Better together; Culture Label: cultuur als retail

Besides developing new ideas for cultural institutions and advising them on commercials opportunities, the core business of Culture Label is selling gifts for a large number of cultural institutions.
Our core business is a dot com launched a couple of years ago which has been very popular with customers right around the globe. CultureLabel.com is an ecommerce site that offers an edit of the best products and merchandise from 200 leading cultural institutions, designers and creatives. We also launched a new section at the end of last year with art work and editions from about 500 artists. Museums and galleries normally also sell their products on their own websites, although there are a lot of exclusives from institutions, artists and designers that give us a unique mix. We work on the basis that the customer wants it to be easy to search across the marketplace, so we curate and merchandise them in a single destination. Interestingly, as we are a team with specialist know how in this area who have spent the last 3-years perfecting a platform for culture retail, a number of our partners have asked us to produce online shops for them, including institutions such as the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House in London. In other cases we have also developed and operate entirely their ecommerce, such as for the Saatchi Gallery, for whom we created SaatchiStore.com.

What would you call the secret of success of Culture Label?
We have a very simple concept which is ‘better together’ to make it easy for the cultural consumer whose interests range beyond a single organisation. We have helped to reposition culture as a retail brand in the same way that ethical shopping has become part of the mainstream. Great -design, brand development, technology and creative product sourcing are at the heart of our success. The response from the cultural sector has been extremely positive and we are now rolling out the technology and concept internationally with galleries such as the Château de Versailles and New Museum New York joining in the last few months.

Was it difficult to convince all your partners/clients to put their products on offer on one communal website?
Most organisations were actually prepared to give it a go although people obviously moved at different speeds. It took us about a year in total to create the partnerships and build a platform that worked for everyone. It was important for us that some of the bigger names anchored the concept and it’s great that they were prepared to take a risk as this made all the difference to the initial media story. We positioned the terms and conditions at a very attractive level at only 12.5% commission and £25 per month. We now announce about 5 new partners a week which mostly all come direct to us via the sign-up pages on our website from all around the world.

You state Culture Label is not a consultancy, but actually you do consultancy work, e.g. for the Library of Birmingham the Cambridgeshire Libraries, the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture (MoDA) and Iron Bridge. Could you expand on the commercial recommendations Culture Label made for these institutions? There actually is an element of consultancy within the work of the Culture-Label Agency, but the most important element for us and our clients is that we approach each project with the mindset of an entrepreneur. Within our team we have trend scouts for companies such as BMW and a former Managing Director of a FTSE 100 company, alongside cultural sector experts that have worked at the highest level, so we are blending skill sets across culture and commerce to create totally new business models on occasions.  With Ironbridge Gorge Museums, a World Heritage Site in the UK which was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, we recommended the creation of a retail ecosystem across the whole Valley, drawing in local manufacturers, crafts people and other creative industries under a ‘Made in Ironbridge’ brand, to grow their commercial product by tapping into their immediate creative network. For Tate we recently developed an online platform to crowd-source two new products from the global creative community which we incentivised by prize money and a profile space on the website for their work, but also the fact that Tate would -manufacture and distribute the project in their shops so it was a great package for any designer so the message spread quickly and we got some great responses. With the Courtauld Gallery we came up with a commercial model where we shared in the profits of a new digital ticketing system for their exhibitions which gave them the technology to offer the first mobile ticketed exhibition in the UK at no up front cost as we created a viable strategy for the long-term.

What are, in your opinion, the most profitable commercial opportunities for cultural institutions? For instance: what were the most important changes in their strategic model for earning money?
Apologies – I’ve just listed 5, as time is against me and I’m currently writing a book on this so I’m holding a few back.

1. Embrace digital as a key part of your commercial strategy and not just the obvious areas like ecommerce but other areas such as ticketing and location based services. However, don’t spend a fortune on it. We often see this and you really don’t need to, with such great open source systems around; just make sure you get the best advice as there are a lot of cowboys out there.

