You want to sell 15k of art this year. Good. Q4 is coming and its time to get ready.
In this episode of Art Business Mornings, Patrick and Nick focus on the importance of Q4, the peak art-selling season (October to December). They discuss strategies for turning a hobbyist art endeavour into a profitable business, emphasizing the significance of consistent marketing and preparation starting now. Key points include the impact of online sales growth due to COVID-19, the necessity of building a robust online presence, and new features in Art Storefronts designed to increase average order value. They also highlight the success of live art shows and the importance of maintaining a collector list. The episode concludes with an encouragement to take advantage of Art Storefronts' summer sale for those looking to boost their art business in time for Q4.
Podcast Transcribe
Patrick Shanahan: Morning, everybody! Everybody alright? Coming up on today's edition of the Art Business Mornings, we're really just talking about Q4, some facts on the ground. By Q4, we'll define that as the fourth quarter, the biggest art-selling time of the year. Just sticking to my normal programming notes, welcome to another Business Art Business Mornings, the show that will put you on the path to a six-figure-a-year-plus art business. Stated another way, Nick, which is becoming one of my hot button ones...
Nick Friend: Stop being a hobbyist. Stop being a hobbyist, right? There's a whole lot of artists, a whole lot of photographers, many of which are hobbyists. They don't want to be hobbyists; they want to have full-time businesses. Guess what? This is some great advice on how to go from hobbyist to actual business with paying customers. Maybe that's just getting to the ground, maybe that's turning your side hustle into something more significant, or maybe that's moving your side hustle into your full-time job.
Patrick Shanahan: Either way, that's the success we're attempting to advocate for, right?
Nick Friend: Yeah, and I mean, it depends on everybody's got a different desired outcome level. Some people just want to have a side business and make a little extra money on the side from their art or photography. Some people want to make $100,000 or more a year and turn it into a full-time business, like a real thing. Obviously, whatever effort you're going to put into it is what you're going to get out, right? Plus strategy. All that stuff is what's going to build a business in any industry. It doesn't matter if it's just art or photography.
Patrick Shanahan: Right, and I think the key thing here, the biggest point to talk about, is that we're at the end of July, right? We know that if you want to get...well, I should say this: we know that the fourth quarter, Q4, in other words, October, November, December, is the biggest art-selling time of the year every single year. If you don't sell the most amount of art in that period, then you are always leaving money on the table and you're underperforming. You've got to take advantage of that time. For most artists and photographers, 50% or more of their sales come during that time.
Nick Friend: We're getting reports that you have an echo on your end. Can you turn your speakers down even more?
Patrick Shanahan: Turn my speakers down on which side? Is it on Facebook?
Nick Friend: On Facebook, yeah, on the laptop.
Patrick Shanahan: Just on the laptop? There's no speakers on. So it's got to be the echo on your side.
Nick Friend: How would it be echoing on my side? I don't have anything turned on. Let me see. I'm turning on the echo cancellation.
Patrick Shanahan: I'll turn mine on too. Check, check. Is that better? Guys, let us know on Facebook if that sorts the echo.
Nick Friend: Keep going. I think it did.
Patrick Shanahan: So yeah, knowing that the fourth quarter is the biggest art-selling time of the year and it's coming, it's only a couple of months away, now is the time that you've got to really get your art business in gear, whether you're launching it for the first time or you've had one for a while. Right now is when you want to step on the gas on your marketing and build your audience as much as possible. If you do that and you're all prepared, then at the start of the fourth quarter, you're going to have the best fourth quarter that you've ever had. And you should, because with everything that's gone on in our economy and how much of the art business has gone online...do you realize that online e-commerce...if total e-commerce sales have gone from 9% to 25% in one year?
Nick Friend: 9% to 25%?
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. The stat that I like, the way to spin it that I like even better, is 10 years of e-commerce growth, and by which I mean the percentage of total commerce that has transacted online versus retail brick and mortar, got sandwiched into eight weeks over COVID.
Nick Friend: Yeah, that's a staggering quantum play. There's just tons of opportunity on the table. Art is selling like crazy, and this Q4 is going to be the biggest ever. If you guys heard it right now, your timing is absolutely perfect to take your business more seriously if you've thought about it, your art business. If you want to make some money from it and take it to the next level, maybe you're already selling $20,000 or $40,000 a year and you want to take that to $100,000, or maybe you just want to start and go from zero to $10,000 or whatever it is. Right now, you're getting the warning shot. If you start at the beginning of Q4, what happens if you decide to run a marathon tomorrow with zero training? Is that going to be a positive experience for you or no?
Patrick Shanahan: It is not.
