Museum Gift Shops:
A captive audience notwithstanding, museum gift shops have had to revise marketing and sales strategies to keep revenue numbers strong. We take a look at how these novel gift stores are faring. Geoff Walsky
exhibits or mission. Doing so can jeopardize the tax benefits these non-profit institutions receive from retail income. This can frequently mean it may be diffi cult to jump on current trends
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nlike a stand-alone gift shop, a museum store is a captured venue. A captured-venue store is a retail location associated with some type of event
or venue that has a built-in customer base. For instance, a sports and entertainment arena has some amount of seats and draws a crowd based on their events. A theater draws attendance based on the shows they put on. In this a case a museum draws visitors based on the content of its exhibits, the educational message, and the mission of the museum. In most museums, the store is the last place a visitor will go through before leaving. So from a fi nancial standpoint, it’s the last opportunity for a museum to capture any more revenue.
Museum stores have a unique challenge in that they cannot carry items that are unrelated to the museum’s
GIFT SHOP n Winter 2013
and bring in the new “hot items.” At the same time, the captured venue means the museum store can count on a certain number of potential customers checking out the store. At a time when everyone is competing for a decreased
pot of discretionary spending, here are three strategies that museum gift shops are honing now more than ever.
Price rules At the National Museum of the Marine Corps, 30 miles outside Washington D.C., Andy Pineau, Director of Retail Sales, saw revenue decline since opening in 2006. The museum doesn’t benefi t from the everyday foot traffi c seen in the city, and economic factors such as gas prices play a large part in whether people venture out of city limits to visit the stand-alone museum. Pineau has seen sales come
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N A T ION A L MU S E UM OF T H E MA R I N E COR P S
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