What Are the Biggest Art Selling Times of Year?

In this episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, Patrick dives into an often overlooked but highly lucrative time for art sales—the summer season. While the fourth quarter is widely acknowledged as a peak time for selling art, Patrick reveals that summer, which spans from Mother's Day through the end of August, is the second biggest art selling period of the year. Backed by insights from nearly a decade of industry experience and data analysis, Patrick outlines the reasons for this seasonal spike, including high moving rates, less competition due to other artists taking vacations, and increased cell phone usage during downtime. He emphasizes the importance of consistent marketing and adapting pricing strategies to leverage this perfect storm of opportunities. Patrick also shares changes coming to the podcast, including featuring more voices from the Art Storefronts team and customer stories, and encourages listeners to engage and provide feedback. Tune in to learn how to make the most of the summer months and build momentum leading into the holiday season.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Coming up on today's edition of the Art Marketing Podcast, I'm asking you, what are the biggest art selling times of the year? Specifically, everybody knows the first, and everybody ignores the second. Don't be everybody.

Welcome back to another edition of the Art Marketing Podcast. I'm fired up for today's episode and what I'm going to be covering. It's nice to be back. First, I wanted to cover some housekeeping issues. You'll notice some changes coming up on the Art Marketing Podcast. Some of those changes are that we're going to start introducing some additional voices, some additional voices other than just mine. Anybody that's been listening to this show for any period of time knows that we are known for a number of things, none of which are consistency. It's been really difficult to keep this podcast going consistently with all the rest of the marketing responsibilities I have for running the marketing department at Art Storefronts. Since we started this thing, the podcast has actually, last I checked, 475,000 downloads. So, thank you all, you guys, for listening, by the way, and continuing to tune in and dealing with that lack of consistency. But anyway, what I want to start doing is introducing some new voices. We have some impressive additional members at our team as we've been growing as a company at Art Storefronts. I really want to start featuring more customers, more of their stories. I get feedback all the time, whether it's from current customers or folks I'm talking to on webinars, being like, "Dude, why can't you keep the podcast going consistently? I love the podcast. Why are you not doing that anymore?" Sometimes I get ranked on when I do Instagram Lives, and people leave it in the comments like, "When's the next episode coming?" So, I hear all of that feedback, and I really want to do that.

In terms of podcasts, I like the Joe Rogan model. Some people are into Joe Rogan, some people are not. Independent of that, it's pretty much the number one most downloaded podcast in the entire world, so it's important to study those types of things and take lessons away from it. What you see when Joe Rogan does his, he will do MMA fighters, he will do the comedians that he has coming through his club and that he does his comedy with, and then he'll have that hodgepodge mixed bag of influential guests, right? Politicians and doctors and lawyers and scientists and nationalists and UFO people and everything else. What I think is interesting about the way that he does it, which I kind of want to apply at Art Storefronts, is I like some of the super intellectual scientists slash naturalists slash health and longevity doctors and the like that he has on there. Those ones are great for me. I don't ever listen to any of the MMA fighters because MMA is just not really my jam, and most of the comedians I skip over unless I know one and I really like them. I think that's a fantastic thing about a podcast in today's day and age, that we can break it up and do it like that.

I wanted to let you know we've already dropped a couple of them recently. Brandon's been on one recently, and Nick's been on one recently. I want to do more of that because I think we have some incredible content to deliver. It won't always be my typical hard-hitting marketing details, tactical type of shows, but that's what I do. It's time to bring some other voices on and let them do their thing. You guys can let us know based on your attention, whether you download and you listen, if you like more of that content or not. If you are appreciating the podcast, I would love a review on iTunes. Let us know, give us some feedback, because that's one of the only visible ways that we can find out, unless you tweet at us or leave us a comment on Facebook or Instagram.

But enough of that, let's get into the topic du jour, which is, what are the biggest art selling times of the year? I teased in the intro that everybody knows the first and everybody ignores the second. Don't be everybody. I've been doing this for a long time now, coming up on 10 years in business and watching the ebbs and flows and seasonality in the art business. Over that period of time, I think we've grown to close to 10,000 customers now, and I get to look at the data that comes in year after year and see where the peaks and valleys are. Selling art and photography is a cyclical business, like many are. There are times where it's especially important to be selling, and there are times where it's not as important to be selling and marketing. Obviously, you want to stay consistent in your marketing and your selling all year; you have a business to run. But there are some times of the year where it is more important because you have the potential to earn significantly more revenue than you would in the others.

