Artsy | Obsessed Product

I got to know Artsy during the global pandemic when I was trying to look for beautiful artwork at home. Now I browse it every day to enjoy new artworks and stay up-to-date with the art world.

What is Artsy?

Artsy brands itself as the art world online. And indeed, it has multiple features — an online artwork database, an education platform, a news publisher, and a marketplace that brings dealers, collectors, and artists together. In short, it provides a one-stop, end-to-end experience for art lovers of any level.

The art industry is one of the last few industries still waiting to be disrupted by Internet — trillions worth of art assets are still analog and sitting in living rooms or storage unknown to public. It is notorious for high barrier of entry, low transparency, and little public information available. Known for its galleries and vibrant exhibitions around the world, the art industry is also highly fractured, crowded and embroiled in trust and security issues. More importantly, the galleries want to keep their exclusivity, scarcity and uniqueness. While new artists are struggling to get tractions and gallery representations, galleries believe that any online presence itself might devalue the work and its emotional and social value.

However, in recent years, the wave of social media has pushed the art establishment to rethink their digital presence. As more emerging and established contemporary artists upload their artworks on Instagram, galleries and auction houses realize that they need to expand their digital marketing footprint to stay relevant.

Then enters Artsy. The vision of artsy is simple yet ambitious — it wants to digitalize the art industry and make art more accessible to the public. To realize the vision, Artsy’s priority goal is to create the first online database of artworks. It took years to finally convince galleries, museum collections, and foundations to allow Artsy to feature their artworks online. Now, Artsy runs a growing database of 1,000,000 artworks, architecture and design with the largest online database of contemporary art.

How did I become obsessed with Artsy?

Since Artsy is a one-stop platform that includes online database, collection marketplace and education services in the art ecosystem, it has separate offerings for 3 broad categories of stakeholders:

1. Collectors who intend to search, discover and purchase artworks.
2. Sellers who have artworks for sale, including galleries, auction houses, museums, foundations, as well as private collector consignors around the world.
3. Students who want to learn more about art and design, including students, art enthusiasts, curators, collectors or teachers looking for teaching materials.

It is interesting to note that these three categories of users overlap, which has created unique value proposition for Artsy as an end-to-end platform for users like me.

As an art enthusiast and student, I was searching for free art history courses during COVID at home and stumbled upon Artsy’s editorial on the most iconic artists, ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the 1990s. The editorial articles cover in great details about different art movements, iconic artists, and their distinctive styles.

I have always been afraid of reading art history books, typically dense with convoluted language and confusing art history terms. The contents on Artsy are written in simple language with few terms and organized into easily digestible chunks. Out of curiosity, I clicked on one of the artists mentioned in the article, Andrea Gursky.

As a potential collector, I was able to get a general idea of the artist’s collection value through status and auction results on the top of the artist’s profile. As I scrolled down, I found a few interesting pieces that I considered buying either via messaging galleries or directly online. I clicked on the like button to save them in my collector profile.

One of the major reasons that I am obsessed with Artsy is that I like browsing my own collector profile and artworks that Artsy recommends. Unlike Amazon wishlist, I feel like browsing my own digital art collection, and Artsy is able to refine my taste based on works that I liked and recommend trending artists and artworks to follow.

As I grew my saved artists and artworks to hundreds, I become more attached to Artsy — I have gradually built up my collector profile that can be shared with museums, auction houses and galleries when I contact them to purchase or bid artworks.

For galleries, museums and auction houses, Artsy has distinct product offerings tailoring each of their needs, including digital marketing and analytics tools to help them expand reach, move art inventories online, promote shows and exhibitions, as well as facilitate online bidding and purchasing process.

Why Artsy matters?

Artsy is a great product that won my adoption and obsession due to its ability to deliver on three criterias:

1. Craftsmanship that makes the product simple, available and understandable.
2. Personalization that makes the product engaging and addictive, leveraging user efforts to make all Artsy contents deeply personal.
3. Categorization that clearly targets the different needs of buyers, sellers and students.

