From street to elite: StockX, a global online resale platform best known for selling limited-edition sneakers, has launched a new category on its website in a bid to capture the emerging millennial art buyer. The US-based company offers more than 350 different prints from over two dozen artists, including Takashi Murakami, KAWS, Yoshitomo Nara, Shepard Fairey, Hebru Brantley, Matt Gondek, Madsaki and Futura. And it recently announced a multi-year partnership with contemporary New York arti
rtist Daniel Arsham.
The partnership makes StockX the official resale marketplace for Daniel Arsham editions and establishes a Daniel Arsham x StockX Next Gen Scholarship Fund at New York’s historic Cooper Union, a private college renowned for its art and architecture courses.
The move is in keeping with StockX’s mission to democratise pricey products like cult streetwear and collectibles by leveraging the stock market’s bid/ask pricing system.
“Historically, the art world has been synonymous with exclusivity and for the most part, inaccessible to a mass consumer base,” Tom Woodger, vice president of cultural marketing at StockX, told Inside Retail.
“In addition to providing access to the products themselves, we’re introducing unprecedented price transparency and visibility into the art print market. As a result, StockX is helping democratise a world that has long seemed out of reach to the vast majority of individuals, particularly young consumers with a burgeoning interest in the arts.”
The rise of the art-lennial
Customer experience and digital transformation expert Damian Madden refers to the new generation of art buyers as ‘art-lennials’.
“An art-lennial is essentially a next-generation consumer for whom tangible objects like art are seen as a way to reconnect with real-emotions and experiences which can often be lacking in an overly digital world,” Madden told Inside Retail.
In a keynote presentation on ‘The Rise of the Art-Lennial’ he gave at the Retail Leaders Forum in 2019, Madden said young consumers aren’t just looking for art to hang on their walls, they really want to experience it.
For these shoppers, meaning is more important than price, as can be seen on StockX, where art prints range in price from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. The sneaker site is also proof, according to Madden, that retailers don’t need to have a track record in the art world to benefit from the trend.
“I think you will certainly see more retailers selling art online as a way to connect their brands and products with these emotions and provide yet another way for consumers to purchase these objects,” he said.
A booming market
According to research published on Statista, the global online art market was estimated to be worth US$4.82 billion globally in 2019, or just over 7 per cent of the overall art market.
Pre-Covid, that number was forecast to reach US$9.32 billion by 2024, but it could be even higher, thanks to the combination of physical spaces being closed during the pandemic and the cocooning trend, which saw people invest more in decorating their homes.
“As a category, art went up 90 per cent, and a lot of that went to the trusted players,” Edward Hartley, one of the co-founders of Australian online art marketplace, Bluethumb, told Inside Retail.
“In 2020, we grew two-and-a-half times in two months. April and May were a tipping point, and from there we really haven’t looked back.”
Hartley founded Bluethumb with his brother George in 2012 after seeing how many artists struggled to get distribution through galleries and other traditional means to sell their artwork.
“Back then, the concept of buying a painting online was a long way ahead of its time,” he said.
Thanks to an injection of funds in 2015, the brothers were able to invest in technology and marketing to scale their offering. Today, Bluethumb offers artwork from over 11,000 emerging and established Australian artists, including partnerships with 20 Aboriginal Art Centres.
“It’s actually quite a complicated process for someone to find and decide on artwork, so you need to have a lot of options and inventory to suit their needs,” Hartley said.
Bluethumb also offers free shipping and free seven-day returns to reassure those who might still hesitate to drop over $10,000 on a piece of art they haven’t actually seen in real life.
“If you get an artwork and for any reason decide that it’s not for you, you get a full refund. That’s something we did from the very beginning,” he said.
Hartley believes these factors will continue to give Bluethumb a competitive edge as new players enter the booming market.
“To do this at scale, you need to have the artists, the traffic and the buyers, and you need to focus on the technology as well,” he said.