Peaks and valleys, right? It's kind of like if you were a sailor; there are times where the wind is blowing and you can still make progress, and there are other times where the wind is howling, and you want to get those sails up, and you can really go fast and cover a lot of ground. That's kind of what those seasons are. The season that I alluded to that everybody knows is obviously the fourth quarter. The run-up fall, anything that goes along in the fall selling season, and then the huge ones are Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the run-up to Christmas. Everybody knows that. Everybody is always so encouraged and charged up and fired up to be selling art in that season as they should be because it's one of the most important all year. But then the question becomes, all right, great, we all know that, everyone gets ready for that, everyone gets fired up and motivated. What is the second biggest time of the year? Almost no one knows this, and there are a couple of different reasons for it. I want to tell you when it is. Hint: it's right now. I'll explain why it is, some of the fundamentals that underpin this data point on why this is such an important selling season, and then we can finish off on some of the things that I think you need to be doing to best take advantage of it.

The second biggest art selling time of the year is the summer season. You could sell art and photography all year long, you should be marketing consistently all year long. The spring season, call it after the New Year's season goes down. The spring season is kind of the baseline for art sales, and that's your 1x time. Around New Year's, sort of the tail end of Christmas, is a 1.5x of baseline, so 1.5 times the amount of art is sold as in the spring season. The summer season, which we kind of kick off a little bit before, is actually, as I'm recording this, the official start of summer is this weekend with Memorial Day. But we kick it off with Mother's Day. When Mother's Day starts, essentially till the end of August, is the second biggest art selling time of the year before the run-up to Q4, the last quarter of the year, the last three months of the year, with the Black Friday, Cyber Monday run-up to Christmas. It's a huge selling time, and almost no one understands this, almost no one talks about it, there's not a high level of motivation. I have to constantly bang the drum and get my customers excited. What's beautiful about it is it really leads into the biggest, which is the holiday season, which is a 5x from the spring season baseline. Around New Year's, 1.5x, spring, 1x. With the start of Mother's Day, it goes into a 3x period, and at the end of the year, it's a 5x. That is essentially the cyclical nature of the up and down of an art business and selling art and photography online and off.

You want to put yourself in a position as an artist. Yes, of course, you have to be active during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but summer is an absolute winner, and there are some reasons for this. I want to get into those reasons so it'll make a little bit more sense. There's a total confluence of events that happen in the summer, which I think is very impressive. First, I want to explain something conceptually why the fourth quarter, Black Friday, Cyber Monday are so huge. As artists, as photographers, and really as any merchants trying to sell things online, you benefit significantly when the biggest brands, biggest businesses, biggest merchants, biggest shops spend massively on advertising. This is why Black Friday and Cyber Monday are so huge, and why the run-up to Christmas is so huge. All of those brands are spending, and all those businesses are spending so much money on advertising that the combined effect just whips all of us human beings into a frothy state of being on that trigger finger and getting that credit card ready and wanting to spend money. It's like you can't avoid it, right? You couldn't live your life unless you were with no cell phone, living in the wilderness, and not be exposed to the billboard ads and the print ads and the radio ads and the TV ads and the painted windows in shops. It's everywhere during that fourth quarter. As artists and photographers, when we understand that people are more actively spending money in that time because these big brands are spending so much money on advertising, we can kind of water ski behind that increase in ad spend and the demand that it generates, and we can get some exposure to it as well.