Nick Friend: Exactly. You've got to warm up your audience. You need to build that audience as big as possible. It's the perfect time. It's a great wake-up call for everybody that's out there listening to this. It's also extremely exciting, like this is such an exciting time, knowing that that's coming and knowing what's going on in the economy with art sales and all of that. It's super exciting. It's right there for all of you.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, and I would also say too, we've been doing this for a while now, you and I, like seven, eight years, right? Hardcore focused, and when you have the hindsight that experience creates, you realize fundamentally how this business operates. This business operates on normal marketing, sale, normal marketing, sale. The sales are critically important, but guess what? The normal marketing you do before the sales is just as important.
Nick Friend: Everybody wants to talk about how they don't want to be a hobbyist and they want to have a good and robust business, but what everyone doesn't understand is the marketing that you do right now. Why we are banging this drum today, we have year after year after year of historical data in which a large portion of our customer base sells more in Q4, in one quarter, from October to the end of the year, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all the pre-sales, Christmas sales, even New Year's sales. The majority of our customers sell more in one quarter than they do the other three combined. That is under normal circumstances. Last year, not normal circumstances. As we look forward to where we are, the facts on the ground right now, July, with October and Q4 starting, this Delta variant is terrifying. It's in the news more and more headlines. Without getting political about any aspect of it, I know one thing for certain, the more drum beating there is with these news articles, and you're in Texas, I'm in California, just north of me in California, mask mandates are back in Los Angeles, restaurants are closing. People are not going to be going out. If we get into a winter and it's a cold winter and, God forbid, this Delta variant crops up, all this does is further underscore how important starting your marketing, making sure your art is up on a website that you can take credit card and sell, and getting ready for this Q4 period. Everyone is going to be gun-shy; they're not going to want to go out. The show and the show circuit is going to be obliterated. People are going to be staying home, and they're going to have the same disposable income, and they're going to be stuck in their houses again. Guess what? Art and photography, just like home decor, is going to be phenomenal again. To your point earlier, and we're going to publish the data after it's all over, my guess is this will be the biggest Q4 for art and photography sales ever. It's going to do with everything; it has to do with the e-commerce penetration, it's going to have to do with this COVID scare, it's going to have to do with everyone still being at home, and the work that you put in now, it is a marathon that is coming. You have to start doing the 1K and the 2K and the 3K and the 4K and the 5K training runs. Those training runs that get you ready for the marathon are the marketing that you put in between now and the end of the year.
Patrick Shanahan: We bang the drum here as much for our customers as we do for anyone else because we want them mentally prepped. We want them mentally ready. We want them in a position where it's like, "Okay, I get it." Where is my mind? Oh, it's July, the weather outside is beautiful, it's vacation time, and that's well and good. Enjoy your vacation, but understand that the marketing starts now. You've got to start doing this. You've got to get ready, and you've got to get prepared for what will be the biggest Q4 for online sales, live large show sales, and just home decor in general. It's going to be another whirlwind, and it's coming.
Nick Friend: Back to the Delta variant, the big story there, the big message for small business owners, is that it's not necessarily just about the Delta variant. It's the fact that the virus mutates. That's what they do. There will be future ones. There's a likelihood that there will be future ones. A lot of the experts are talking about that. What does that mean for you? How do you create a strong, anti-fragile business? The way you're going to do that is by
making sure that you have robust online capabilities, fully equipped in every way. You're not dependent upon the in-person stuff. The same lessons everybody learned, the same lessons all of you, that we've been talking about for over a year now. How many artists, Patrick, came to Art Storefronts and joined Art Storefronts over the last year that were like, "My gosh, my entire business was doing art shows," or "My entire business was with art galleries, and they're all closed. Literally, I went to having zero dollars of income coming in, and I was making $10,000 or $15,000 a month." They were just coming in from everywhere.
Patrick Shanahan: The bigger point is that in this new world that you live in, the less you are dependent, the less the rug can get pulled out from underneath you. Whatever type of business you're in, the more anti-fragile your business is.
Nick Friend: That's really important. We're getting some questions. We haven't done this in a while. People are asking about Instagram and TikTok and changing what all that looks like. Let me just take that weight off your mind. None of that stuff is anything that you need to stress about in the slightest. Every platform is going to change. They're going to make little tweaks. They're going to do this, that, or the other. The reality is that that's down there in the weeds. We don't want to be down there in the weeds. We want to be up here at the high level. At the high level, is Instagram still a visual platform? Yes, it is. Do they still have all the attention? Yes, they do. Is it still driving business results for a massive amount of our customers? Yes, it is. Are the changes and tiny little tweaks that they make something to worry about? Absolutely not. Everyone loves getting in the weeds. I'm not picking on you out of the community, out of the comments.
Patrick Shanahan: Don't name them then.
Nick Friend: I'm not picking on you. I'm giving you a lesson from a massive amount of experience, which is, everyone likes to dwell on the various different things that don't matter. Trust me, I've had a career of doing this for now. You've got to just focus on consistent marketing, focus on what you can control, which is the input, the effort, and the thoughts that you're adding to your marketing on the platforms that are still working. Instagram is still a phenomenal, phenomenal one.
