visitors to just look at that. I want that. That's exactly what I want. I want that gallery wrapped canvas, that nice, thick, ready to hang. I want that. I'm going to go get it right now, you know, and and so and like it's so important to understand the abstraction. You guys, you guys as artists and photographers, OK, you are your own retail store. When you go live on the Internet, when you do video on the Internet. Right. It's like you're giving the ability for your visitors to walk into your store as if you really had a store. It just happens to be virtual. OK. And then when you show them the products that you sell, they're literally walking in seeing the products that you would have in your retail store. OK. You are a retail art gallery. You happen to be running it out of your house and you're going to use technology to be able to market yourself. OK. And to be able to close the deal. Right. The website, the art gallery website that's there to help close the deal. Right. Remove friction from the buying process with the wall preview tools and the framing tools and the videos like the merchandising we should say. That was another feature, big feature we added this year, Pat. Didn't even talk about that. Right. Pat set up a studio in his garage and and commandeered this project because it was so important to him, this merchandising. And so every when when you when you are looking at any media type on an art storefront members website like canvas and there's a description of what the canvas is, there's actually a professional video right there that we made that shows the front, the back, the sides and all that so that when anybody is shopping on the website, it's like a robot working for you, doing the merchandising for you. Right. Like you got to you need to have all of these things. Right. And but that's how important the merchandising is. You have to remember overall that you are a retail store. OK. Don't it's not any harder than that. You're a retail store. Be open on the Internet. Show the products that you sell. Don't offer things and then not show them. I mean, you know how many people are offering metal on their website, you know, and they've never even shown their their followers or anybody on their email list why they should like metal. You know what I mean? Like what makes what makes your photography lend itself so well to metal.

