Going on our Projects

At this stage, our ARI was still working on a new policy of membership, marketing project and customer database for the workshop.

In terms of new policy, the director had handed in the meeting on the middle of the June because we need to get at least two members to commit the approval of this new policy. With around 10 members in this ARI, we need to put a lot of energy on communication. Particularly, requesting people to do some voluntary work at the shop even it is a part of responsibility of the members. Form the artists’ point of view, they would be happy to stay in their studio to contribute to their works rather than stay at the pop shop to service customers. They don’t want to waste their time and doing nothing there (when the shop is quite, we might not have any sale on that day.). With this issue, director decided to change the policy of membership, kick off the wrong member and then carefully pick up the coming right members for the association. It is a bit annoying, but it is a necessary process to grow up into a long-term business.   

I have worked on our current marketing project –called “The feature artists of the month”. The project is about renovation of the window showcasing at the pop up shop to target the public attraction. In fact, the feature artist of month is quite similar to the normal exhibition of a commercial gallery. For example, Our ARI will arrange refreshments and drinks for the feature Artists on the opening day. This marketing project aims at encouraging local artists, especially our members, to create their new collections. The project is still under the preparing stage that we just got an approval of the policy for this project in the meeting. With this project, I was supposed to meet a new member, who will take this the marketing project as her voluntary work. However, I have not yet seen this new member from the meeting. She is also the first feature artists of this project. Thus, I can not work on this working project until I meet the artist.

Besides shop work and marketing project, I also attend a lot of lectures hold by the council and the pop up project. So far, I have attended a financial lecture, an introduction of how to run your business. I just got some idea about the accounting and the different business type. As an art administration student, it is good to learn a bit about how to run an art business in financial part. Making a business is not easy and making an art business is even harder than that. As a result, we figure out that we really need to get our studio down as soon as possible to offer some ceramic classes for the public rather than expecting people came in to but some artworks.