Craftsmanship

As the representation of online art world, Artsy is a model example of craftsmanship and high quality design. The overall design is minimalistic and simple — photos of artworks are carefully curated for aesthetics, reflecting its brand identity of trusted, elegant partner in the art world. The page layout beautifully aligns different web elements, with small variations presenting different sizes and types of artworks, creating both the sense of order and liveliness. Effective use of color palettes, topography and white space represents the appropriate information hierarchy, gives space for breathing and comfortable for users to read and react to.

Compared with Artsy, the design of one of Artsy’s competitors — Amazon fine art almost gives a negative example of product design. Amazon does not cater to the aesthetic needs and emotions of art collectors and buyers, and use the same UI / UX elements for groceries and general products like the rest of Amazon.

In terms of availability, Artsy excelled in both physical and functional availability. Artsy is available on mobile, tablet and desktop, via web experience or iOS / Android app. It covers all key use cases for buyers, collector and students, whether it is researching artworks on large desktop screens, or browsing casually on the phone on Sunday afternoon. From the physical availability stand point, Artsy has made art available anywhere, as long as you are connected.

Regarding functional availability, Artsy has pushed for mobile first strategy and made trending artworks, art exhibition news & guides, artwork bidding and purchasing seamlessly integrated into the physical art world. If you are at Art Basel — Artsy app will be your pocket tour guide through thousands of artworks at the exhibition and make sure you never miss the upcoming stars. If you are at auction house — Artsy app will streamline the bidding process and maintain your anonymity. If you are deciding which painting fits better for your living room — the innovative AR function of Artsy app will give you a good idea how exactly it would look like at home.

Artsy is also very understandable for users. There is no registration required to browse artworks and editorials, and the registration can be done in one click. The site is easily organized and searchable with the centralized search bar on top — you can easily look for specific works of art, artists, exhibitions, galleries, or discover through currently trending artworks, ongoing bids & exhibitions, and Artsy editorial guides. If you are not sure about where to look, Artsy art gift guide is never a bad place to start. When browsing artworks, relevant background information, reputation of the artists, related news and auction results are all available on the same page, making even the first-time art purchasers informed about the value of artworks. The purchase step is 3 clicks from start to finish, with responsive customer support to answer your process related questions and specialists to give you professional opinions on art collection.

Personalization

Excellent products use personalization to create habit-forming loop that subtly encourage user behavior. Artsy embedded personalization in all 4 stages of user behavior — trigger, action, variable rewards, and investment.

At trigger stage, Artsy leverages both paid triggers, such as sponsorships at international art shows, as well as owned triggers, once users decide to opt-in and register on Artsy. As I start using Artsy, Artsy takes notice of artists and works of art that I browsed and liked, and sends me personalized email notifications about similar styles of artworks, related artists, exhibitions and related news. The emails are typically aesthetically pleasing to read by itself, and many times I decided to follow through the call to action and browse the recommended artists. Artsy also sends notifications, but personalizes and adjusts the frequency when notifications cause more disruption than user engagement. Gradually, Artsy creates the internal trigger — when users associate Artsy with the sense of beauty, calm and comfort. When I feel bored, stressed or want to feel inspired, I open the Artsy app sometimes just to look at beautiful art pictures.

At action stage, the craftsmanship of Artsy design has made it simple for users to search and discover art. Combined with personalization, Artsy uses a few heuristics to further encourage user engagement. Personalized based on my art preferences and past engagement with exhibitions, Artsy recommends me to check out Artsy x Seoul auction. With the ticking countdown timer and the decrease of remaining unique artworks that fit my interests, Artsy utilizes the scarcity effect and taps into my FOMO, with clear registration button that calls to action.