Patrick Shanahan: Absolutely phenomenal one. Also, to answer the other part of his questions, what is Art Storefronts with marketing? That's an easy one to answer. We go exactly where the success is. We are constantly testing, literally running marketing campaigns on our own and testing and probing all of these different things like TikTok, Pinterest, and everything. Wherever that success is actually happening for selling art or photography, we turn that into a playbook and a resource for our members only. That's just a permanent principle of this company. We will always be on the forefront of what is working right now.
Nick Friend: Another way to say it is that I say this all the time. It's not really a fair fight anymore. The reason it's not a fair fight anymore is we're, I think, a little bit over 5,700 customers now that are doing all types of marketing in all types of various different venues. I have an entire team within the company that just studies the best-selling artists. Who's selling the most originals? Who's selling the highest volume of originals? Who's selling the highest price point originals? Who's selling the cheapest originals? Who's selling the most commissions? What about metal prints? What about canvas prints? What about framed prints? What about classes? Who's running the most sales? Who's capturing the most emails? Who's the best on Instagram? What are they doing? What does it look like? How much are they posting? What type of content is resonating? When you start studying things that way and you're studying from people actually making money and growing significant businesses, it gives you this incredible filter to filter everything else out. One of the most important things I believe that we do for our customers is not tell them where to market and how to market. Don't get me wrong, that's critically important. The most important thing is telling them where not to market.
Patrick Shanahan: So true.
Nick Friend: Not to waste their time on shiny objects. Now, don't get me wrong, we chase down every single shiny object there is if it looks like it could be a viable source for traffic and revenue. If it's not, get it out of the way and ignore it. Our job more than anything else is just stay in your lane. Trust me, we know this lane is creating revenue for our customers. You don't need to worry about these outside peripheral things that are nonsense. They just suck your attention up. You're worrying about things, and it's kind of...it is so fundamental to what we do.
Patrick Shanahan: Also, at the end of the day, one of the most important things in terms of marketing is all of you guys that are listening to this call, I love this line, you guys have something in common with Elon Musk. I don't know if you knew that. We have something in common with Elon Musk. It's called 24 hours in a day. You have 24 hours in a day. When you break that down to whatever portion of those hours that you have to devote to your marketing, our position is, I know how you're going to get the highest ROI out of that hour. ROI is the return on investment, return on time, treasure, effort, talents, all of that. Our job as a marketing department at Art Storefronts is to say to our customers, these are the things that we have identified as high ROI marketing activities, techniques, and tactics. Am I absolutely mandating that you can only do these and no other ones? Of course not. We're a living business. But at the same time, this is what I want you focused on. This is where I have the data that's actually turning into sales.
Nick Friend: So-and-so told me about this. For the last month, do you know how many people have come and talked to me about NFTs? Do you know how much time I've had to waste talking about and responding to NFTs? Do I love NFTs? I do. Do I love crypto? I do. You and I both love crypto, always have loved crypto. The ROI of worrying about that versus doing your normal marketing is not even close. It's not even a sport. What's happened with NFTs? Big, big boom, and then all of a sudden, quieted down. A whole bunch of people wasted a whole bunch of time exploring, trying to figure something out with NFTs. What results did they get as a result of it? Zero, nothing, zip. That was a distraction. It was a shiny object. It has nothing to do with how we feel about them ideologically or technologically or anything else. The point is, to Nick's point, what is creating ROI now? What is going to create ROI now to the end of the year? Don't misunderstand this. Our focus is on people that want to grow a real business and derive income, not be hobbyists. If you want to be a hobbyist, all good. Make that decision. Make that decision that you want to be a hobbyist, that you're doing your art, your photography for fun, and that's all good for you. If you want to grow a business, then let's take it seriously. The point of the business is to create a customer. That's what we're focused on.
Nick Friend: Back to the focus thing, what not to focus on and how important that is, what does everybody tell us, Pat? They don't have time. I don't have time. I don't have enough time to spend on marketing or this and that. I don't want to put...how many hours in the day is it going to take for me to put into my marketing? Oh my goodness, it's literally every person, right? Every single person is just like, what's the least amount that I can do to work on my business yet make $100,000 a year? First of all, just forget that. If the first thing in your head is, what's the least amount of time I can put into a business? Just forget it. Understand your expectations need to be very low for what you're going to get out of it. By definition, you will never, ever get to the heights. All of the people that are selling over $100,000 a year, they're working at it. You think they got lucky, but they put in years of work into it. As a rule, there is no such thing as luck. Nobody just woke up and did nothing or just sprinkled a couple of emails out there and a couple of social posts, and all of a sudden, they're selling $100,000 a year. It never, ever is the case. It's important to have the right expectations. If you are one of those people, because there are a lot of you legitimately out there who have a job, or you're a stay-at-home mom or dad, you've got responsibilities. You also may have lower expectations, like, hey, if I could make another $10,000 a year, if I could make vacation money for my family, that's a huge win. Now we've got free vacations. If I can make an extra this or that on my talent from my photography or from my painting skills, that's a win. If you're in that position, the number one thing that you actually want or need is, what do I need to spend those hours on to get the highest return on my time? I'm not the guinea pig making all the mistakes on how to not email the right way, how to do social media the right way, how to not run promotions and sales, how
to not price your artwork the right way, and on and on and on. The value of having exactly what to work on is, you're totally right, it's the main value. Everything else, this ocean of stuff that's going to lead you down the wrong track and frankly just get you discouraged. There's nothing more discouraging when you're starting out or if you're at a certain level and you're doing all the different stuff, and you're reading blog posts, and you're researching, and somebody says something, and you're dragged over there. You're doing this, and that didn't work. Then you see something on Twitter or some news article, and you think that you should go do that. Facebook shopping or blah, blah, blah, and then your Pinterest is all over the place, and it doesn't work. Then you're left as this entrepreneur who's just like, oh my gosh, you're pulling your hair out with frustration, and it's a nightmare.
