What is Digital Art Works - Digital Art Works is into selling global art at affordable rates. This looks like a very simple concept till one finds out the underlying factors behind the launch of this seemingly simple concept.
Many (in fact every) products in the world go through a 4 stage life cycle - Niche & Status Symbol, Niche & Fashionable Item, Commodity & Fashionable Item, Pure Commodity, Death.Take any product and look at it through this 4 stage life cycle lens and you understand how a product moves in its life time. I will take a classic example of mobiles to explain it in the Indian context.
In the late 90's having a Black & White bulky Nokia phone was considered a status symbol. Only the uber rich were able to afford it and rest others envy them for their mobile phone. Later on due to technology advances, cost came down and the product moves from Niche & Status to Niche & Fashionable Item. Now the upper middle class were able to afford this mobile phone and the mobile phone became wide prevalent. At this stage the uber rich moved to a new phone discarding this one. And then it became commodity & fashionable item. By then, it became accessible to even middle class and it became wide prevalent. Middle class started flaunting it among the fellow middle class people. After a few years, i guess by 2005, it became a pure commodity. Poor, old and 'I don't care how a mobile phone looks' people were the only ones using it. By 2009, it was discontinued and we hardly see that bulky Nokia phone in the market.
This happens to every product. Even for cricket which is once hailed the rich man's sport. And cars - Before Ford invented Model T, cars were rich men thing. After Ford's Model T, it became a common man's thing. Even in India, it is now becoming a common man's thing. People like Henry Ford, Richard Branson envision the need for moving the product from Niche segment to mass segment and in the process revolutionize the entire industry. We are in a way now trying to emulate Henry Ford in the field of art.
There are some products which are always maintained as the rich man's object. Brands like Louis Vuitton, Chanel ... they maintain their position by keeping the prices high and by maintaining artificial scarcity. With the current technology they can make LV a common man's bag but they don't. In fact, i heard few years back LV had put a condition that only one bag for one Japanese customer may be during Japan's roaring 80s. And the other one is natural resources. By nature, they are limited and thus their price is high. But also it is an open secret that DTC maintains artificial scarcity by stocking diamonds in its warehouses to maintain the price.
With this brief background, lets see how art is positioned in the market. Art is always maintained as mainly a rich man's thing by maintaining an artificial high price for the art work. Nobody knows how the artwork is priced. Middle class envy those rich buying the art thinking they are sophisticated. Galleries are very uninviting for the normal person. But should art be only for rich. A thorough study revealed that art appreciation doesn't require richness and art can be a common man's thing. So effectively increase the supply of artwork and bring down the price of artwork. We explored ways to increase the supply and found one great solution (kudos to the technological advances). We thought we got the killer application and reached artists to get the artworks. But to our utter dismay, none of the artists seemed interested in our concept. They haven't given us the digital rights of the artworks. And upon exploration we realized that they are too deeply rooted into those preconceived notion that art should be sold expensive that they don't want to sell it cheap. We tried to convince them by showing the comparision between price and scale. Lower price can be compensated with higher scale. But few seemed convinced.
And also the marginal cost of selling a print for the artist is zero. He just creates the artwork and thats it. Where are his marginal revenue is very high. It also didn't seem to convince many artists. Of course, the fact that ours is a startup made them skeptical about this entire thing. But we wanted to prove them that this works and we are looking forward for a day when artists come to us and give us the artworks for the sale.
There is a saying 'Nothing stops the idea whose time has come'. We believe the time has come for this idea and we want to make it happen...
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