You know, I kind of don’t like blogging. Don’t get me wrong – I read a lot of blogs and like what many of them have to say. But when it comes to writing them, I’m one of those people that doesn’t usually ask a lot of questions or has a lot to say right away or off-the-cuff. I like to think about things and chew on them a little bit before I come up with what I have to say about a topic. So this blog thing is challenging for me, because it means you have to come up with something pithy on a daily (or if you’re one of those Twitter people, even more often than daily) basis.
Of course, you could argue that a lot of what ends up in a blog isn’t all that pithy, so I’m setting myself too high of a standard. OK. Fine. Let’s give this blog thing a shot. Your patience – and feedback - is appreciated.
This weekend I went to “First Friday”, an open-house type of event that the art galleries down in Denver’s art district get together and do on the, you guessed it, first Friday of every month. It’s interesting to see all these galleries from a retail point of view. There were smallish places that had a lot of art on the walls, and there were big spaces that had hardly anything on display. It seemed like a lot of the galleries were struggling to be something between a retail store (how gauche, apparently) and a museum. Considering that they exist to sell art, you’d think they would employ at least a minimum of retail techniques. But no.
I was in one gallery that did a good job in offering multiple price points – there was plenty of art for sale in the $30-300 range, but it was all stuffed into a little back room, behind the $3,000 pieces. Several galleries had the artists on hand, but I met two of them without ever realizing they were the creators of the works they were standing next to – I only found out about it after the fact.
I’m not a luxury goods expert by any means, and not much of a consumer of such items either, but it seems to me that all of these places were missing out on a major component of selling high-end items. If I’m buying art, sure it needs to match the sofa I’m hanging it over, but the difference in getting me to pay $100 for a print and $10,000 for the real thing, at least to me, is the story. I mean the story I’m going to tell people as I show off my new painting: “It took the artist 10 days to make this, because she had to do all these layers and hand cut every single piece of paper you see there and glue it to the canvas…” or “Yes, he said he was shooting to create something that captured the essence of fire…” – I don’t know. Whatever. My point is, I saw very little story telling going on last Friday, and I have to wonder how many missed opportunities there were to sell some art.
Now we come to the challenging part of a blog. If you’ve taken the time to get this far, I feel obligated to leave you with some kind of take-away, like, “how are you making sure that your products’ stories get told?” And provide a few recommendations. If I have to put together enough analysis to get to recommendations for every post, I guarantee you won’t hear much from me, because that takes more time than an “off-the-cuff” post, and requires more content to start from.
I like stories. They are probably one of the earliest teaching tools, and certainly one of the earliest forms of entertainment. I don’t know that anyone wants to hear about the stories behind my products – my research (wanna watch some sausage being made? Yech) – but I hear a lot of good stories, and have a few to tell myself. So check back here for my stories. Maybe you won’t learn as much as you might from my research, but hopefully they’ll be entertaining, and maybe even a little thought-provoking. I don’t know.
Cheers,
Nikki | 