Nick Friend: Yeah. And if you can't like try to do that without this in your hand ready. Go right. Yeah. Get it. Get it up close. Yeah. Right. Like amazing. You can see the gloss level. Yeah. Like there's a nice frame on the back. It's ready to hang. You know, beautiful. Yeah. So the era of merchandising is upon us. I'm going to spend a tremendous amount of time all year because, you know, it is it's something that I'm massively passionate about. But, you know, the video premise is so true. If you're not good at it, if you first of all, no one is really good at it. It is really hard to do. And you know how you get better at it. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. Right. Practice. Like. But it's no wonder when you think about it. So many artists and photographers in the past website on, you know, WordPress, Squarespace, go down the list. Right. And with with static 2D images of their their painting, their original artwork, their paint, their prints, whatever it is, or their photography, they do no merchandising. There's no merchandising on that site. There's no visualization tools to help people through the buying process. And then they wonder why they have no sales or that their sales aren't where they want them to be. Right. They're literally doing like they're not acting in any way like a retail store. Like customers need to be helped when they come into a retail store. Right. Or shown the products. And they're just like, hey, you know what you I'm just going to I'm going to I'm going to like literally put in the least amount of effort and as I can, I'm going to put up some 2D images and the rest of the work, Mr. Customer, is on you. Yeah, it makes no sense. Yeah. Visualization is like such an important part of it. So we're going to come at this a thousand different ways all year long. But just know if you don't have your work, you don't have the sample media types that you offer, you have an arm tied behind your back. You don't stand a chance. OK, another child theme to pivot of this year, you know, of video of 2020 is the one to one consultative selling. OK, we haven't probably talked about this a bunch. And so let me define it. Hey, Nick, you just came to my website. You sent the contact form. You had some questions about some pieces. I, Patrick, know that Nick is a qualified buyer. Nick, why don't we set up a zoom call? Why don't we set up a zoom call and go over it and have a face to face conversation consultatively selling the work? That is a massive one. We've probably been beating the drum enough on that. But yeah, there is a tremendous amount of art being sold on Zoom, which, by the way, everyone knows how to use. OK, I have I do hundreds of these a week. OK, hundreds. And you know what? No one has a problem doing getting their camera or mic working. It just works. Yeah. Year old people, year old people, year old people, year old people like even not a year old guy get on the zoom session and ask questions. OK, everyone knows how to do it. Right. Yeah. That's so awesome. And you know, there's a bigger thing to this right to the like one on one consultative selling. OK. And that is that, you know, all of the marketing that you do and your website, right, it's a marketing tool. It's a robot that's that should be working for you. OK, to produce emails from the traffic that you come in to generate sales, to maximize those conversions. Well, what happens when you start doing effective marketing is there's people who will buy. Right. And then there's people that like you think about it like a sales funnel. They got to the bottom and out the sales funnel. They they an order was created. But then there's people who are warm and hot. Right. That they like your stuff. They got a few questions. They're kind of like, you know, they're lingering on the edge. And by when you you have to recognize who those people are, they might comment on your posts. Right. They might DM you. They might just respond to an email, you know, like not saying like, I want to buy that. Let's hop on a call. They'll say something a little more coded. But what that is, is a warm lead. And you need to convert all of them. You need to go after all of them and you need to try to convert them. And the one on one approach is the is a very effective way to do it, especially when it's a high dollar item. Get them onto a zoom call, offer a zoom call. Right. Get them on and and then do the merchandising. Show them the pieces. Right. And the way that we just showed you. And it works really well. But make sure that you get all of those people in a one on one fashion. We call it hand to hand combat across the finish line. Again, if you're taking this passive, I just throw up a website with my 2D images approach and you're not paying attention to the warm opportunities that are being created on your social media posts and through your email list, you're blowing it. Right. That's why if you're not posting and you're not emailing and you're not doing any of that stuff and generating activity like you don't have any warm opportunities. So that's actually your biggest problem. But either way, you've got to make sure that you take this one on one approach on all, you know, from all angles.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. So it's another it's another, you know, the one on one consultative selling. It's I have this this drum that I bang nonstop about the live video and going live, whether we're talking about one to many, a live art show, your process, a zoom call consultatively. Everyone gets all wound up about doing the first one. And in these circumstances, those circumstances, lighting, camera, tripod, mics. Don't worry about the one you're going to be doing thousands of them. Everyone says like I did my first one. You know, I had no success, some success, something in between. I had fun. It was a disaster. Great. I'll go do a thousand of them now. Go do a thousand of them. And again, you know, you don't I don't wear any T-shirts to say guru. OK. I don't even know any gurus. I don't like gurus. We're doing it ourselves. OK. Eating your own dog food dot com. Why are we live five to six days a week? Have been since since the pandemic hit and more in different creative ways on different platforms and different systems every single day. Someone from myself, my team, Nick is online doing the live video, doing video consultation because we know it's the future. You need the reps and sets.

Nick Friend: Yeah. Don't get hung up. You don't have to get hung up on the live or the video. It's like if you had a retail art gallery, people would be walking in the door. Would you be nervous when somebody walked in the door? No, you're not nervous. Just when your friends come over, when you know, you're again, you're just running a retail art gallery. It just happens to be on the Internet where you have a global audience to leverage. And it's the best business model. Right. That's all it is. And so you're going to do it a thousand. You're going to do it forever. Right. Like as long as as this continues this. I mean, obviously, the virtual way of selling is is is the way of the future. And so you're going to be doing it a million times. But just look at it that way. It's very simple. The way that we look at it, Pat, right, is like we're a business to business company. Right. So our customers are artists and photographers, you guys. Right. And we want to be open for business. We're open. Like you guys can't travel to Austin, Texas, and come to our come to our headquarters. Right. And I mean, the offices are closed right now. But but regularly, not everybody could could do that. But we're open for business. You get to talk to me and Pat and other people in our company, like Taylor, other guys on the marketing team. And it's pretty amazing. And so you just look at it in that type of a way. Right. It's not a big deal.