At variable rewards stage, Artsy always brings beautiful artworks alongside with the artwork I search for. The technological backbone behind the powerful recommender system is the Artsy Genome Project. Since each work of art is unique, the traditional technique of collaborative filtering used in recommender systems is not effective in art recommendation. Artsy has teams of art historians and experts handcrafting over 1,000 characteristics and manually mapping them to works of art. Those characteristics are then used to connect works by subject, style and movement. The recommender system creates a technical barrier for its competitors, and the various new glitzy and beautiful artworks create pleasure and rewards of the hunt for users.

Finally, at investment stage, Artsy asks users to save artworks, artists, exhibitions and articles that they are interested in. It is intuitive when I unknowingly spent 45 minutes on the product hunting for another beautiful artwork or upcoming artist, and I would always want to save my favourite works. Even though I have not purchased many works, I have gradually built up a large online art collection on Artsy. Whenever my non-Artsy friends ask me about modern art or I contact galleries for inquiries, I always show my collector profile on Artsy.

Artsy has successfully created a virtual art collection for everyone, leveraging users’ efforts in creating contents, data and their reputation in the art world. That sense of pride and user-created value stored on the Artsy drastically increase the user stickiness, and improves the personalization engine that Artsy runs on.

Categorization

Last but not least, Artsy effectively manages the needs of collectors, students, consignors, galleries, museums and auction houses through different value propositions, product offerings and business models, which is an impressive and difficult feat in an opaque and complex ecosystem that has been around for centuries.

For collectors, Artsy gives everyone access to a full global inventory of artworks. Regardless of whether you are billionaire or a student who wants to spend a hundred dollar decorating the dorm, it is difficult not to be intimidated by the art market due to its opacity, steep learning curve and high barrier of entry. For the first time, buyers can educate themselves through rich, understandable materials, lean on ready-made purchasing guides, search directly for specific artworks or artists, explore works and receive personalized recommendation through algorithms, read the most up-to-date news about art, while the traditional art curation specialists are just one phone call away. Since Artsy is still focus on user growth, it is currently free for collectors, with the exception of taking a 15% commission when users purchase artworks directly on Artsy.

For galleries, auction houses, museums and art shows, Artsy provides effective reach to global art collectors and helps manage institutions’ digital marketing and online presence. Compared with traditional digital marketing, traffic driven by Artsy has a much higher sales conversion rate due to its addictive design and attraction to true art lovers. Artsy charges galleries a monthly membership fee dependent upon their size, and the tiered approach has won thousands of galleries to Artsy’s platform.

For educators and students, Artsy has provided rich, beginner-friendly resources to learn more about art. Similarly, Artsy is providing all its editorial and educational contents for free to drive user growth and engagement, but it is very likely that at later stage, Artsy can easily setup the paywall for premium contents for students and collectors alike.

Benchmark in Fine Art

In summary, Artsy has created an excellent product that delivers on craftsmanship, addictive personalization and effective categorization of user needs and business models. Over the past few years, Artsy has gone through high organic growth even when multiple digital art startups such as Paddle8 filed for bankruptcy during COVID. There are multiple marketplaces that sell mass produced, hand-made designer products such as Lofty, Minted, and Etsy, but their core user base is consumers rather than art collectors. Currently, Artsy is the category leader in fine art marketplace. As more millennials starting luxury purchases and focusing more on aesthetic experiences and living quality, there is still a lot of space for growth for Artsy.

Recommendations for Artsy

Even though Artsy is an excellent product, there are powerful opportunities to both strategically grow user base, counter market headwind and improve its product experience for existing buyers and sellers.

Social Media Shopping Integration

Compared with other competitors such as Saatchi Art and Artstar, one of the main advantages of Artsy is its partnership with thousands of most prestigious galleries, museums, auction houses and foundations. Therefore, Artsy is unparalleled in terms of the quality and quantity of its listings. The tradeoff is that Artsy does not directly list any artists without gallery representations, while its competitors offer artworks of various qualities from unestablished artists with relatively low price tags. With the rise of Gen Z, social media such as Instagram and TikTok, even though Artsy’s main users are more sophisticated art collectors, but it is at the risk of missing out new upcoming artists, the future generation of customers and new consumer shopping behavior.

