Guild.com Inc. uses new media to keep traditional arts and crafts alive. The recently launched Web site (www.guild.com) offers unique and limited edition pottery, jewelry, metalwork, textiles, painting, sculpture and other works by artists and craftspeople.
The site, with some pieces priced in the four figures, is now in soft launch. That gives it a chance to work out all the bugs before the big push this fall, according to Guild.com vice president John Anderson.
Guild.com’s intended audience is specialized collectors. To drive traffic, the site advertises in American Craft, Metalworking, ARTnews and other publications catering to artists and collectors. It supplements the space ads with monthly mailings to those magazines’ subscriber lists. In May, for example, 25,000 pieces went out to American Craft’s list.
The campaign, incidentally, also generated interest among craftspeople who would like to be included among those represented by Guild.com.
Familiar Territory
Targeting collectors is an outgrowth of Guild.com’s origins. It began 15 years ago as The Guild, a publisher of artists’ resource books for commission work. Artists would pay to have color pictures of their work in the reference volumes.
Then, Anderson says, the Internet came along and offered the possibility of a broader market for its database of 20,000 artists. However, unlike the reference books, artists featured on the Web site have to pass a review process.
Since its introduction, the site has been getting about 10,000 hits a week, a number Anderson describes as “climbing.”
Visitors, he adds, typically spend more than 11 minutes at Guild.com.
No Impulse Buying
Anderson claims the conversion rate is difficult to calculate because of the newness of the site and the “long purchase process.” Typically, people will look at an item four or five times and think about it before buying. “Some of the items have a fairly good price tag,” he notes. “It’s not impulse stuff.”
Although plans have not been finalized, Guild.com will market more aggressively in the fall. Anderson suggests that there might be ads in such publications as Architectural Digest and Town & Country.
The company also is exploring the possibility of setting up networks of links and affiliates. Anderson sees artists’ trade associations with resource areas on their Web sites as likely candidates.
Network