Patrick Shanahan: It's really important. The way that we're talking about it, if you don't have mentors that are really successful, that are thousands of dollars or more a year, or something like that, you need to get those, whether you work with us or not. That's obviously what we're all about. It's the right information in a truncated format, step-by-step playbook, exactly across the board, whether it's with Facebook ads or Instagram ads or email marketing, literally the entire mix of growing an art business. One way or another, you need that information, one way or another. This is a principle of any entrepreneurship in any industry. It's not just this business. If you're starting a business in another industry, the same logic applies. You should figure out what is working, and you should do that by understanding what is working for businesses that are similar to yours as possible, and spend no time on anything else.
Nick Friend: I would say a couple of things. One, for everyone on Instagram, you want to see someone doing their marketing, scroll up to who just joined this feed and look at what Joan is doing. He just came out with an amazing documentary. Shout out on that thing, brother. I watched it. What are the three most important things? I've got to qualify this for a second because some of you guys don't know who I am, don't know what I do on a daily basis. I have been running what we call art business workshops. These are Zoom sessions for folks that are not customers of Art Storefronts. There's anywhere from 30 to 100 artists and photographers on every single solitary one. I've been doing that three days a week since essentially the end of February, March. The sheer number of artists and photographers that I have talked to over the last year and a half, I often say it's not hyperbole. I don't think there's another human being on the planet that talks to more artists and photographers on a week-in, week-out basis than I do. You do that long enough, and pattern recognition becomes a thing. Certain trends emerge. As we talk about marketing, to state it another way, let's say I'm a doctor, and I'm attempting to get you healthy, and you have a marketing problem. The first thing that I'm going to do is work on the consistency. Work on the consistency because what do all artists and photographers do before anything else? They get all fired up. This is my time to market. I'm going to do it. They go and do it for a month or two months or three months. They don't see the results instantaneously because no one's explained to them the perspective of how long things take once you start marketing. Then they quit. Then the year goes by, they don't do anything. Then the new year starts. It's like committing to a gym membership or the fact that you're going to work out in January. Then by the time February, March rolls around, you're working out once a month and you're eating cheeseburgers. The consistency is number one. One of the most difficult things that we've faced as a business is, how do you get people to market consistently? By which I mean, you have one hour a week to give me. Fantastic. I need that one hour a week, 52 weeks a year, no excuses. Then we're going to reevaluate and see where we're going to put our extra energy. It is the number one thing, the only thing that moves mountains. That's the number one, the most important. Number two is honestly getting rid of the distractions and shiny objects. The ability to say, hey, this is what's going to provide you the ROI. Do not worry about anything else. I don't care what your cousin said about SEO. I don't care about NFTs, $10 million, sell $100 million in art sold by Beeple in 24 hours, or any of these other nonsense shiny objects because I know none of those are creating revenue for my customers. I am telling you conclusively, knock that nonsense off. Pinterest, a whole bunch of other ones that we make recommendations on. The third is actually, okay, now that you're marketing consistently, now that you're going to ignore all these shiny objects, the third is, here's what to focus on and here's how you do it. All the education that we provide, the guide to running a live art show, how to post on Instagram, how to post on Facebook, how to omnichannel market, how to run a sale, how to announce a sale, how to tease a sale, how to contemplate the discounts, what to do during the sale, how to extend the sale, all of those various different things. You would think it's like, okay, give me the education and then tell me what to ignore and then teach me to do it consistently. Uh-uh. Teach me to do it consistently, show me what to ignore, and then here's the hardcore tactical. If I was a doctor, that would be how I would write the prescription. I see it time and time and time again.
