Easels
I own two easels but don’t paint, have never been an artist and have no intention of starting a career as a painter. The main reason that I have the 2 easels is that I am very lazy; I use them to display paintings that I have yet to put on the wall of my apartment.
They are flexible in as much as I can change the painting whenever I want to and also individual enough that they stand, and make my pictures into pieces of furniture. Of course if you want to sell them as a business then you would be wise to remember their original use as a tool for artists to hold their work.
Rather than focusing on new uses for easels we will stick with the traditional one for painters, and the approach that I use at home. The key will be marketing the product effectively, which we can try in the following manner: -
Ebay
Website
Direct Response
Art shops/Galleries
Furniture shops
Ebay has 1300 items listed under the word easel, which I found very surprising. On closer examination many of the products are not in fact easels but the word easel has been used by many advertisers for any kind of display stand. If you narrow your search to “floor standing easel” or “table top easel” then the numbers become much more manageable at 22 and 68 results respectively. You can manipulate your key words like this to attract different audiences; “artists easel” generates only 146 results out of the original 1300.
Building a website might seem hopeless with a search for “easel” generating 3.35 million results on Google but again changing the keywords to be more specific reduces the competition significantly. “Artists Easel” gets us down to about 1 million results and “floor standing easel” a mere 231,000. Working with a specialist search engine optimisation company can help you to get to the top of the search engine rankings. Don’t forget that there are other ways to get people to your site such as building cross links to other popular sites, writing articles for other websites or for article submission sites, and offline promotion/advertising of your site.
Direct Response may be a great way of selling this product, both to painters and to people who will simply use the easel to display their art. Advertising in arts and crafts magazines will target the first group, whilst home décor magazines and art collectors’ magazines should work for the latter group. Include your website address along with your address and phone numbers in any advertisements that you run, and try to keep your advertising runs separate so that you can work out which magazines generate the best results.
You may be able to persuade art shops or galleries to carry your easels. For a gallery you could offer 2 or 3 as gifts in return for them referring anyone who expresses an interest. If you add the potential for commission to this then the gallery staff will have an incentive to push your product for you. Equally art shops may want to display canvases, brushes etc and an easel is an obvious way to do this.
Furniture shops may also be willing to carry your easels; mine came from Ikea and are cheap and flimsy. I would happily pay more for better quality ones, but have never seen them for sale in more traditional furniture stores. With a reasonable painting on an easel does not take up much space, looks great and is bound to attract enquiries. Use a similar approach to the above with commissions available to sales people.
www.alibaba.com has over 400 listings for easels from suppliers in China. If you don’t want to go through the import paperwork then simply buy your stock from Ebay and use the other distribution channels to generate a healthy mark up. Most customers do not shop around for an easel and will buy at a reasonable price based on impulse.
This product will raise questions as to whether you are the artist that painted the work displayed on it….try to be truthful!