I get paying artists in monthly installments, but I have zero interest in doing that as a consumer. Art is a luxury good and those that can afford it are trained to avoid financing things they don't need. I would charge the users the full upfront cost and pay artists in monthly installments. Maybe instead of taking a cut off the profits you can invest the money that hasn't been distributed to the artist yet like RobinHood.
Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists
41–50 of 235 posts
Re: Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists
#42How do you make sure the buyers will keep paying even after receiving the artwork? You don't keep the money in escrow or anything like that, do you? Is there a way, as a buyer, to figure out how much shipping would cost?
If someone stops paying, they're required to return their artwork (we even used to frame the relationship as a "rental"). In the case of a truly bad actor that stops paying and goes MIA, we make sure the artist gets paid, even if it's a loss for us. For now, we charge a flat price for domestic shipping (with two tiers based on parcel size.) A near/medium-term goal is to integrate with shipping APIs for more nuanced s…
Be careful with insurance as they may consider this voluntary parting as opposed to theft if someone refuses to pay and refuses to return the painting
Re: Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists
#43The selection of work seems pretty high quality, but I'm curious - how does the artist/art selection process work? I come from a fine arts background and have always had issues with the contemporary art scene for it's artist to curator/gallery process. In general, social status and popularity seem to be the main currency for getting great art visible to the public. I would love to see a service like this that enables…
Very good question. A quite tough challenge but probably not impossible.
IMO, bad curation is something that is very apparent on sites like Etsy and Redbubble. So I do believe it’s worth it to try to find a good system for it.
Re: Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists
#44I really enjoyed making combinations on the filters to see what (I thought) unlikely combinations existed, and I was happy with what I found (e.g. minimal organic, architecture face). Does the artist apply the labels? Or is classification part of your curation? In any case, nice work. I hope your market finds you!
Re: Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists
#45Someone in YC made Artix! (I kid)
Short enough to copy and paste. Here it is, from http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html
# The Artix Phase
We should have expected this. It's very common for a group of founders to go through one lame idea before realizing that a startup has to make something people will pay for. In fact, we ourselves did.
Viaweb wasn't the first startup Robert Morris and I started. In January 1995, we and a couple friends started a company called Artix. The plan was to put art galleries on the Web. In retrospect, I wonder how we could have wasted our time on anything so stupid. Galleries are not especially excited about being on the Web even now, ten years later. They don't want to have their stock visible to any random visitor, like an antique store. [2]
Besides which, art dealers are the most technophobic people on earth. They didn't become art dealers after a difficult choice between that and a career in the hard sciences. Most of them had never seen the Web before we came to tell them why they should be on it. Some didn't even have computers. It doesn't do justice to the situation to describe it as a hard sell; we soon sank to building sites for free, and it was hard to convince galleries even to do that.
Gradually it dawned on us that instead of trying to make Web sites for people who didn't want them, we could make sites for people who did. In fact, software that would let people who wanted sites make their own. So we ditched Artix and started a new company, Viaweb, to make software for building online stores. That one succeeded.
We're in good company here. Microsoft was not the first company Paul Allen and Bill Gates started either. The first was called Traf-o-data. It does not seem to have done as well as Micro-soft.
In Robert's defense, he was skeptical about Artix. I dragged him into it. [3] But there were moments when he was optimistic. And if we, who were 29 and 30 at the time, could get excited about such a thoroughly boneheaded idea, we should not be surprised that hackers aged 21 or 22 are pitching us ideas with little hope of making money.
Re: Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists
#46Edit: huge props to the team for shipping a fix for this in minutes. --- I want to love this idea, but I struggle to get past the lack of full price when browsing. It says "$48 • 24 months" and expects me to intuit that the product costs $1152. Or rather, I worry that it expects me not to intuit that. Breaking the absolute price into a series of less frightening numbers to obscure the magnitude of a purchase feels sl…
Not to mention the fact that I suspect most people interested in purchasing fine art aren't exactly the type who care to finance the purchase.
You could be right! But if AiR is right they might be able to prove that there is actually demand for financing in this context.
Re: Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists
#47Very cool. I'd love to see this extended to photography. good luck!
Re: Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists
#48One thing I've always been curious about with art in this price range ($500-5000) is the resale value. Say your tastes change and you'd like to get rid of one of these after a few years, how painful is it to sell? What are your chances of getting 50% of the purchase price? 90%? 150%?
I had taken a look at the affordable art market about a decade ago. What I found out was that “art as an investment” is either
1. About art normal people can’t afford
2. A full time speculation job
Unfortunately neither of those worked for me. I don’t know if things have changed in the last years, it seems that there are a couple more platforms around nowadays. I can go into detail about all that stuff but my personal takeaway was to completely ignore investment value in art until the price tags get close to seven figures. And yes, I still am a couple orders of magnitude away from that last price tag. I also don’t care, whatever art I own I am happy with and if I fall out of love with one piece I usually just gift it somewhere. On that last part, there are also usually some good opportunities to give art away for a good cause. Such auctions happen from time to time. I can imagine though that other people have had considerably different experiences with affordable art than mine :-)
Note: art in the above is meant to be paintings and sculptures, never bought anything else.
Re: Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists
#49Overall, I like the selection and I hope it goes well. It is genuinely hard to find something good that won't break your budget anywhere else. I am not sure if it was intended by filters on left side are grayed out for me ( took a while before I realized I could change them anyway ). Good luck! edit: side note/question. Any plans for including sculptures?
Oooh, I just assumed one of my plugins had broken it and didn't even care to try.
Re: Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists
#50This is a neat idea -- getting financing for art would feel really strange for a lot of people visiting an art gallery. Your site makes the idea more approachable!
Personally, I'd prefer to see a "total cost" comparison of the purchase price vs financing rather than calculate it in my head anyways, but I'm not sure if that would discourage sales at all for other people.
Quick semi-thought-out idea: you could have a "buy it now" price that is higher than the financing price, and indicate that customers will save 5% by financing, for example. This would add some more transparency, and maybe even make people feel psychologically more into the idea of the payment plan. You said one of your goals included creating a revenue stream for artists to normalize their income a bit, so I thought this might help incentivize that even more, while still giving the option to purchase outright (some people will never want to finance). Personally, I try to never finance anything. Probably still wouldn't for 10% off. But for 20% off I would be much more tempted to finance rather than buy outright