notes

MSN has a news story online this morning citing various idiosyncratic measures of economic recovery. Given last year’s crash that caught even Warren Buffet unawares, these grass-roots gauges- including spikes in expensive cupcake sales- are as valid as a measure of economic strength, or continued doldrums, as anything else.

Even we have some measures that we use to gauge, if not overall economic performance, than at least what our own business portends. No one will be surprised to learn that we track hits on our website very carefully. What might come as a surprise, however, is that we don’t find any connection between an overall spike in site hits and a spike in sales. What we find more significant is when during the week that we have site hits. For instance, if we see quite a disproportionate amount of our internet activity occurring on the weekends, we believe that it is people surfing with no particular objective in mind, beyond general interest. Oddly, we engender our greatest number of website-related inquiries during this time- my Monday morning is given over to responding to these- but our rate of sales based on weekend inquiries is quite low. If, on the other hand, our site hits are greater during the working week, we find that this generates a significant amount of business both from private clients and interior designers. Moreover, we find that browsers with money to spend also take the time to browse during the week- not at the weekend. This certainly makes sense considering interior designers: their legwork, including all shopping trips, even to virtual shops on the internet, occurs during weekdays. Evenings and particularly weekends are very often given over to client meetings. While increases in our site traffic during the week don’t always translate into more internet inquiries during the week, we always find that actual visits to our galleries increase. When we inquire of new visitors to our galleries, they with nearly 100% frequency tell us that they visited our site precedent to an actual gallery visit.

While the maintenance of our website- and maintenance of placement on the major search engines- is important to us, the most telling indication portending good sales is actual gallery visits. We log in every single gallery visitor- who they were, what they were interested in, price quotes- absolutely everything germane to the visit, even, if appropriate, what they were wearing. Call me old fashioned, but while coiffure may not signify, jewelry and handbags do. For the gentlemen, Prada loafers don’t mean much, but we can always spot a DAKS jacket. This is probably our most important internal management tool, with our gallery log a record of subsequent activity. It is accessible for review and data entry by all gallery staff, with each week maintained as a separate document in 12 point type. When our Weekly Report extends to in excess of 3 full pages, we know some good sales are likely to follow. Although typically the longer the report indicates that we have had more gallery visitors, this is not always so. Occasionally the report can run long because we’ve had some pretty heavy-duty gallery visits- lots of interest in lots of items. So, rather than just a measure of gallery visitors, the length of the report reflects the earnest nature of those visits.

Much more palaver on this subject and I then will begin to give away proprietary information. Suffice to say these are informal measures, but things we take seriously. Moreover, while Wall Street and the other money centers are the big stage upon which economic dramas are publically played out, the larger economic engine is one that employs every individual consumer and every business, even small ones like ours. We firmly believe that when we can sense economic trends as well as anyone can. The one thing we know for sure, amidst all this, is that when the news media reports on any trend, it is, in this age of information, already old news.

It’s not often in this business someone’s asked me for a knockoff. As I think about, it has never, in our ever-lengthening tenure that such a thing has occurred. What has happened, however, is our having to break the news to a client that something they purchased in good faith as the genuine article was, in fact, not. Fortunately, no such item that I was ever called on to evaluate has been anything that cost the client a lot of money. The client, after some mutterings, has invariably chosen to take having been taken on the chin. It has often seemed to me, therefore, that this is why customers of online sales platforms do not rise up en masse. For us, the silver lining is that a number of these sadder but wiser buyers will then eschew auctions- whether virtual or actual- altogether, and give their trade, if it is antiques they are after, to a proper antiques dealer.

Though erstwhile buyers have not arisen as a class seeking redress, legal action on the part of luxury goods manufacturers, knockoffs of whose branded merchandise is sold with apparent impunity in online auctions, proceeds apace. Online sites have maintained that it is the responsibility of the luxury goods manufacturers themselves to police their brands. Oddly, some courts have agreed with them, but some have not. The luxury goods manufacturers claim, reasonably enough, that the auction sites, collecting as they do a sales commission on the sale of knockoffs, are therefore culpable.

One of our many memories of foreign travel is one that occurred very early on, when a group of us visited China, Hong Kong and Korea. While Keith and I spent our time trying to suss out Asian antiques, some in our party were keen to find ‘deals’ on knockoff merchandise. Upon returning to San Francisco and making our way through US Customs, the customs officers gleefully confiscated every bit of knockoff merchandise our friends’ brought in. I would venture to say that all of my 20 or so devoted readers have at least one similar tale to tell. Moreover, for how long can a retail establishment operate selling knockoffs before it’s shut down? Why, therefore, does our otherwise vigilant government allow the open and public sale of knockoff merchandise in another forum when it is otherwise so vigorously sanctioned?

