Bringing African Art to Your Doorstep…or not
After several weeks trying to find local but affordable art for our home, my husband and I decided to start an online African art auction business to solve our own problem. To us, it sounded like the beginning of what could be a million dollar business. After all, didn’t all great start ups begin with founders wanting to solve their own problems? We were ready to bring African art to the world, and to your doorstep…if you visited our website and placed the highest bid on our curate art pieces. We called it AfriCanvas.
We started by doing some online research on our potential competitors on the world wide web. These competitors ranged from renowned museums auctioning art pieces for hundreds of thousands of dollars to an online art shop that sold prints for ten dollars a pair. With AfriCanvas, we planned to reach a niche market of budding collectors who wanted high quality art but could not afford the high sticker prices for pieces created by already famous African artists.
Where would we get our art? This was a good question — we came to this idea because we had asked ourselves the same questions. Our strategy was to visit the galleries in our hometown, take note of art we loved and the responsible artists and use our internet sleuthing skills to find their contact information and reach out to them. We believed that our local artists would be excited for an opportunity to bring their art to a global audience. A win for the artist, and a win for the budding collector.
We decided to set up our online store as quickly as possible: the budding collectors, the brilliant artists, and us, the future millionaires, had no time to waste! We built out our website infrastructure using themes and resources from Wordpress and I set up the AfriCanvas Facebook and Instagram pages. We also started reaching out to artists who seemed open to the idea, but wanted to see what we could do first. To demonstrate our confidence in the idea, we purchased a few pieces of art — these would be the first on our auction website and they were pieces we were happy to keep if AfriCanvas didn’t work out.
Once we had set up the website and payment system, we invited a few of our friends to try out the site and place some fictional bids so we could see if it worked. We got positive feedback and made a few tweaks to make the process easier.
After running a few ads on Facebook and posting our art on our personal and Africanvas page, we launched our first auction on a Sunday evening for the Three Friends at an opening bid of $200.
…and there were no takers a week later. And, it stayed pretty much the same, even after opening after re-opening the bid, changing the price, shortening the bid time. Nothing.
Why didn’t anyone take the Three Friends?
On reflection, it all came down to acting on unvalidated assumptions.
We assumed that if we built the website and sourced eclectic pieces, bidders would come. They did not. It’s possible our market did not use Facebook or Instagram to find the art that they wanted. They may have preferred physical spaces. We did not find out.
We assumed that there was a large untapped market of people like us who wanted affordable art today with the potential to become a collectible tomorrow. We still do not know the size of that market or where they might be; we needed to have spent more time understand who we were targeting instead of a blanket strategy.
We assumed artists would be willing and open to give us their art to market based on trust. They said they were willing, but as is the case in research, you can find that people do not do what they say. We ended up going out of pocket to source the art for auction.
Today, we have two lovely pieces of African art in our home, originally destined for the global doorstep, and a greater appreciation of the importance of investing time in user research, especially for a ‘novel’ product or service.
