A person with a successful art business will have found a beautiful alchemy with the following 4 components. 

First, they will have developed distinct, artist identity.  Their work will be recognizable and unique in the marketplace.

Second, they will have their pricing dialed in so precisely that they know their profit margins exactly, and they know what price points will attract their ideal audience.

Third, they will have access to their audience—a way for many people to come into contact with their work.  This could be in real life at a gallery or art fair, or it could be online on social media or a website, or, most likely, a combination of both! 

And finally, fourth, they will know how to serve their collectors well, and ultimately create more sales.

Let’s discuss the formula in more detail!

Your Unique Artist Voice

When you start making art, or creating and developing a new visual language, you will likely do it for the love.  At this stage, your work could be classified as a hobby or private venture.  This is a very important phase and if you attempt to sell the work too early in the phase you could run into trouble.  It’s kind of a like someone learning to play piano—it’ll take you a little bit before you’re ready to go live.   My daughter, inspired by her entrepreneur mom, will make 5 crayon drawings and then will set up an art stand to sell them (on our dead end street).  I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest she’s not quite ready to sell her art, and she clearly doesn’t understand market forces. However, she's onto something!

When will I be ready to sell art, you ask?  You are ready to sell your art when your mom or best friend is able to describe it in detail to someone else.  You want your story and your “look” to be highly identifiable. Your work, your story, your look, your art, your palette, your values.  Not there yet? No problem! Creating your artistic voice is the fun part!

Pricing & Money Management

The second part is pricing.  Pricing is one of the biggest challenges for artists but getting it dialed in is the first step to profitability! First you need to understand your costs.  Your costs include your materials, your space, your time, and your hard won knowledge.  You’ll need to be able to set your margin, which is the amount of money you make after you account for your costs. You’ll need to understand your costs very well so that you don’t lose money by selling things too cheaply!  Then, you’ll need to experiment with your collectors to figure out the sweet spot. What is the price and art product combination that causes the most people to buy at the best margin?  If you want some extra help with this one, please check out my "Pricing Your Art Made Easy” download worksheet!

Building Your Audience and Collector Base

The third part is your access to audience and their access to you!  Your fans are out there, but if they don’t know where you are, how will anyone become a raving fan?  They need to find you to be intrigued with you, and then they need to get to know you to learn to love you.  Impulse art purchases do happen, but it’s more sustainable and more profitable to create a long term relationship with a wide collector base. 

Fulfillment and Service

And the final part of the winning equation is service.  In the industry of shipping, the term used is “fulfillment”, which means getting the art to the customers.  Let's get everyone--you and your customers-- fulfilled!  Since you are on a journey of creating lasting fans that make repeat purchases and talk about your work to their friends, you want to nail the whole process by efficiently providing amazing art, good service, safe transactions, rapid delivery and extravagant delight.  This will make it awesome for your customers and also EASIER for you, so you can get back into the studio quicker!