2. Do spend time if not necessarily a lot of money on developing a digital audience. Too many institutions spend money on the infrastructure, but are not so smart when it comes to acquiring customers especially in areas like ecommerce. Facebook is changing marketing and offers incredible potential savings and new audience development potential for the cultural sector.

3. The internet has gone mobile, so make sure whatever you do for the point above is reflected in your mobile strategy. We recently ran a major conference called Mobile for the Cultural Sector with speakers from Vodafone, Nokia, BBC and Google and it was amazing how few people have engaged with mobile properly yet.

4. Aggregation is key to the cultural sector, making more income as most things are better done together. CultureLabel.com is a great example of this.

5. Blend the digital and the physical commercial services as much as possible so it is a seamless proposition for your user. This is at the heart of our new proposition for the Library of Birmingham which will reinvent how we work with libraries.

Speaking of the Library of Birmingham: Culture Label developed a ‘true digital library experience’  for the Library which centred on the concept of ‘customer experience’. How would your describe the -concept of ‘customer experience’ and in what way could it enhance a ‘true digital library experience’?
Developing a customer experience for this project is all about reinventing both the physical and digital library as well as the touch points where the two converge. This included modelling multiple customer journeys and exploring commercial opportunities within these. It was important not to make money the sole purpose of the exercise as by focusing on multiple customer experience it shaped the customer vision overall and sometimes led to a cultural dividend that could expand an audience (and overall revenue potential) and other times there was an added value element that was chargeable. The use of smartphone devices is central to the experience as well as ereading and a totally new approach to retail and catering than any other library to date.

CultureLabel was commissioned to develop the world’s first online art marketplace where art works can be bought with interest free loans. in partnership with Arts Council England The Own Art scheme is designed to make it easy to buy art by making art affordable. Is this scheme still supported by the new (Conservative) government?
The Minister of Culture Ed Vaizey has been extremely supportive of -CultureLabel from the beginning, contributing to newspaper articles as the policy of the coalition government in the UK is to create a mixed funding economy. Arts Council England and Creative Scotland are at arms length from the government and they have their own strategy but they have been extremely supportive from the outset. Any new initiative that has the potential to develop new income streams for arts organisations is a high priority at the moment so the art store fits well. The initial figures have exceeded everyone’s expectations and the lure of loans and quality of partners and artworks are at the heart of this. As a result we are rolling this out to a further phase of galleries and also taking the project into the galleries themselves.

In your book Intelligent Naivity you put rather bluntly that ‘sponsorship is dead’. The Dutch Government just put it to the Dutch cultural institutions that they should try to get more income from sponsors and gifts from maecenas’s. Would this in your opinion be a wrong and fruitless advice to follow? I think there has been a little bit lost in translation as my point was that the mechanism of corporate engagement in culture as a whole has potential for growth, but the concept of sponsorship in my opinion is a little old-fashioned and is declining from the national survey in the UK. This is where the phrase ‘sponsorship is dead’ came from. The reality – from UK figures at least – is that a large amount of money goes from a small -number of companies to a small amount of national or large -organisations. It is often tied to capital projects rather than revenue budgets also and these are going to be happening less and less in the current economic climate. This means we have to come up with new ways for companies to partner with the arts. One area of growth which we identi-fied is the notion of cultural branding. You only have to take a look at adverts, particularly in the luxury and technology sectors, to see just how many companies are utilising cultural brands and content for marketing purposes. This is been driven by consumer interest in culture, but not necessarily by cultural institutions who need to better understand business and technology agendas and engage more with the creative agencies that are now behind many of these campaigns, rather than targeting the CSR or sponsorship functions of companies. Interestingly these relationships are often being developed with individual artists, user-generated cultural content or utilise growing digital cultural content that is available without the need for a direct relationship with a cultural institution. In the fast moving world of advertising and digital marketing the cultural sector can still add value through an association but needs to work much harder.

What would be better ways to compensate the loss of income from government grants?
Individual philanthropy is important and cultivating small and big gifts is  a growing and tried and tested approach for many organisations. However, even in areas such as individual giving crowd-sourced philanthropy of much smaller amounts is set for huge growth started initially by more simplistic sites such as JustGiving.com, then with US based Kickstarter, which has raised millions of dollars for creative projects and has been replicated for the arts specifically in other places such as the UK by sites such as WeDidThis.

