Bringing A Revolving Art Gallery Into The Home With Subscriptions

Joe Clark remembers that when he was growing up, his parents belonged to the local art museum, and one of the perks of membership was that the museum had a collection members could borrow from, “kind of like a library book.” As a result, his parents had a constant rotation of interesting original artwork in the home. Clark remembers the profound impact the art had on him — and on his parents. Neither of them would have considered themselves art collectors or even art enthusiasts, but they liked to have nice belongings in the home, and, Clark said, “this gave them access to that.” Later, as a businessperson, he wondered if that experience could be modernized, scaled and brought to the masses. That idea led him to found Get the Gallery, which, as an early-stage Denver startup, focuses on improving the customer experience as well as the user experience on its website.

His idea is to make the experience so seamless that customers feel as if they push a button and artwork shows up on their walls. Today, the company’s users can choose from three different subscription plans, ranging from its least expensive plan, the art enthusiast, to its most premium, the art collector plan. The art lover plan falls in the middle. The art enthusiast plan offers one piece out at a time, while the art lover plan lets consumers have two pieces at a time and the art collector offers three pieces at a time. (The more premium plans offer art that is valued higher than at the lower tiers.) Get the Gallery will ship the art to consumers, or it will have it sent by courier to them if they are local.

The Art

The company has approximately 25 artists in its gallery right now. It would consider about half of them to be national artists, and the other half to be Denver, Colorado-based artists. The company also has a curator that shifts through the submissions it receives to curate the art. Its target market, Clark says, is “not the art collector” — and not even people who would think of themselves as art enthusiasts. The company’s customer is, Clark says, an “individual who tends to place a premium on their home décor.”

One of the great features of an art subscription, of course, is that consumers can change up the art. Clark says that often he will describe the company as “think Rent the Runway” but original art instead of apparel. The idea, then, is consumers can have access to better artwork for a lower fee, and they can swap pieces pretty much anytime they want. Customers may rotate art for the holiday season or for, say, a special occasion. If consumers fall in love with a piece, however, they can buy it from the company as well. (It does offer discounts depending on how long consumers have rented, so part of the rental fee offsets the purchase.)

The Market

The concept is novel, from what the company can gather, Clark says, but he notes that there are museums around the country that have perks similar to the one his parents had when he was a kid. Nobody, however, has a subscription or has art rental at scale as Get the Gallery does, he said. As a result, getting the word out is critical, and the company engages in paid advertising through platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Gifts have been significant for the company — and not just for the holidays but, say, a wedding as well.

While Clark says he had the idea for the company from his childhood experience, he thought about making business out of the concept in the dot-com era. In 2000, he thought he might build a dot-com company that would offer art rentals. But he notes there was no such thing as a subscription business back then — unless, it was, say, a magazine or a more traditional subscription. The challenge, then, was that neither the technology nor the market adoption for such offerings were present. Today, however, consumers want to own fewer belongings, and of course technology has evolved.

The company’s grand vision, Clark says, is “to continue our buildout of the Colorado marketplace” as it keeps dabbling nationally. From there, the company may move next to other cities, say, Austin, Nashville, San Diego or Seattle. Get the Gallery has started to look at other cities to see if its target customer lives there and if creative talent is there — if there will be enough supply to meet the demand it would create. The company’s focus is to have a local-first strategy and piggyback off of the farm-to-table trend, as it aims to connect local artists with local consumers.