It is this general inconsistency that is being pursued in courts here and abroad that, I hope forces online sites to maintain the same level of diligence and integrity that are required of the rest of us. Not to sound pompous (Keith tells me I always do, but given my farm background, I consider myself down to earth) but integrity is our stock in trade. Dollars may be the thing that makes the difference, with the high number of smallish transactions involving knockoff goods perhaps making it impractical for law enforcement to do anything about them. But given the whopping size of the largest of the online platforms, it might be that they have a larger legal war chest with which to fight- derived at least in part, ironically, from the sale of knockoff merchandise.

Some very recent mention has been made in the antiques and art press about the participation of a particular New York dealer in one of the better London shows. That this dealer and his estranged brother, also a dealer, have scandalized the trade recently, caught selling shall we say ‘dollied up’ pieces, seems to have been forgotten.

Preaching a Jeremiah about the evil-doers in the trade is not the point of this blog entry, however. The recent press got me to thinking about the confections these gentlemen were marketing. They knew their market, of course, interior designers who are always looking for something outré as an accent piece. And why not? Distinctive design is what interior designers are paid to deliver. That they were duped by a nefarious antiques dealer does not, to my mind, make the designers who patronized them culpable.

As an antiques dealer who, while happy to cater to interior designers and goodness knows we have some excellent designers with whom we trade, tends to have a deeper affinity for private collectors, we tend to offer goods that are possibly a bit more conservative. Quality, yes, but not over the top. Frankly, if something is dramatically out of pattern for a particular historical period, we are immediately suspicious, unless it has some documentary support. This is certainly true for English antique pieces, given the wealth of information- original invoices, inventories, valuations- that survives in the records of the great landed estates. As well, I can’t think of any nation on earth that has its built environment better documented photographically than Great Britain, thanks in no small measure to Country Life. In what amounted to a luck of timing, the magazine began in the late 19th century to include excellent photography in its articles about country seats. The sell offs and contents disbursals beginning in the 20th century, the result of new and functionally confiscatory estate taxes beginning just after the Great War occurred, in many instances, after a thorough photographic record had been made.

The notion of an ‘important’ piece of furniture, absent of provenance, should always beg question. If it is of unusually large scale, of course, it must have been meant for a stately home with a scale to accommodate it. As well, marquetry, inlay, gilding, elaborate carving, and applied decoration were ‘add-ons’ required by the quality for conspicuous front of house display: the hall, the library, and other so-called rooms of state. Even pieces somewhat less grand, either for more private spaces in a stately home or for the smaller houses of the gentry, typically conformed at least in general outline to pattern books that were part of every joiner’s workshop. Using for a moment Chippendale’s Director, the patterns were always adaptable to include, or exclude, decoration depending on the requirements of the customer, or the limits of the joiner’s skill.

It is tempting to think that, as talented as were the likes of the leading lights of English furniture- Chippendale, Vile, Cobb, Mayhew, Ince, the Linnells- that they would for display in their atelier- if they had one- have the occasional outré piece that would show all their skills, crawling with marquetry and dripping with ormolu. Occasionally, a dealer in furniture would offer pieces from a joiner already made up, but these were typically standard productions- case pieces including chests of drawers, bureaus, and night stands, and possible sample boards of ‘fancy’ work.  The notion of an exhibition piece is, moreover, largely a 19th century one- witness the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first showcase of British manufactures, and, so far as I know, the first such national exhibition ever mounted anywhere in the world.

It was announced several weeks ago that a number of London old master paintings dealers will band together for a joint selling exhibition to run a couple of weeks after the conclusion of the Grosvenor House fair. While a couple of the dealers will exhibit at the fair, others, including some Grosvenor House stalwarts, will not. Everybody is making nice, of course, with the fair organizers saying something to the effect that Grosvenor House will be unaffected.

Perhaps, but a look at the exhibitors of both Grosvenor and Olympia show an absence of some significant names, besides old master paintings dealers. The fact of the matter is, these are extremely expensive shows to do, and, times being the way they are, not everyone has enough of the ready to participate. Yes, of course one wants to be in front of clients who one may only see at shows, but, at the end of the day, the upfront costs associated with a show while always tremendous may now be onerous.

What the old master dealers have done begs the question of the merits of show participation, which participation Keith and I weigh, invariably, before we sign any show contract. First, of course, is the wisdom of doing a show in a particular geographic location. We’ve found that show participation is an expensive and more importantly an ineffective way to break into a market. When we started this business, we began with the wrongheaded notion that our markets were in large cities that favored traditional decorative material. What we failed to realize was that certain cities, San Francisco being one of them, have long established traditions of buying their material not locally but elsewhere. We used to do shows in the southeast- no longer- only to find that the buyers were buying in New York. While the notion of purchasing in New York makes some sense- with New York, London, and Paris continuing their well-established traditions of art market hegemony- there exist some significant markets in other cities where private clients and interior designers purchase locally. Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles are the cities we’ve found that will support the fine art and antiques trade, with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago the host to two excellent fairs a year.  As my 20 or so devoted readers will know, we participate in fairs in all three cities.