Therefore, my prioritized recommendation is to integrate social media more into the Artsy product, and interact with artists while maintaining its relationship with established institutions. Currently, like Sotheby’s and other institutions, Artsy has an Instagram presence with 1.2 million followers. It constantly updates Artsy editorials, daily new artworks and new art exhibitions. However, Artsy could use IG more effectively by integrating the new Instagram shopping feature. Brands such as Nike have already started integrating with Instagram to create the new immersive shopping experience starting with attractive image and video posts on social media. Led by XiaoHongShu in China, we start to see the shifting of customer purchasing behavior from one-stop shop like TaoBao / Amazon to social media and short video and live streaming platform. The IG shopping integration could appeal to the new generation of art lovers and collectors.

In addition, the artist pages on Artsy are fact-based, simple, informative yet distant. Especially for contemporary artists, many have an active social media presence. The link and integration with their social media accounts and posts could give potential collectors a more complete story and a much more emotional and personal impression of the artworks, which is an essential part of art collection — artwork value has always been about culture, relationships, and emotions.

There are also other features Artsy could add to improve its existing user experience. I will discuss these features separately for buyers and sellers. These features are discussed more generally with different levels impact and engineering / time costs.

Additional Features — Buyers:

1. Personalized wizard: currently, Artsy user registration is simple and deliberately avoids the question of users’ previous art experience to ease the intimidation and attract more users. Meanwhile, first-time art collectors might appreciate a personalized wizard that guides them through some basic knowledge about art history and art collection. Advanced art collectors might be less tech savvy and appreciate a short introduction of the platform. Artsy could provide users a choice after the registration to help users navigate the platform, and potentially increase user engagement and stickiness.
2. Immersive virtual art show experience: many galleries and art shows are closed due to COVID, and Artsy provides the online technical infrastructure they need to facilitate the sales. However, online art shows on Artsy feel different, as there are only static photos and descriptions of artworks. Short videos, live chats, social media integration can be implemented in the short term to complement the existing experience, and in the future, we might have VR online art show which could change the industry landscape.
3. Robo Advisor: to further lower the sense of intimidation while providing guidance to inexperienced collectors, Artsy has specialists serving as the traditional art consultant role. However, those consulting services typically come with a high price tag and mostly geared towards premium customers who typically already have some experience in art collection. Robo art advisors could lower the barrier of entry as NLP gradually matures. However, in the short term, the engineering challenge of deeply personal robo advisors remains high.
4. Blockchain Authentication: one of the main issues of art industry is trust. Forgery remains one of the top concerns for collectors, and requires high human and time cost to detect. Digital technologies such as Blockchain can be potentially used to make the marketplace safer, but the engineering challenge and its potential impact remains to be seen.

Additional Features — Sellers:

1. Inventory Integration & Transfer: galleries have complained about this issue — they typically have their own inventory system to keep track of all the artworks, but working with Artsy doubles the work as they have to upload the artworks separately into Artsy. The integration and transfer of information in existing inventory system could drastically lower the barrier for adoption, but the integration effort is high as each legacy system from galleries is different.
2. Smart Curation & Captioning: As galleries upload new artworks, using existing recommendation algorithm and user behavioral data, Artsy can automatically generate captions for artworks, and provide curation suggestions that fit into the general customer trend. Galleries will have the final discretion on the curation and captioning, but automation will greatly accelerate the inventory update process.

Business Model Innovation — “artwork as service”:

Lastly, the future of art marketplace might not lie in ownership, but leases. It could be interesting to explore the model of art leasing for corporate and potentially private consumers. Why own a painting if you just want to have it on the wall? Why not get a new one every year? The potential tax benefit associated with leasing as operating expense is also intriguing, and a number of universities, startups and companies have been using “artwork as a service” for years. Artsy’s strength in partnership might create more revenue and lower the barrier of entry for millennials looking to have beautiful artworks at home.