Summer is the next greatest in that entire cycle. When you look at it, the holidays, the art selling holidays, just holidays in general, in which all of these types of local businesses and big-box stores and massive brands like Amazon are running sales. May starts, and in there we've got Mother's Day, and then comes Memorial Day, and then comes Father's Day, and then comes that whole range of summer sales. Then we've got Fourth of July, then we've got Amazon Prime Day, which, by the way, has turned out to be a fantastic day to run a sale because we've been doing it three years, four years in a row now. We've been advising our customers to run a Prime Day sale, and my goodness, Prime Day is massive. But we'll get more into that as it's coming up. Then you've got the end of summer sale. Each one of those selling opportunities, no different than what we see during Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Christmas, all of that, there are different brands and stores and local merchants and even mattress shops and everything in between. They're all running massive promotions for those things, for Mother's Day, for Memorial Day, for Father's Day, for summer, Fourth of July. They're going to be spending those ad dollars, which is going to whip all of us up into a frenzy. There are deals, they are expiring, it's creating scarcity, and there's discounts. I need to be shopping. So when your art or your photography are mimicking when these incredible sales are going on, then you stand to benefit from them. All of those holidays are a really big one, and if those holidays were the only thing that existed on the calendar in summer, that would be enough. But that is just the start of what supercharges summer into the second biggest art buying time of the year. I want to talk at a high level of three of these, and then I'll go into detail. These are the three events that supercharge, that are force multipliers to what already exists on the calendar in terms of sales.

One, moving is at an all-time high, peaks during the summer months. You can look to U-Haul for this data. There are more people moving in the summer than at any other time all year long. Number two, most artists and photographers are oftentimes either doing the show circuit in the summer, or they just don't market consistently or sell consistently all year long in summer because they're taking a break. It's wonderful weather, they're going on vacations, right? They're enjoying it, they're outside, they're not working on their marketing. Number three, which is sort of the profound one here, which I can't wait to get into last, is access to attention in the summer months is at an all-time high. Let me get into that in a second. First, I want to talk about the moving. This one is obvious, you guys. Anytime somebody moves, you have to redecorate after you get through the nightmare that is moving that we all hate, right? Death, taxes, and moving. You have to decorate. There's new wall space, there is the ability for your art or photography to get on that wall space. A tremendous amount of art emerges sold as people start to redecorate, re-ness, get the houses going. The busiest months for moving are between May and September. The weather is nicer, the warmer weather, longer daylight hours, no rain, no snow, much easier time to move. For those of us with kids, we understand all too well school schedules. I mean, good Lord, my kids are about to be on summer break, kill me now. School schedules, let's get moved, let's get settled, let's get the kids into the right school district, moved, settled, all of that. Lease cycles, okay? Leases also come up primarily right before summer, right around summer to maximize the revenue the landlords and tenants can get. So more leases renew as a percentage of total leases during the summer months than any other time all year. And as a final, employment opportunities, you know, the current work from home trends aside, summer is the most popular time for job transfers and relocations. It's better to get them in, settled in the summer, where they can hit the ground running at the end of the year. So you combine the fact that all of those summer sales opportunities that I alluded to, all of the holidays, with the fact that more people are moving, and that is just another reason why this season is just the biggest and the best for selling art. It supercharges what are already incredible facts on the ground, right?

Next, most artists and photographers are either doing shows or not marketing consistently during the summer months. One thing I know conclusively, which is a fact, is that the number one thing that suffers in anybody listening to this art or photography business when life happens, i.e., you're doing fairs or shows, or you're taking it easy in the summer months, your kids are home from school, the weather's nice outside, you want to be outside, you want to be visiting with friends, the vacations and everything else, the number one thing that suffers in your business when life happens is the damn marketing and selling. You post less on the socials, you send less emails, and you're generally less active in any marketing or selling modality. I know this because I see it. Everything drops off in the summer with my customers, and it has every single solitary year, no matter how much I bang the drum and get them motivated. So there are less people, i.e., artists and photographers, posting to socials, sending emails, running promotions. That means there's significantly less competition for you, the artist or photographer that is attempting to sell and market in those times. This is profoundly impactful to what you can achieve in terms of ROI. The ROI is return on investment of the marketing, of the selling, of the emailing, of the social posting, of the live art shows that you do in the summer. It's so important to understand that when you have less competition, you stand to get more eyeballs on your art, on your photography, on your emails, on your sales.

