50
BESTTHE Celebrating
OF DARTMOUTH DART
GALLERY Ed Reach and Tom Butcher took over the popular and well-named family business Dart Gallery when the previous owners retired from running the gallery in 2014.
A
lthough both Ed and Tom had enjoyed long careers before
that in financial services, they were no strangers to the art world having launched and subsequently sold a successful gallery in Lyndhurst in the New Forest before moving to Dartmouth.
Has the gallery changed much under your ownership? A long-standing gallery like ours never stands still and we are continuing to evolve it. Obviously, our roster of artists is always changing and developing in new directions. We’ve worked hard to build strong relationships with the many artists that have been with the gallery for a long time, such as Stewart Edmonson, but also to seek out and develop new artists. It’s always been a gallery that keeps refreshing its offering and we have kept that going. That said, we’ve made a lot of changes online with our website and how we use social media and digital marketing to communicate with customers and expand our market. That works well alongside continuing to regularly publish and send out brochures to our customers to promote upcoming
exhibitions. The investment we’ve made in
the website has made it more user friendly and responsive. It’s now easier to buy online without calling the gallery and you can purchase any of the art exhibited in the gallery online. This has become an important part of our business. Our online buyers might be those who we already know
For customers, we work hard to make sure the purchase and delivery of art works efficiently around their lifestyles.
from their visits to the gallery as collectors of a particular artist and some are completely new customers whose first purchase with us is online. We find that often buyers will have loyalty to the gallery or to an artist, so a bricks and mortar and online presence gives us the best of both worlds.
Who buys art from you? It’s a healthy mix of residents,
second homeowners and visitors. We’re delivering artwork every
week to all parts of the country and we also have a very loyal local customer base. It’s good for us that there are always new people moving to the town and local area.
How many artists do you show? At any one time, we work with around 40 artists. Lots of new artists approach us directly but we also visit art fairs and search online for new talent, as well as having artists introduced to us by other artists we already work with. We are lucky that the gallery has a lot of flexible space over two floors – this means we can show a real mix of art. For example, when we have a solo show filling the ground floor, we can have a mixed exhibition of other artists on the first floor. One of the great strengths
of owning and running an independent gallery and something we really enjoy, is our ability to have direct working relationships with all of our artists, many of them have become our friends too. It makes the process
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