The second factor we use to determine participation is time of the year. Our busiest season in our galleries is the first half of the year. We do not, therefore, want our better material on the road during the time of year when it has the best chance of selling in-house. There are also times of the year when there exists a dearth of activity, as well- June and July are notoriously slow months, with graduations, weddings, and a few vacations due to beginning school holidays creating a ripple effect through the antiques trade. Our buyers- both private and design- are not shopping for our material then. At one time, the Olympia and Grosvenor House fairs were of such significant moment that they could counter this but, as witness some attendance problems in the last couple of years, what these fairs now experience I venture to say matches our own.

Finally, and most obviously, is the cost to do a fair. A dealer of my acquaintance, unnamed as I’ve not asked his permission to quote him, developed a financial rule of thumb to determine the success of a dealer’s show participation, and a rule that we have adopted- a good show should generate revenue equal to 10 times the cost of the booth. If we pay booth rental of $10,000, including costs directly associated including décor, catalog advertising and lighting, we would not consider the show a success unless we sold $100,000 worth of material. Mind you, we don’t expect to assess the success of a show as we are packing up the truck to leave. We consider follow-on sales made as much as 6 months after the conclusion of the show, including initial and subsequent sales to new clients who originally contacted us but did not make a purchase at the show. If we cannot expect to have a good show using this formula, we don’t participate. You might be able to divine, we do shows that, while less expensive than some shows, are certainly not inexpensive, and all of them are vetted shows. We will not do a show where we are not amongst peers. The Antique Dealers Association of California is the organizer of the Los Angeles Antiques Show and, with its mix of both knowledgeable dealers and outside experts involved in vetting, is an excellent model for a vetted show.

As much of a dice roll as it is to do a show, we nevertheless appreciate their existence. In certain markets, if there were no show for us to participate in, we would have to do a trunk show to stay in front of clients. In fact, the notion of a trunk show is something of a financial yardstick by which we keep antiques and art show organizers honest. If the overall cost of show participation begins to approach the cost of a trunk show, we generally have a word with the show organizer about costs. At least obliquely, this may be the thinking of the dealers who are planning Master Paintings Week in London. Times being the way they are, Grosvenor House, for all that it might promise, may just be too expensive.

The art press hasn’t had much to say so far about The European Fine Art Fair (‘TEFAF’), running through this coming Sunday. The New York Times and the Antiques Trade Gazette have both characterized the mood amongst dealers as ‘optimistic’, and both cite the recent success of the YSL-Pierre Bergé sale as a hopeful sign. I hope prospective Maastricht buyers didn’t leave all their money in Paris.

What also seems to be apparent in press reports is that for the pieces that have sold- mostly artwork- prices paid, after heavy duty negotiation, were ‘reasonable’- read ‘significantly less than they would have been a few months ago.’ Another item of interest, several pieces purchased by dealers at the YSL sale have shown up in stands at Maastricht. Why on earth, in this trading environment, would a dealer choose to offer something only recently- and expensively and very publically- acquired? Perhaps the dealers who’ve done this need to get their money back. In such an environment, the relationship between dealers and clients is not unlike that of the maidens of the town and the invading army. Not meaning to be risqué, but let’s just imagine, with the dealers marking confidently marking up their YSL purchases for resale, who will come out on top.

Looking through the exhibitor list, the numbers of dealers offering period decorative material is down from last year, as it has been declining for a number of years, replaced with those selling 20th century furniture and art, including photography. Nothing wrong with this, of course, as the 21st century buyer is an eclectic buyer, and, in a 239 dealer show- the size of this year’s Maastricht- the booths need to be filled. However, the stated rationale for inclusion of so much more contemporary material is that Maastricht needs to hold its own against the contemporary art fair Art Basel. Unfortunately, the fair organizers may find, in their eagerness to fill up the fair’s show floor, that they’ve diluted the fair’s traditional focus- period material including antiquities- confusing punters thereby, with the longer term effect of reducing the number of fairgoers whose primary interest is period material. With the significant downturn in the contemporary art market and the increasing disinterest in midcentury modern decorative material, Maastricht has, it seems, jumped the gun. While a regional fair like the Merchandise Mart in Chicago or the Los Angeles Antiques Show might reasonably consider itself a survey venue and introduce therefore a certain amount of contemporary material, an international fair that brings in buyers from around the world that has an established reputation for a certain type of gear needs to consistently maintain its focus. With all that, the name of the game is carrying on in business and, with so many dealers- those that have survived- in near shellshock, fair organizers need to fill the booths to make it a show. This may not make long-term strategic sense, but lately none of us in the art and antiques trade has had the luxury of engaging in any other strategy than to determine how to pay this month’s rent.