Patrick Shanahan: To the very first point that you mentioned, which is like, most artists, they try a couple of things and then they don't have the perspective. They think fish jump into their boat right after they start selling their art or launch their art business. I think the biggest, biggest line on this, the biggest point to get across to everyone, and you guys listen up on this, you can Google this phrase. You can Google it: 99% of all Shopify stores fail. 99% of all Shopify stores fail. That's not a knock on Shopify. Insert Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, WordPress, BigCommerce, anybody. Why is it? Because just because you have a website, it doesn't mean you have a business. What you have is a glorified business card. The website companies are really, really good at, hey, it's so easy to start a business, you can do it today, $29 a month or $5 a month, whatever it is. You have all these people who are paying subscriptions, and they don't have a business because you don't have a business until you have a marketing engine. A marketing engine is not a marketing tactic. It is a perpetual thing that generates leads in a funnel. You want to think about a sales funnel. You've got to put leads in the top, and then a percentage of those leads will turn into sales. You have to figure out and you have to create an engine of growth where there isn't a flow of new people going in the top so that some people can come out the bottom. We commonly call this the marketing problem. The reason that 99% of all Shopify stores fail, the point there is, the stat, it's like 99% of all businesses fail within the first five years. It's like 90% or 80%, and then it goes up to 98%. It's consistent with that number. Why is that, Pat? It's because people don't understand effort. You've got to fail a lot and win a few times. Most of what you're going to do is not going to work. But three out of ten things that you do probably will. That's the way that it goes. If you actually have the right perspective about what's going to happen with your business and how you'll have misses but then you'll have wins, then you don't get down on yourself. You don't have to get depressed about the times where you've lost. You can persevere and outlast everybody else. As long as you're having continual growth every year and each year is better than the last year, then you're on the path.
Nick Friend: We have a photographer, one of our members, Bill Wenzel. I've heard about his post stats over the last three years as an Art Storefronts member. His first year was, I want to say, it was like...I'm going to throw out some numbers. His first year was like $5,000. His second year was like $12,000 in sales. His third year, it's like $75,000. He's on pace to be over $100,000 this year. Why? Because when he started out, he started out as a talented photographer where people told him, you should sell your work. Maybe he sold a little bit here and there. But then over time, after doing direct marketing, after failing and having things not work and not getting the sales he wanted, he started understanding what his customers really wanted and which images he was taking that were really resonating. Then he started testing new images, going, wait a minute here, my audience likes these, maybe they'll like some of these. He started testing, testing, testing, and then boom, he hit it. He hit the right content. Then he paired the right content with a great, phenomenal marketing strategy. Boom, year three was the one where he went up. But he persevered through all of it. He persevered through all of it. To go through that, you have to iterate your way there. You will never start a business with the perfect idea and the perfect strategy. It perhaps
never happened. No successful entrepreneur that I know has ever had that happen. There's a long history of...Apple started off as this, or Samsung started off as a microwave company or something. So many started off differently and iterated their way to become a big success, nationally successful. There's some great stories there.
Patrick Shanahan: You mentioned Bill and his numbers. I love the side note on Bill, which is like, I'm thinking about quitting my job this year. We're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't quit your job. This is going too good. Keep pouring the money back into the business. Let's just take Bill Wenzel, right? I like giving it real numbers and teeth because everyone likes to talk, oh, a successful artist. Okay, well, that's nebulous. What the hell does a successful artist mean? We need to give it some teeth. I always cite this book because I really like it. It's not like the art industry has a bunch of data down at the Census Bureau where you can just audit it and take a look at it. There's this book called "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark," and it's the curious case of the contemporary art market. It was written 10 years ago. You can find it on Amazon. It's an amazing book. I cite it all the time. What's really interesting is they have some hardcore stats in there. We talk about Bill Wenzel and the fact that he's over six figures a year now, and the business is growing and it keeps going. Some stats from "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark": the number of artists in residence in London is 40,000. The number of artists in residence in New York is 40,000. That's 80,000 total artists. Out of that 80,000 total artists, 75 out of the 80,000, 0.09%, are superstar artists selling over a million dollars a year. The pros, we're going to axe them out. The next tier down, over $100,000, under a million, so anywhere from $100,000 all the way to $999,000. 300 out of the 80,000, 0.38%, 0.38%. Bill's already in that. The two of them combined is barely 0.4%. Of 80,000, again, you have to adjust the figures for inflation. The next tier down out of the 80,000 is 5,000 artists that are a little bit under six figures and have some sort of a side job or a hustle. What's crazy about this book is, look, it's one data point. It's a trustworthy book and a trustworthy author, so I enjoy riffing on it. But 6.7% out of 80,000 actually have a job as an artist that are actually bringing in sizeable income as an artist. That is a staggering figure. You look at it, and it's depressing in some ways. So what you're telling me is that 93% and change of those 80,000 artists are essentially just hobbyists. They're just doing this for fun.