Nick Friend: Yeah. And it gives me the opportunity to pivot. So, you know, two other big themes on the notes, which I think we have banged incessantly, which are, you know, the arts, art galleries closing and the art in the art shows and there's not coming back. I think we've covered those ad nauseum, which which lets me go to Q Thor. But one thing that I did want to read is that, you know, I've got this crazy list and firms that declared bankruptcy in 2020 Neiman Marcus, J.Crew, J.C. Penney, Brooks Brothers, Hertz, which owns Dollar and Thrifty, Lord and Taylor, True Religion, Lucky Brand Jeans, Ann Taylor, Lane Bryant, Men's Warehouse, John Varvatos, 24 Hour Fitness, Gold's Gym, GNC, Model Sporting Goods, the XFL, Sur La Table, Dinan, Luca, and, you know, one that we're all really heartbroken about, Chuck E. Cheese, California Pizza Kitchen, the U.S. arm of Le Pen Quotidien, which is, you know, a coffee shop. The sheer number of bankruptcies. And it doesn't necessarily mean some of these some of these bankruptcy can be a tool, right? A tool to get restructure some debt and come back to business. But the sheer number of retail entities. And this is the only point that I want to make on the Darth Vader's and shows the galleries, you know, that are going to declare bankruptcy that are that are about to declare bankruptcy that are going to go bankrupt, you know, especially with the galleries. Like, look, surviving one pandemic, unbelievably difficult to do. One lockdown, unbelievably difficult to do. Now, the fact that we're into a second, trying to survive that, it's just not feasible. And so I think that the final point that we can get on to Q Thor is retail is not coming back for art and photography anytime soon. Yeah, under the assumption that you can somehow wait this out, I'm worried for you.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. And there's I think I think some more data that I would put on that that I think is, you know, add some more color to it is, you know, traditionally right in in like in e-commerce. OK. There are products that have lent themselves, you know, really well to selling online. OK. Over the last 20 years, those those products of them, it's like 80 or 90 percent have been selling online the last, you know, it's got it started at 60 up to 80 or 90 percent. Right. Art and clothing, for example, are some of the products that are way slower to actually be adopted online. Why higher friction items versus lower friction? You know, it's another one cars. Right. Buying cars, renting cars, things like that, buying houses like these are all higher friction type of things. Obviously, those are at a bigger level. They're all selling online now. Right. Tesla sells 100 percent of their cars online. You literally cannot buy one offline. That's been going on for years. Right. You have to buy one in an e-commerce transaction. And so what's happened during the lockdowns during this whole period is that our art, for example, being more of like a 10 to 15 percent online item, you know, has gone to 50 to 60 percent. Right. Like like let's call it 50 or 60 percent. And so what everybody is saying and there's other items like clothing that have done the same thing, you know, and what everybody is saying is that it's like these products were just slow to get to the 80 or 90 percent. They were the last ones there. They're not going to just go up and go all the way back again, like just kidding. Right. It's everything is getting has been disrupted by the Internet. Everything every product has been that's sold online. Right. And so all that's happened is these numbers were getting greater and greater every year. The percentage of art sold online. Right. And it just accelerated itself by five or 10 years. Right. And so now that everybody has discovered the experience of buying art online and how to find it and, you know, being able to have direct relationships with the artists and photographers. Amazing. That experience is incredible. It is so much better than going to a cold retail store. Right. Or a cold retail gallery and where the artist isn't selling it direct to you. You know what I mean? And like being it and like not having to leave your home. Obviously, there's all that convenience as well.

Nick Friend: I told you this. I love watching the live art shows that our members are doing. They're super entertaining for the ones that, you know, I love their art in particular. And I get to do it in 20 or 30 minutes. I get to see the whole show. I don't have to convince my wife to go down there and make an evening of it because she didn't want to go and do that. Maybe, you know, but I just did it at 8 p.m. from 8 to 830. And I didn't even have to ask or tell anybody. And I got to see all that art. I get to buy some, you know, incredible experience.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, I think I think that covers and slaps a bow on it. We've definitely been banging the drum on that. And you know, you know, what's so funny is that the minute the shows and the fairs come back, though, we'll be right back to banging the drum and our playbook on that because we do love all channels. Right. There's some good channels, good opportunities there, and they're definitely going to come back. But people are going to be skittish for a while. It might be two years. It might be three years until they're back to. So that's important to say.

