Entrepreneurial Dominion

        Alyah Rafeh

A Work in Progress

PostPicasso.com helps emerging artists market themselves on the Web. After years of tinkering, the Richmond firm is putting the finishing touches on its own business model.

When Alyah Rafeh came home to Richmond early this year to run one of the family enterprises – PostPicasso.com – she found a post-dotcom business still engaged in a search for meaning. Launched during the Internet bubble, PostPicasso had originated as an e-commerce marketplace where contemporary artists could sell their work. Neat idea... but it turned out that not everyone was comfortable buying $2,500 acrylic paintings based upon what they saw on a computer monitor.

After the dotcom crash, the website had evolved into a marketing portal for undiscovered artists – a vehicle to help them get seen by curators, gallery owners and private collectors. Another promising idea... but undiscovered artists were slow to cough up the $100 annual subscription fee for the visibility that PostPicasso could deliver.

Arriving from Beirut, Lebanon, where she had been working in Web development and interactive marketing for Saatchi & Saatchi, Rafeh took the reins of the business in January. The previous PostPicasso manager had experienced success hosting online art exhibitions judged by prestigious artists and academics. Seeing that the shows generated both visibility and income, Rafeh reconfigured the enterprise around them.

So far, PostPicasso.com has held six "Art on the Line" shows this year – from “Blown Away: New Forms in Glass” to “Who Do You Think You Are? The Digital Self Portrait” -- and has scheduled one more in December. The response so far has been encouraging: Interest in the website is up, and revenues are on track to double this year.

It’s still too early to tell if PostPicasso has a sustainable business model. Painters and craftsmen are a touchy-feely lot, less comfortable than the general public with technology and marketing. On the other hand, thousands of artists are desperately hoping to be discovered, and PostPicasso can put them on the Internet, drive traffic to their work and equip them with e-mail marketing tools for a fraction of what it would cost them to do it all themselves.

Long-term, the key is attracting the attention of art buyers, gallery owners and other key players in the art merchandising chain. If PostPicasso can capture the eyeballs of art buyers, the tiny, three-person firm should have no trouble selling the artists.

“Gallery owners do peruse the Internet looking for new talent,” Rafeh says. That’s why the judged exhibitions are so crucial to the company's future. Not only do exhibitions generate submission fees, creating a new revenue stream, but they create credibility for the website among the movers and shakers in the art field.

PostPicasso.com was conceived and bankrolled by Allen Rafeh, Alyah’s father. The elder Rafeh, a Richmond resident, is president and founder of Fort Worth, Tex.-based Provider Networks of America, one of the nation's largest managers of health care provider networks. The former physician has started a cluster of smaller enterprises in the Richmond area, including PostPicasso.com, the Art Management Group and ActiveNation, a Web developmnet firm.

Daughter Alyah has been long intrigued by the potential of the Internet, but she came to the business by a different path. After earning a business degree from James Madison University, she chose to strike out on her own. She first managed the website for a time-share company, and then learned the ins and outs of e-marketing at Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. She developed banner ads and websites, conducted statistical analysis of Web traffic, and engaged in e-market consulting. Only this January, after six years far from home, did she return to Richmond to run PostPicasso and ActiveNation.

PostPicasso’s original business model was to create an electronic marketplace for art. At the time, the late ‘90s, consumers demonstrated a willingness to purchase books and CDs online, inspiring hundreds of Web enterprises to see what other products might sell well in an online environment. Hard experience showed that arts and crafts were not one of them. “That’s stuff you want to see and touch,” Rafeh explains. “While we still believed in the Internet as a medium, we had to evolve with the market."

The core of the PostPicasso website today is an online gallery where artists display their work, along with bios, calendars of events and artistic statements. By subscribing to PostPicasso’s services, artists get more than a place to post digital images of their canvases – they get Web traffic. By posting listings in online art directories, placing ads in art magazines and distributing an e-mail newsletter, PostPicasso generated 13,000 visits and 55,000 page views last month – far more than an individual artist could accomplish on his or her own.

Additionally, says Rafeh, PostPicasso artists are buying into an online marketing methodology. She advises members not to simply post their wares online and wait passively for results. Artists should regard the website as an extension of their own marketing efforts. The artist’s best prospect is a previous customer, someone who’s already demonstrated an affinity for the artist’s style. Those artist-patron relationships, she says, need to be cultivated.

In one service that differentiates it from other online galleries, PostPicasso equips artists to e-mail news to customers and prospects. Subscribers can send customers images of new artwork, tell them where the art is being shown, or deliver their latest musings on the nexus between art and reality. Says Rafeh: “Add people to your e-mail database. Mail them a shot of your current work, or a piece you want to promote. It’s target marketing.”

Currently, some 65 artists are displaying a wide range of wares -- pastels, watercolors, acrylic, photography, sculpture, furniture, jewelry -- on the website. Although most are American, they hail from all corners of the globe. Likewise, notes Rafeh, 17 percent of the website's traffic comes from overseas.

The key to success now is coming up with intriguing themes for the online exhibitions that draws submissions and Web traffic. The current show exhibits self portraits. In the Best in Show, Rafael Goldchain photographed himself posing as a series of Polish Jewish ancestors -- including a woman and a bearded man. In another submission, Bovey Lee composed a digital portrait, consisting of rearranged images of her own body, inspired by Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Even to a visitor with only a casual interest in contemporary art, the submissions make fascinating viewing.

Rafeh evinces confidence in the future: Between the sales of art, the artist memberships and the exhibitions, PostPicasso has identified three different revenue streams. As the company holds more exhibits, visibility and credibility are growing. Meanwhile, she's building her database of artists, and  cementing relationships with museums, craft guilds and artistic associations. "It’s not just enough to have a website," she says. "You have to have functionality, a purpose and a direction."

The broad brush strokes the business model seem clear enough. Rafeh's challenge now is to fill in the details.

-- October 20, 2004

Find Out More...

PostPicasso.com

home page

Exhibitions

"Who Do You Think You Are? The Digital Self Portrait"

"Blown Away: New Forms in Glass"

"Distinguished Chairs"

"Integrity of the Minimal"

"Jewelry with a Purpose"

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