Nick Friend: The fact is that I look at our own data set, and I'm like, these guys are not even close. By the way, this book is surveying a bunch of people with gallery relationships in which we know there is a 50% haircut right out of the gate. We're hearing about the splits going up to 60%, by the way, 65%. We look at our own customer database, and guess what? Here's the encouraging part. Our percentages are significantly higher than what these facts bear out. Our data sample is 5,700 instead of 80,000. I look at that, and I'm like, whoa, what an encouraging thing. One, we are teaching a group to be able to get in the top 6% of what artists are doing in New York and London. Two, we are teaching them to do that without a 50% haircut of the gallery, the exploitative gallery relationship that's existed forever. Number three, they're all doing it from their own homes and direct. It's staggering. It's amazing. That is such a phenomenally encouraging thing. I don't know what the actual figures are, but the percentage that we have that's in the 6% of our customer base is going to be like 30% or 40%. It's really, really high. I bring that up, one, to say the book is great. People were asking, it's called "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark." It's on Amazon. Just type "12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark." You get some pictures of the stuffed animals, and then the book will pop up. It's an awesome book, an amazing read, a phenomenal read. We don't have a lot of things to benchmark against, but I benchmark against that one, and I'm like, my goodness, this is encouraging. It is truly the time of the artist, of the photographer, where you can do all of this direct if you work on your marketing, you understand the rules of the game.
Patrick Shanahan: Despite the fact that...the comments on the book that you made, I've been in the art business for over 20 years. There's not a lot of people that I know that have as many years in the business side of this industry as I have. As soon as I see stats like that, I'm just like, they're completely dubious. I will tell you that that is a fact. It's because of one thing, Pat. It's the way that the person sees the industry through their lens. They're like, oh, I'm going to go survey the artists that are in galleries because that's their perception of the market. It's the equivalent of going, hey, there's only 5,000 taxis. What are you talking about? Well, here's the market. It's taxi cabs. They're yellow, and there's 5,000 of them in the country. Yeah, but what you didn't understand is that there's 30 million Uber drivers. What about them? It's the same thing that's happened in the art industry. People that don't understand, they're not looking at the whole picture of all of the individual creators that are out earning money. They don't know about any of these people. Nobody is getting surveyed.
Nick Friend: We could probably do a survey of our...
Patrick Shanahan: We are doing...
Nick Friend: We have...
Patrick Shanahan: We have...we're going to release that art market report for our customers because we know it needs to be out there.
Nick Friend: Entrepreneurs.
Patrick Shanahan: I know that...did anybody from this organization contact you? How many millions and millions of dollars that are not even being surveyed, right? That's going on all over. That's an obvious thing to me. Either way, though, your points were made exactly. I want to take a little deviation here over to something that we haven't talked about in a while. Features, new releases. I see Kim Winbury, if you're still on, I'd love to know which of these features you've already activated. There's been a lot of feature releases that we've done. Number one, it is the color search. On your website, on all of our member websites, a buyer or an interior designer, I think is really key for designers, can go to your website and pick a color from this color chart, like aqua, because they have a design of a house that's going to be a beach house, and they want it to have water-type colors. They can pick the aqua, and every piece of art on your site that has that sort of color on it will pop right up for them immediately on the spot. That's a big...
Nick Friend: Good kick implementing them today.
Patrick Shanahan: That's really fun. It's awesome. It's just another conversion feature that will separate all of these Art Storefronts members. The second one, though, the order bumps.
Nick Friend: Order bumps. Maybe you should explain it because it's your baby.
Patrick Shanahan: The order bump concept, let's go back to the good old days where it came from. I don't even know if I remember this as a kid, but it used to be McDonald's would sell burgers. You would go and get in line, and you would buy a burger. That's what you would get, and you would leave. That would be the normal situation. Then McDonald's is like, hey, a burger costs $2. Everybody keeps coming in and spending $2, or maybe they get two and spend $4. What can we do to increase that number, to increase the order value? Stated another way, average order value, AOV. Somebody at McDonald's, probably Ray Kroc, decided, you know what? We're going to start offering fries. They trained every single person working behind the counter to say, hey, I'd like two burgers, please. Then the person behind the counter would go, would you like to add fries to that? The fries were 50 cents each at that point in time. Now, I would come in to get a burger, and my order value would be $2 because I just got a burger. They would say, hey, do you want to get fries with that? Now, my order value went from $2 to $2.50. Maybe Nick came in, and he got two burgers, so his order value was going to be $4. He said, do you want fries with that? Now his is $5. What you're looking at is a situation where every single transaction, every person that comes to your store, you have the ability to offer them an additional product at the time that they check out. Let's say that I come to your website, and I am going to buy a print. I saw some stuff today. My football team is Chelsea, and Chelsea just won the Champions League, football, soccer, however you want to say it. This guy's
selling me a print of the Champions League trophy and all the guys around it. I go and purchase the print. The minute the purchase is about to complete, his version of, do you want fries with that, is, hey, I also have a t-shirt that I've made that commemorates the Champions League win. Would you like to add that to your cart for $19? Or it could be any merch, or it could be an additional print, it could be whatever you like. Now our customers have the ability to turn on the order bump feature. Instead of selling a $100 print, they're selling a $100 print and a $20 t-shirt. It's the AOV of $120. One of the things that we are religiously focusing on is, look, our customers are making thousands of transactions a day. We can either help them to get more transactions, which we want to do, or another way we can work at it is, how do we help them to make more money per transaction? How do we raise the AOV? Do you want fries with that?
