The fortunes of Mallett’s, the venerable soon-to-be-former Bond Street firm, may not necessarily be a bellwether for the trade, but, as a public company, and so far as I know the only remaining publically held antiques dealer, its to-ing and fro-ing, financially and otherwise, are generally the stuff of media fodder, including my humble blog.
The move off Bond Street, arguably the most expensive shopping street in the world, is probably a matter in which Mallett’s has little choice, and, given the primo location opposite Sotheby’s and dead center between Oxford Street to the north and Piccadilly to the south, their leasehold has got to be about as desirable as any space on the planet. One wonders whether their space in New York on Madison Avenue won’t soon have another tenant.
No question, cheaper premises can always be found. With that, though, our own best promotion is our gallery space, located in an established antiques venue. Given, with an exorbitant increase in rents, Bond Street, as nearby Mount Street, is with each passing day less an art and antiques venue than it is a shopping parade for haute couture. Tragic that arts and antiques venues are being priced out. As our business is still high touch, so gallery premises in an established venue remain of paramount importance for the continuation of the trade. While the proper maintenance of a website is critical, it is only an adjunct to premises commensurate with the type of material on offer. With all that, in spite of the changing age demographic of the retail antiques buyer- which is, I might add the same demographic and often the same buyer for both contemporary and period material- the practice of, for want of a better term, ‘antique-ing’, by which I mean taking sufficient time to browse, making one’s way casually from gallery to gallery, is still the preferred method of shopping that is always, and I mean always precedent to making a purchase.
Apparently, Mallett’s is also looking to cut costs by reducing its participation at antiques fairs. Certainly, fairs participation is expensive and exhausting. The plain cost of the stand, plus kitting it out with décor, plus transporting one’s goods to and back from, and housing and feeding staff while at the fair. Keith McCullar and I generally work the fairs we participate in, and, trust me, it is hard to continue to stand upright at the conclusion of even a three-day fair. But, we’ve found that, next to premises, fair participation functions as an outstation of one’s gallery, and, in our strong markets, if we didn’t do fairs, we would have to go to the trouble of mounting our own trunk show. Does a show always result in good sales? Frankly, the answer is no. Not all fairs result in good at-show sales. However, we find that, at the end of the year, the more fairs we’ve done, the better our overall performance for the year will be. That said, we’ve found that fair participation is a poor method for market development. In fact, fairs we’ve dropped include some of the best attended fairs we’ve ever been involved in- but they were in locations where we had little penetration to begin with, and, consequently, fair attendance didn’t help us.
Of course, a number of arts and antiques dealers of Mallett’s stature participate in the world’s most exclusive- and expensive- fairs, and have been mainstays for decades. One wonders, moreover, how much continued participation is driven by actual commercial success, and how much by ego- something on the order of feeling a need to be seen. Times being the way they are, none of us can now afford this particular conceit.