Artists who sell art prints.
Fine art prints have become a common staple in many artists collections of artwork. They are a great product choice to compliment an artists collection, open up their customer base and have great longevity.
The process of printing, framing, shipping and the customer service that goes along with selling fine art prints can be hard to manage at times. It can take a lot of time and effort for an artist to complete each step efficiently and accurately, and if something goes wrong your customers may not want to come back.
This is where Artist Services can step in and take care of all this for you, leaving you with more time to create art, focus on growing your art business and take that much needed holiday!
Just quickly, what is Artist Services?
Artist Services is an all-in-one, on demand fine art printing, framing and shipping service for artists. Meaning, when you sell a fine art print we can print, frame and ship it directly to your customer and yes it is that easy!
What makes us different from other printers is that we focus on the needs of you the artist, and the needs of your customers, we don’t simply print and forget.
This blog post will cover six key elements that make Artist Services one of the most helpful and accessible services for New Zealand artists who sell fine art prints.
Photograph by Dylan Arthur @dylanarthurnz
Artist Services helps artists save time, money and space.
Time
Time is one of the most valuable asset any artist has.
An artists income is determined by the number of works they can sell within a year. If you are spending time travelling to a fine art printer, then to a framer, packaging the art yourself and then going to a post shop to wait in line, you are greatly limiting the time you have to create new art. As an artists your time is much better spent creating art, connecting with your customers, building your fan base or going on that holiday we mentioned earlier. You can only get so much done in a single day, Artist Services is that helping hand you need to take away these seemingly small tasks (that do add up) and leave you with more...time!
Money
We have all heard time is money and sometimes artists can be focused on cost rather than profit. Common things we hear are “I can do it myself, cheaper.” and “I’ll deliver it myself to save on the shipping cost” these are both fair reasons, especially when starting out and resources are limited. But what we have seen over the past 10 years is that artists who fight to keep costs down have much lower sales overall, compared to artists who spend their time creating more art, maintaining their websites and online profile, engaging with customers/fans and selling to art galleries.
It's important to choose your direction and focus on it. Start outsourcing your fine art printing, framing and shipping so you can use your valuable time to do what you do best, making art that people love. Nobody else can do that as good as you and freeing yourself up to do this efficiently will open doors.
Space
Not all artists are blessed with huge studio spaces, in fact many are doing it from home, so we understand that space is very valuable. The beauty of on-demand printing and framing like Artist Services is you don't need extra space for storing and holding print stock. Orders for fine art prints can be made as the art prints sell, freeing up your precious space. Not having to keep print stock on hand also means prints aren't at risk of being damaged while in storage. The other up-side to printing on demand is there is no need to spend a lot of money printing art prints that might sit there for a long time, this can lead to lack of motivation when you have old art taking up space and not seeing it sell.
Artist Component signing 'Preserve for Life' limited edition screen-prints
Artist Services makes it easy to add products to your website.
We provide free templates for web imagery so you can present your art prints accurately on your own online store. You can also use our copy on our paper stock descriptions for you own websites.
Even if you don’t use our printing or framing services these resources are free so use them and share them with your art mates.
We care about your brand.
We can add your branding to your art prints and framed prints. It's a free service and a nice personal touch for your customers experience. Simply send us your branding elements (postcards, stickers, bios) and select the 'add my branding option' when placing your order and we will include these on any of your orders.
We ship 100’s of orders every week, have 15 years experience shipping art around the world, so back ourselves with fully insured replacements of anything that arrives damaged. You want confidence in the fine art printer you choose to work with, we have efficient processes to help you with returns or replacements so that you don't have to worry.
Artist Services actually gives a sh*t about your customers.
If your customers are not happy, they don’t come back, then you don’t come back to us.
Think of Artist Services as an extension of your own business. We have a responsibility as your on-demand fine art printer to go the extra mile to make sure they are not just happy but blown away by their experience. This customer focused approach is what differentiates us from the machine type printing services that don't think twice about a job once it leaves the building.
Artist Services is tech focused and future aware.
We only offer products that we already know work in the local New Zealand market. Through our art gallery, endemicworld we know first hand what prices, paper stocks and framing options work best for the New Zealand market, and these are the very products we offer to you through Artist Services. We've taken away a lot of the guesswork so you can feel confident knowing the products we offer are also used in our gallery.
We use technology to help us help you. Like running high end fine art printers from Epson, beautifully made papers from USA, Germany and Japan, up to date full suite of mac devices and Adobe tools, and as artists ourselves we are experienced in new programs like Procreate. Quick tip for when you are creating art using Procreate and you want to be able to export a high resolution print file. When you open a new canvas, set the size at around A2 (420mmx594mm) and as close to 300dpi as possible to still allow for a decent number of layers.
'Waiheke Ferry' by Byron Coll, printed on Smooth Cotton Rag.
We are not an online only service. Visit us :-)
Although the world is very digital nowadays, we understand that sometimes one-on-one human service is beneficial, especially when you are first starting out. Maybe it's to chat paper types, being able to see the products in the real and feel the quality in your hands first. We know we are good at what we do, but we also aim to provide easy access to our products and services. Having a central Auckland studio on Ponsonby Rd at the same location as our art gallery is an excellent learning environment and full of creative energy that we want you to be part of too.
The reason we like to share all this knowledge with you is our business only works well when we help artists do well, it’s a full circle model. Even if you don’t use us to print, frame or ship your art, you will hopefully learn something new that will help you grow your art business, and you can pass on those learnings to other artists.
So to wrap this up with the most important takeaways.
These are the ways Artist Services can help you grow your art business.
- Saves you money, time, space.
- Free web imagery and print file templates.
- Free branding service.
- Caring about your end customer.
- High quality products .
- You can visit us in the real.
And because we are big on value... there are no contracts, no subscription fees, and no judgement. When you are ready to print frame and ship your art efficiently so you can focus on the valuable end of your art business, get in touch and we can help :-)