Then the next, the third, is attention during the summer months is at an all-time high. What do I mean by that? Picture what happens when folks take time off in the summer and they're spending more time outside and they're taking time off work and they're unplugging. Given the world that we live in right now, that means they are spending an inordinate amount of time on their cell phones. Think to your own user behavior. How much more are you on the phone when you're on vacation, when you're sitting by that pool, sitting by that lake, sitting by the ocean at the beach, outside enjoying the backyard, doing all of these things? Cell phone use spikes during these summer months. One of the things that I've been pounding into my customers' heads so much recently, ever since we really got fired up on the whole merch program, is how important merch is to sell as an artist or a photographer. Why? Why do I say that? Hint: spoiler alert, it's not because you're going to get rich selling merch. No one does unless they sell thousands and thousands and thousands. But do you know what the merch represents for someone that's been doing digital marketing for as long as I have? It represents to me any piece of merch you sell: the calendar, the coaster, the coffee mug, the wooden spoon, the magnets, the stickers, I don't care, whatever it is that you do, the tote bags. It represents a Facebook or an Instagram ad with you 24/7, or in your house, or in your cabinet, or on your coffee table, or on the garage fridges in the form of a sticker that I simply cannot get to any other way. I can go onto Facebook and Instagram and I can spend money on paid ads, and do you know when those paid ads get you? Or I can go into my email service provider and send you guys an email, and do you know when that email gets you? When you're on your phone or when you're on your computer. There are no special ads placements on Facebook or Instagram, sadly, that let me put something onto your refrigerator or let me put something on your coffee table or in your kitchen cabinet or on your couch in the terms of a throw pillow or on the kitchen wall in terms of a calendar. That's why merch is so profound, because it has the ability to get your attention when you're not on the cell phone, when you're not on the computer.

What we want to do as business owners is we want to maximize our marketing messages, especially in this digital context in which we live in now, i.e., our social posts, yes, Instagram feed posts, yes, Instagram videos, and yes, reels, and yes, stories, and yes, Facebook posts, and yes, live broadcasts, and yes, email sales promotions, all of it. You want to do those and maximize those when the highest number of people are in the venue in which you're broadcasting. It turns out the summer is one of the best times to do that. Cell phone usage and computer usage, especially laptops, spikes when you're on vacation, primarily cell phone. There's less distractions, people have less time going on, they like casually unplugging, they're on their phones, browsing Instagram, browsing Facebook. One of the most profound things that we've lived through, unprecedented things that we've lived through in our lives recently, everyone listening to this is COVID. When COVID happened and those lockdowns happened is when this got so cemented in my mind. I would be doing my live broadcasts for Art Storefronts, talking about whatever I was talking about at the time. Pre-COVID, let's say there would be like 100 people on. In COVID, there would be like 5,000 people on a broadcast. The jump in the amount of attention I was able to get because so many people were on lockdown and on their phones and on their computers, because what the heck else did any of us have to do, was insane. Now, I'm not saying that summer is anywhere near one of the most unprecedented things in history that we've all lived through, i.e., the COVID lockdowns, but let me tell you, it's about as good as it gets. It is at an all-time high. When you contemplate that, the posts, the emails you send, the live broadcasts, live art shows that you do, the marketing, the sales promotions, you stand to get way more attention in the summer than just about any time all year long. That is how you reach people. The more eyeballs you get, the more people that are gonna click, like, share, go to your website, send you a direct message, and yes, purchase your art or photography.

So, when you rewind this whole thing back, we start out with all these incredible holidays that happened, all of which present an opportunity for you to have sales and promotions on your various different things. Then all of the advertising dollars that whip all of us into a frenzy looking for the deals and get our fingers just a little bit closer to that credit card. Then the fact that everyone's moving and walls are there and decoration needs to happen, huge force multiplier. Then the fact that all artists and photographers usually take this time off, so there is less competition. And then finally, more people are on their cell phones and more people are on their laptops because of the downtime. It honestly creates a perfect storm. It creates a perfect storm where the photographer or the artist has more access to attention that is receptive to buy than at any other time all year long. It's why the summer is the second biggest art selling season of the year, and yet no one talks about this. No one ever tells you about this. People are not motivated to do anything, and it's the second best opportunity that there is. Not only that, momentum being a thing, what it does when you take the summer season seriously is you're building momentum going into the greatest art selling time of the year. What am I advocating for here? I want you guys to start taking your vacations in spring, and then I want you to grind it out all summer long. I don't mean that literally, but it is the second best time all year to sell art. It just is. When you realize this, you start taking your business a little bit more seriously. You start realizing this is the time to invest in my marketing and really hit it hard, and then not only if I do that, things are just going to get better all the way to the end of the year. Phenomenal.