Do the cuts the British government is planning for the cultural sector apply to the whole sector and does this mean that some cultural institutions will disappear?
Some organisations have lost their funding entirely and it does seem some will disappear. Other organisations have sprung up over the last few years however with little or no direct public funding at first but have been rewarded in the new round of funding.

Is there any indication in the UK that cultural organisations are switching towards another model to earn money, and do they recognize any necessity to do so?
I think the bigger organisations have made this shift already. The question now is how can they reach an even bigger customer basis and maximise this impact to offset the loss of other sources of public funding. They also need to tread the right balance between providing added value services that consumers are prepared to pay for without being overly commercial and alienating some audiences. For smaller organisations that are less far along this path they need to use other approaches such as crowd-funding to maximise on a more limited potential audience and identify what other commercial models translate.

In your book you also say that (good) entrepreneurship is built on the principle that you create something from nothing, that you dare to take a few steps back; then you take the time to view results and your strategy can change. In what way is this applicable to the arts and cultural institutions in particular? In your book you, for instance, make a plea for the setting up of joint ventures, like bringing in food and culture specialists, thinking in niches et cetera.
Finding the right partner is essential in any joint venture. There are a lot of commercial organisations that now want to work with museums and galleries, so identifying those with the best potential for return on investment is paramount (even if that is about time or other resources than money) as well as which organisations offer something you could not do yourself. Cultural organisations themselves also have to ensure they have the right skills and people internally to develop and manage these partner-ships. I have spoken to venture capitalists in the past who have said the ideas from cultural sector organisations were interesting to them but they felt they could not invest in the team they had put together to deliver the idea, which is one of the primary considerations when they make an investment in a new business idea. It is true that in stead of a mass market there now is a market of many niche markets. It has long been said that the internet in particular means you can find an audience for virtually anything so niches have become the new mainstream. For example, I love websites like PicturesonWalls.com as they have claimed a niche around one area of culture, street art. If you buy that sort of work, that’s the place where you go and it has been a very successful online business for a number of years. It pops up in physical locations to extend the brand. It helps that they are the distributor for Banksy but they have used that position to create a collectors club for street art.

 What about variable opening hours?
I can imagine this could be developed further in programs for different audiences at different times with different content and different atmosphere, ambience, etc. The example your use for cultural institutions are the so-called boutique hotels (see eg www.TabletHotels.com), a website which brings together all kinds of niche hotels with offers for all kinds of accommodation or amusement. Variable opening hours can play a big role in attracting new audiences. In London the ongoing Lates programme has remixed culture experiences to appeal to audiences that want the culture experience on their terms created through partnerships with -commercial brands and bringing DJ’s and other new experiences into galleries. Membership programmes are also beginning to follow this model, with the Whitney Museum offering a series of bespoke packages for different types of art fans similar to the boutique hotels experiences alluded to in Intelligent Naivety.

To conclude: you state in your book that companies are increasingly creating their own cultural content. Is this a dangerous development for the arts world, or does it offer opportunities?
The digital revolution has seen brands and new media organisations are working directly with creatives to crowd source creative ideas and content for a variety of purposes, be it advertising, for competitions, content creation or co-creating products without the need for recourse to cultural institutions. The Diesel Wall project is a good example of this, where artists submitted ideas to Diesel which were put onto walls in spaces across various cities. Facebook has over 500 million fans and counting and this has become a key tool for them to do this such is the viral nature of its proposition to crowd source communities of interest in these areas. The two can come together however to great effect such as the amazing YouTube Play project with Guggenheim.

Interestingly the New York Times announced last year in an article that the word ‘curation’ no longer exclusively belonged to the cultural sector. Retailers are ‘curating’ ranges, food retailers add a premium with ‘curated’ selections. It’s not the same thing of course but in the digital age everything is mixing together.

Het boek Intelligent Naivety (a sort of handbook for would be cultural entrepreneurs to help organisations develop new commercial income)