Galleries, boutiques and bookstores serve as frequent destinations for locals seeking entertainment or education through classes, poetry slams, wine tastings and more. But these destinations are businesses, and a business needs revenue to survive. Foot traffic might not be enough to sustain the business, so Phoenix artists and entrepreneurs are going online to showcase what they have to offer.
Visitors walking into Practical Art on Camelback Road will find handcrafted, artisan-made kitchenware, furniture, jewelry and an assortment of other work by nearly 100 Arizona artists. The store also fills with people participating in a knitting class or philosophical discussion group or jiving to live music. But as of early January, visitors can also find Practical Art online.
“It just seemed like the next logical opportunity,” manager Lisa Olson said. The online store serves as a small sampling of what is sold in the physical store and enables the business to expand its audience, she explained. While they still have a lot to add to the website, Olson said the store already has made sales to people as far away as Florida.
Not only does the Internet help physical stores reach a wider geographic area but a strong social media presence helps give the business a personality, manager Kara Roschi said. Selling items online further builds upon that presence, she said.
“It helps to have a web presence that’s more than just the exchanging of conversation,” Roschi said. “It’s kind of like giving our individual items in the store a white pedestal.”
While Practical Art has expanded partly because of the Internet, entrepreneur and slam poetry champion Aaron Johnson has expanded his business despite it.
Johnson, who started a publishing company called Lawn Gnome Publishing, previously sold books out of the Firehouse Gallery in Phoenix as well as online. On Feb. 1, he opened his first book store in the Roosevelt Row arts district in downtown Phoenix on Fifth Street next to Conspire. Johnson now sells his self-published poetry books as well as the works of local and first-time authors. His current focus is creating culture and a sense of community at the book store.
“I get to show people new books, new talent and publicize local authors, which has never been done in Phoenix before,” Johnson said.
While Johnson acknowledges the trend toward e-books as well as the convenience of online sites such as Amazon, he said his store offers a genre that can be found in San Francisco, New York and few other locations, but hasn’t quite caught on in Phoenix: the zine. A combination of literature and comics, the zine has a personal feel to it, and is usually handmade, hand-drawn or hand-written, Johnson said.
“For me, it makes a lot more sense to have a store to showcase that kind of work,” he said.
Still, Johnson agrees that the Internet is a great way for customers to discover his business, and his online site offers a small sampling of his store’s books for sale.
Since opening the physical store, Johnson sells more items daily through his store than online, he said. In the past year, he sold about 23 copies of his new poetry book online, but at book festivals he can sell up to 200 in a single day, Johnson said.
“Events allow for people to come and even get more of a sense of what I’m trying to do,” Johnson said. “I think the personal touch of people talking to one another is always more important and more permanent than Internet connections.”
For local painter Banding Hendrix, it’s all about balance. Years ago, he used MySpace as a platform to sell his work, he said. After performing exclusively at live events for roughly four years, Hendrix said he finally built up enough momentum to create his online presence.
“You can sit all day on the computer and promote your art,” Hendrix said. “But in order to get a really serious art clientele and people really talking about your work, you have to interface with them, and doing it through the computer can only do so much.”
With one to three sales a week via his online gallery, Hendrix aspires to make a sale a day in the future. Ultimately, he would like to sell his work strictly online. Recognizing that not everyone wants to spend $1,000 for an original, he offers prints ranging in price from $20 to $150.
“I wouldn’t be half as successful just doing live shows if I didn’t have the Internet,” Hendrix said. “And if I didn’t go out and do live shows, I wouldn’t have half the clientele that I have off the Internet.”
Contact the reporter at sarah.p.pringle@asu.edu.