Now I want to address the elephant in the room. As I'm recording this, it's 5/25/2023. We are in some frothy, uncertain economic times. Interest rates are damn near an all-time high. Not an all-time high, but interest rates are at a very high clip. Inflation at a high clip. Just general economic uncertainty, layoffs happening all over the place. So, surely that means art is not going to be selling during these periods of time, right? Absolutely wrong. Erroneous. We as a business at Art Storefronts, as a result of some of the things that we've been doing, which I don't want to get into on this podcast, but I will in the future. We saw the biggest weeks of art sales in the history of our company outside of Black Friday, Cyber Monday as a result of the Mother's Day sales that our customers ran. It was almost 91% growth year over year of total art and photography, sculpture, crafts sold from our customers' websites than the year previous. How the hell did that happen in a recession? The data surprised me. Then I dove into the data because we track this, and here was the unique thing that happened. Yes, our sales almost doubled a couple of weeks, and then it was like 50 or 60% growth year over year on a few of them. But you know what happened? The AOV, AOV stands for average order value, was down about 20 to 25% from the year previous. So what does that tell me? It tells me that absolutely art and photography and merch are still selling. It's selling incredibly, but the price point sensitivity has come down a little bit. That's the important lesson. No matter what, art and photography and your merchandise will sell. In times of economic uncertainty, in times where the economy is in a bumpy place, people are still spending. They're just not spending as much.

When I drop podcast episodes and do my blog posts and do my lives, one of the best pieces of content that I've created recently is how to price your art. You can go back a few podcast episodes and you can listen to it. When you have the proper range of pricing, you are set up to capitalize on this type of situation during economic uncertainty. The artist or the photographer that has stuff priced from zero to a hundred dollars, including non-wall art, is a part of the lineup. Merch of any stripe, doesn't matter what it is: photo books, calendars, yoga mats, iPhone cases, hand-painted wooden spoons, magnets, greeting cards, postcards, I don't care. I see all of it doing well. You have prices from 100 to a thousand, and you have prices over a thousand. When you have the entire range of pricing set up, when we're in one of these economic uncertain times, it doesn't affect you as much. What people will do is they will look at your entire range of pricing, they'll settle on whatever they think they would have spent back then, and then they're going to just go down a couple of steps. That's what we do. We don't pay retail for things when things are economically uncertain. Because human beings are so wired for comparison when we make our buying decisions and choices, we anchor onto one price and we say, "Oh, that's expensive. I get that. Maybe two years ago, things were going great economically, I'd get that." So, what I want to do instead, I'm going to anchor onto that high price, and then I'm going to go two rungs below it, and that's what I'll get. That's what I'll buy. Instead of the original, I'm gonna buy the limited edition. Instead of the limited edition, I can't afford those right now, I'm just going to get some great metal prints. Instead of those big metal prints, I'm just going to get some small paper prints. We just end up stepping down. So, the artist or the photographer that is seeing to their lineup and has their pricing range set up appropriately, it really does not affect them that much. It's the artists that are stuck on their pricing with their originals and limited editions and high dollar, high ticket amounts. They're like, "This is terrible. Nothing's selling." Yeah, nothing's selling because you don't have a range of pricing. All they see is, "This is full price, I can't afford this, I'm out." But when you have the range of pricing, you're totally in good shape.

So, coming into these summer months, regardless of what the facts are on the ground, economically speaking, whether they get better or worse, it doesn't matter. Art with photography is still going to sell. It is going to be the artist and the photographers that understand the second biggest art selling time of the year is upon us. It is time not to take our foot off the gas, but instead to step on the gas, to be even more consistent, and to ride that wave to capitalize on this perfect storm ahead of Q4. I'm gonna need to start pounding this everywhere. I need to get my customers more motivated. I want to get you guys more motivated that this is absolutely a fantastic time to be in the game. On that note, thanks for listening, and as always, have a great time.