Nick Friend: Yep.
Patrick Shanahan: That feature is supposed to increase your average order size by about 15% to 20%. Obviously, it varies on who the artist is and what they're offering and what the upsell is, but generally speaking, that's what that does. It's a specific order bump.
Nick Friend: Kim, you've got to activate that. Everybody, you've got to activate that, all you Art Storefronts members. The third one that I have in mind is the live art show page.
Patrick Shanahan: Live art shows, it's a big, big, big deal. Can't go into all of it here. We've got five, look at it on version 4.0 now, or 4.0 might be coming out. I think that's what's coming next, 4.0. The live art show page, my goodness, the work that you guys did on that, unbelievable, top notch. This is a landing page that's on your website because your live art show, you'll go live and you'll do it on Facebook and Instagram or one or the other, for example. But then the show's got to live somewhere after the fact because, as you guys know, with Facebook and Instagram, it's not your website. These things are ephemeral. They're going to go down in the feed, and they're going to be gone forever. Nobody's going to see it after the fact. The show has got to live somewhere. The live art show page allows the show to live on this page where the video is nice and big, and then the products that were offered during the show are right on the sidebar. It's beautifully designed specifically for that purpose, for a live art show. It's awesome. Pat and his team worked really hard on it to provide a great experience for the art buyer, but also to make it easy for you guys and the photographers to set these things up.
Nick Friend: Why does it need to be easy? Because you want them running as many as they can.
Patrick Shanahan: I'm really pleased with this one because anyone that's been watching this show for any period of time, how long have we been banging the drum about the live art shows?
Nick Friend: For a long, long time.
Patrick Shanahan: For a long, long time, absolutely. Over a year. The future of selling art and photography, full stop. I would go as far to say it is the most significant advancement in marketing that's happened to art and photography in forever, certainly in the last 25 to 30 years. During the experimentation of running these shows, getting customers to run these shows, we realized one of the major hurdles is, okay, there's having the live art show and the mechanics of all that, but where do all the pieces live? How do you make the transaction process as smooth as possible? Most importantly, how do you make the amount of work that it takes to create this thing as simple as possible? Let me give you a for instance. Whether you were an Art Storefronts customer or not, and you have a website, you have 50 pieces, you have the description for the 50 pieces, you have the size for the 50 pieces, you have the price for the 50 pieces. You have to get all the 50 pieces onto a page, and you have to make it as easy as possible for people to check out in two seconds. How do you go about doing that? How do you go about doing that in a situation where this is the future, and I need as many of my customers running these things as much as possible? We looked at that, and this new iteration, which it's in beta, I think we're going to turn it on for everybody, I think what, end of this week, next week, something like that. It's coming soon. My team and I have timed it. If I put one of my marketing team members on setting up a page like this for a customer, we're saving on average four to five hours worth of time setting the page up by this advancement alone. I made it so stupid simple. You literally drop a folder of images, all the images populate, you give them titles, you give them prices, you have a buy now button. The minute somebody hits the buy now button and checks out, the item goes to sold, and you are unencumbered when you run your show.
Nick Friend: It's an instant checkout. You don't have to add to their shopping cart and blah, blah, blah. They can literally instant purchase.
Patrick Shanahan: To tie it back to what we started this whole thing on, Q4 marketing starts now. I will just tell you, full stop, having run literally hundreds of live art shows for customers now, I don't know about hundreds, but at least a hundred, I have never seen a higher ROI marketing technique in my entire life. It's not even close, full stop. You need attention to be able to run these. If you're not doing your marketing, if you've not started marketing, if you've not taken your marketing seriously, you've got no one to run your live art show to. Even if you figure out all the mechanics of how to do it, how to go about it, what are the best platforms, how to handle the pricing, how to handle the payments, everything else, all well and good, but if you do not have the attention to market to, if you do not have a collector list, an email list, and some fans on the various socials, you're going to be running them to crickets. You're going to be running them to crickets. How significant are the live art shows going to be coming up in Q4? You have no idea. So significant, I can't even begin to tell you. Maybe 80% to 90% of the marketing focus in terms of some of the mechanics of the sales. Let me tell you, guess what else? I don't care. Delta, Alpha, Beta, whatever variant comes down the pike, the live art show solves for this so fantastically. You run it from your house. You do not need to leave. You can run thousands of them. People love getting a deal. It forces you to merchandise, talk about your inspiration, and present your art via live video, which, let's be honest, I know none of you are doing. I have to bang the drum so hard to get anyone to do these things. I have to carry my customers sometimes, kicking and screaming, across the finish line to get them done. You're not doing them now. You're not getting the reps and sets, and you're not learning the mechanics of it. You need to be, because guess what? If COVID comes, God forbid, I don't care, and neither do my customers, because they have people to market to, and they're going to be running live art shows. If you think that we're the only outfit in town that's figuring this out all at once, nothing could be further from the truth. Every single solitary marketing-forward individual in the art and photography industry that has figured this out is just running more and more and more of them because they are the future.