Nick Friend: Yeah, I wanted to wrap up biggest takeaways. Q4. I mean, we can't state this. And, you know, if you if you would have asked us, we sat down, we tried to project what Q4 was going to look like and sort of need to define it. Q4 is just the last three months of the year in which you have Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Cyber Week in the Christmas buying season. And what was the situation at the beginning of 2020? Positive economy, right? Good economics numbers across the board. Things were going well. We thought it would be big. We thought it would be a growth, a growth, maybe crazy. Maybe we'd grow like 25 percent. What we saw in this Q4 and again, you know, going back to the perfect storm was averaged out for us. 374 percent growth year over year of art, photography and merch sold on our customers' websites. It represents one of the most staggering levels of growth that we could ever have dreamt of seeing. OK, a massive, massive. And it speaks to the perfect storm on a whole bunch of different levels. But I think also a huge takeaway is it speaks to how Q4 driven the art and photography markets are. And it's not to say you can't sell art photography the other three quarters. Of course you can. But understanding the mechanics of how important Q4 are, understanding the mechanics of how to properly run the sale, how to get attention, eyeballs on your sale, understanding how to discount, how to omni-channel market, I believe will be as important in 2021 as it was in 2020. And I think we got out way ahead of it this time, this particular year. And next year, I'm not so certain we don't even get out even further ahead of it.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, it's going to be amazing. It is. It is a massive part of this business. Again, this is one of those. This is one of those things that it's like, how could you not be so excited for the individual artists or photographer, you know, for every one of you guys that are on this? Like it just when you're talking about that, like and I and I and I understand what happened and where things are going. Right. Because that the online market is going to be so significant going forward. All that means is is just goodness for all of you guys. The opportunity is greater. It's right there for you. There's nothing special you need to do. Right. Aside from obviously running an intelligent business. OK. You do the things that we're talking about this entire this entire lesson, like following a marketing plan, properly equipping yourself, merchandising. You know, there's obviously a lot in there. But when I say there's nothing special, you don't need any special relationships. You don't need a big distributor. You don't need some big gallery to like, you know, accept your work to change your life. You don't need any of that stuff. You can literally just make the decision, get your hands dirty and get after it now. Yeah. Right now, if you like this last year, like and we have a lot of art storefronts members, I see them in the comments. Right. Mark, Katie. Hey, guys. How are you, by the way? And Eddie. And and it's like the number one thing to do starting the year is get after it. Get after it. Take some time off for the next couple of days. And then in January, get after it. OK. Because, you know, it's all about the lead generation. Right. Building and following, you know, iterating on your business, doing some pivots, testing some new content, doing the things that the most successful people have done to build these bigger art businesses. Right. And do those things. Don't not do them. Do those things. OK. But if you want to have a big Q4, like we're talking about, if you want to have a massive Q4 next year, you've got to put the work in now all year long. OK. And you've got to put the work in next year and the next year after that and the next year after that. The people that are killing it this year, Pat, they put the work in for the last three years or five years on their dignity. Summer bodies are built in winter.

Nick Friend: Yeah. It's like it's like, you know, when I look at the people that are just like destroying it all year long, you know what I mean? Like they're the ones that are like they're they're spinning the world on their finger because they're not afraid to go live and do all the social media and the email market. They already know how to do all of it because they've taken the time to learn the skills of going direct to their audience, period. Right. Taking control of their destiny and doing that in the beginning. It was rockier, as it is for everybody, for every small business. Nobody that's successful, you guys just goes whoop, like straight up into the right. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. It's a bunch of, you know, stair step stumbles all the way up. OK. It's no different for for for them than it is for you. And you have to iterate your way there one day at a time, one step at a time. And so if you're making progress, you just keep going. But that's the way that you're going to take advantage of this big Q4 that Patrick is talking about. You've got to put the work in, you know, early on.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. It's also like we're in this for the long term. Right. And so I realized the power of repetition. Right. Like you and I, you and I started banging the drum on Q4. I mean, we must have been at it like April or May. Now I'm going to start in January because if I just ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, you'll start taking it seriously because it's it's a fundamental impact to your business.

