THE ART OF DISTRIBUTION
PICTURE THIS, pardon the pun. You operate a small memorabilia store and thanks to “Phantom Menace” mania, you can’t keep up with the demand for “Star Wars” posters. Your regular suppliers are fresh out, making competition from the new store on the other side of the street all the more perilous.
Your Jedi Knight may well be Art Print Index, a new wholesale Web site designed for art retailers and framing shops. The site (www.artprintindex.com), which debuted earlier this spring, lists more than 90,000 prints, 13,000 artists and 1,300 publishers.
The mission of the site is simple, says Bill Lederer, president and CEO of the Lake Forest, IL-based company: to provide art retailers with nearly constant direct access to wholesale-priced artwork. From this venture, he says the company expects to gross about $5 million this year, even though the wholesale average orders runs around $100. At deadline, the company has already signed up about 9,600 clients.
The entire wholesale art industry is about $1 billion a year, says Lederer, claiming his company to be the first unified wholesale source for artwork. “To make an analogy to books, we’re kind of like Barnes & Noble when they acquired [distributor] Ingram Book Group” he says.
One wonders if Artprintindex.com will run into regulatory hurdles since, at deadline, Barnes & Noble withdrew its offer to acquire Ingram in face of sure opposition by the Federal Trade Commission and the prospect of an expensive court battle to try and save the merger.
The benefit to retailers is reduced shipping and acquisition costs of up to 20%, claims Lederer, noting that the online order process sidesteps traditional distributors and other intermediaries.
Users gaining access to the site can view offerings by keyword searches for specific subjects or categories, and can purchase either through credit cards online or from the warehouse, which is open weekdays from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Lederer says Artprintindex.com’s location outside Chicago evens out the cost of shipping to retailers and the less chi-chi art galleries in New York and Los Angeles.
Even though the company delivers its artwork physically, it is developing on-demand digital printing mechanisms so buyers can customize their own art and possibly download product offerings electronically. Announcements are expected later this year.
Lederer first got the idea to offer artwork through the Web more than a year ago when he observed that consumers in art stores weren’t always able to get what they wanted right away. He formed a consumer marketing company that later became Art.com, and the forerunner to the B-to-B site. In May, both sites were sold for more than $84 million in cash and stock to Seattle-based Getty Images Inc., a provider of visual content to advertising agencies, broadcasters and other companies. Just like its new subsidiary, Art.com itself is making moves to boost its exposure, having signed online merchandising agreements with women-oriented Web sites iVillage and Women.com.
