Curious Office

I think Empty Easel is doing a good job following the evolution of art on demand. This blog post is a fairly reasonable overview of the two larger players in this $50 billion space which is the art economy. RedBubble is based in Australia. Our own Imagekind is based here in Seattle. While our traffic is comparable, I personally believe that it is difficult to compare RedBubble and Imagekind on a number of other levels not mentioned in this post. We do all our own printing which means that our quality control is carefully monitored. Further, we are based in the US. That means we ship faster and usually cheaper. Finally, we don’t currently sell tee-shirts, mousepads, coffee mugs or anything else that might not resonate with the serious artist or photographer. So, while they may now have comparable traffic, the quality of the traffic is not the same as it might matter to a serious artist. For now, we believe we offer the right product for artists. As more art purchasing moves online, which we know it will, we believe we are well positioned to make both customers and artists very happy. If it makes sense to offer other lines of products, such as tee-shirts, in the future then we’ll consider it. For now though, I think we’ll stay focused on what we’re doing. Both RedBubble and Imagekind are working hard to pioneer this notion of art buying over the web and, for our part, we’re going to prove that the internet is the ultimate distribution platform for creative types all over the world.