Nick Friend: Yeah, for sure. You're just getting started. You know, perspective should be the thing that we close on. Right. Like you're going to be in this business for the rest of your life. OK. For the rest of your life. Start treating it that way and realize you only get so many shots at the Q4. Maybe you only get 30 or 40 shots at the Q4. You want to dominate it. Right. You want to do great. One's coming up every year. Right. And it's essentially what you train for all year long. Right. It's you're George Carlin or Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock, whoever your favorite comedian is. And they spend all year going to the comedy clubs all over the United States of Canada and everywhere else they can all over Europe just so they can have the HBO special. Q4 is the HBO special. But guess what? It was going to all those comedy clubs all year long, all over the United States, playing the small crowds, getting getting harangued by that person drunk on martinis in the second row and moving to the next one and all the rest of it. Right. All of that was how you had the HBO special. Right. The huge HBO special. So we're going to be banging the drum on that. You know what's going to happen, though, here because guess what? Guess what? Another big art selling holiday is right around the corner. There's a few of them all year long. Right. And mark my words. This is going to be a ridiculous art selling Valentine's Day. It's going to be same trend is going to happen. I'm calling it right now. Guaranteed. Guaranteed. OK, because we know what's going on right now across the world. Right. Like we know what's going on across the world. So nothing's changing. So what do you think is going to happen? I mean, so get ready, guys. Valentine's Day is the marketing is going to begin for Valentine's Day very soon. Very soon. So I can't wait. I'm thrilled.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. I mean, it just goes back to the perfect storm, too. Right. Like everyone's still going to be at home. There's nowhere else to buy art. There's no galleries. No, there's they're not open. So who's going to have it? Right. So here we go. It just it continues and rolls on right into Q1 of 2021. Let's do it.

Nick Friend: Yeah, I think I think that wraps the look back. And I was that was kind of fun. Sort of off the cuff a little bit. A little bit of notes. You're you're going to be doing another one that you've got in mind. What do you want to talk about that one briefly that we can talk about?

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, I just got my own CEO looking back on 2020 and looking forward to 2021, you know, about the strategies that have worked and, you know, what you should be thinking going forward. So I'm going to I've got I'm plotting that one. I've got my notes ready to go. I'll probably be dropping that in the next week or so.

Nick Friend: OK, so you're doing that. I'm also going to do a look forward, all the things that that smart artists, a smart photographer can and should be focusing on to grow their business in 2021. And I've got some some unique insights in there. Of course, it's going to build on the concepts that we covered in this already. The art business morning show is going to come back after a couple of week hiatus to close out the year. Regain one sanity, recharge the batteries. So that'll be dropping in that the episode will probably be in two. So those are all coming. But on that, Nick, a heck of a year, heck of a year.

Patrick Shanahan: It did amazing. You know, I think all things considered, I think we put Christmas lights on the porta potty.

Nick Friend: I think so, too. I think so, too. I mean, it's been it's been incredible. You know, it's been incredible. I mean, I am super excited and I'm excited for all of you guys. I mean, I literally my level of excitement couldn't be higher just because of all the things that we talked about. The situation has just really swung in your favor, guys, as individual entrepreneurs. Right. Like literally, like the amount of business that you can do, like on your own as a result of all of these changes that have happened in the world has literally just skyrocketed. Right. Your ceiling has gone all the way up. So if you just, you know, get after it and you take it seriously and you try to build a business and you stay open minded, you know what I mean? Have a good attitude, be positive and you you just let the compounding happen one foot in front of the other. Just keep getting better every day. Learning something new every day when you go to sleep. Like, you know what I mean? About business, about marketing. And you're going to be in a great spot.

Patrick Shanahan: Yep. Consistency. I mean, there's so many themes to cover, but it's going to be a wonderful year, guys. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being on the session. Have a wonderful new year and we'll see you in 2021.

Nick Friend: See you guys. Seeing it's going to be kind of fun to say that. See you in 2021. Thanks, guys.