Nick Friend: And they work. They work. It's indisputable. We have artists, we have painters at Art Storefronts, and there's a question. If you are a photographer, there is a way to run the live art shows. We have the information. We've actually done it, Pat. I think it's out of the common photography. I think it's one of our members. You can just ask about it in one of our office hours, private member sessions, and we'll get you the information. There's absolutely no difference; there's a way to do it. But we have, I think, the big thing. The artists who have latched onto doing the live art shows, there's a few of them. I was talking to one of them the other day, and she was like, "I have to worry, what are you talking about?" As we were talking about an idea of another promotional thing she could run, she's like, "I sold everything in my last live art show. I literally have paintings for years that were stacked up in my garage, all over the house. I sold all of them with the live art shows. They're gone." It just blew my mind. The same thing happened with Matthew Locka. It's gone. It's an incredible situation. Next time you release an original, they go quick because there aren't any anymore. An original comes out, it's who's the first person who's going to get it. When that one's gone, there isn't even another one. That's an amazing position to be in. That's where everybody can be when you are executing on all of this stuff and once you've had some time to get to this point. It's incredibly exciting to know that that's actually reality and that's happening.
Patrick Shanahan: When you look at Locka's numbers, anyone that's
been following us for any period of time knows Matthew Locka. He was a customer really early, close friend. We worked with him on a bunch of case studies early on. Here's a guy, a very established artist, a very talented artist, that would do the old business model by which I mean, spend six to nine months getting ready for a big show, having the full-blown dog and pony in a gallery. I'm talking the velvet rope, the guest list, two opening nights, bartenders, performance art in there, the whole thing. He would sell, I think on his last big one that he had pre-COVID, a little bit over six figures, Canadian. That was a total revenue from the show. Now that's at a 50/50 split, and he does not maintain the information on his collectors, true to the gallery relationship. He doesn't know who the hell's buying his work. Well, he knew some because he sold, I think, 27% of the show out of the gates to his collector list, which I rant about all the time for a reason. That was a great show. He had a great show. He still did well. He's pleased with himself. Fast forward to the pandemic, and he has two of these basement sales, what he calls his basement sales. Over a 15-day period, he sold 62 pieces of work for a little bit over $30,000 Canadian. There's a guy, and granted, this was old inventory to your point, but 62 transactions, $30,000, which there's no 50/50 split. He keeps the data on all of those people. One thing I say all the time, and I'm never going to stop saying it because it's as poignant a reminder for me as it is anyone else. You want to know why a collector list is so important? It is really, really hard to get a new customer. You guys all know that, to get a new person that you don't know to buy your art. Do you know what the easiest customer to get is? The one that you already have. The one that you already have, which is why it's so important to sell direct. It is fundamentally, over the years, the rest of your art-selling career, the easiest customer that you will get will always be someone that's purchased something from you already, which is why it's so important to continue marketing and take care of those folks and constantly update them.
Nick Friend: Yep.
Patrick Shanahan: You look at this live art show sale for him, and it's like 62 new customers or some portion, obviously, some were collectors and bought some, but 62 people that he can market to in perpetuity into the future and then 100% of the revenue. That's pretty staggering. That's pretty staggering without leaving his house.
Nick Friend: Alright, well, guys, we've got to leave it there. This has been a good one. One announcement, one final announcement: you who are not Art Storefronts members, we have a summer sale that we extended. It was actually ended in June, and we extended it through July. It ends at the end of this month, right? That's actually next Friday. Get your demo request in. If you're interested in learning more about Art Storefronts and what we do and how we can help you, put in a demo request. If you just go to our website, artstorefronts.com, there's a big button in the upper right-hand corner, demo. Click that, fill in the form. One of the people on our outreach team will contact you, learn a little bit more about you, your goals, and all that, and then they can show you everything about Art Storefronts and see if it's a fit for you. It's a really amazing deal. To join Art Storefronts, if you're interested and you want to make this year one of the best years you've had, be ready for Q4. As we said earlier, the timing is perfect. You still have time to get everything live, get your website up, execute on marketing, start building your audience, and be ready for the biggest art-selling time of the year, which is Q4. The timing couldn't be better. Anyways, it's good chatting with all of you guys. Thanks for all of your comments. Pat, another good one.
Patrick Shanahan: Another good one. That's fun. We've got to do more of these. It's been a while. We've got to do more. Alright, guys, thanks so much. We'll see you later.