u/comradegallery

I’ve been buying and selling art for the past 8 years.

Over that time, my spreadsheet grew to 5,000 rows long and 60 columns wide. It was the heart of my art business. It kept track of everything: title, date, price paid, measurements, artist, condition, tags, SEO, descriptions, storage location, etc. etc.

Most inventory management platforms are built around the idea that you have many of the same product: 10,000 T-shirts or 1,000 tables.

Art is different. By its very nature, it is unique, one of one. That makes inventory management in the art world much more manual.

Most of the artworks I sell are between $500 and $1,000, but I know dealers selling artworks for millions who still manage their inventory in a spreadsheet.

I tried standard inventory management platforms that synced with Shopify, and I also trialled purpose-built art inventory platforms like Artwork Archive and demoed Artlogic.

The problem was that these platforms had limits on the number of artworks (which got expensive quickly) and were mainly built for selling art offline, in person.

My gallery is online only, and over the past 8 years I’ve sold more than 1,000 artworks. The existing solutions didn’t make it easy to do things that are essential when selling art online, like tagging artworks, writing image alt text and creating SEO titles.

They felt outdated, overcomplicated and underpowered. I had to learn how to use them rather than them fitting into the way I already worked.

My day job is in tech. For the past 14 years, I’ve worked as a product marketer for B2B SaaS companies. So I decided to take the money I made from selling art to hire a designer and engineers (not vibe coded) to build the solution I wished existed for me.

It’s taken me 18 months of building, and 8 years of pain (thinking about this problem) to get here. I wanted to share some of the things I learnt along the way with this subreddit, because I thought you might be interested in how inventory management works in the niche industry that is art.

Designing inventory management for the art world means dealing with a ridiculous number of edge cases. Here are a few that I’ve been building for.

Artwork data is difficult to standardise: 

An artwork can have two artists, multiple mediums, be by an artist with two nationalities from countries that no longer exist like Cezechslovakia or Yugoslavia, and have a creation date recorded as 1968, 1960s, mid-20th century, unknown, 21st century, c. 1960s, late 1960s and more.

The location could be any one of the following: a set of GPS coordinates for a sculpture displayed a park or garden, an address with a sub-location such as a drawer, a room such as the lounge in your apartment, or a specific position like the upper back wall of a church. You need to capture the information while still making it structured enough to search, filter and organise.

Measurements are complicated: 

You would think an artwork has three standard measurements: H × W × D. But then you have a diptych or triptych where each panel has its own set of measurements, a work with a frame or border has two separate sets of measurements, a sculpture with a separate plinth needs its own measurements, and the crate that the sculpture travels in also has its own dimensions and weight.

Mediums aren't standardised: 

Every customer I’ve onboarded so far has had multiple variations of the same medium in their spreadsheet, either because of spelling mistakes or formatting inconsistencies. “Oil on canvas”, “oil on Canvas” and “oil/canvas” are the same thing, but a spreadsheet treats them as different values. Multiply that across thousands of artworks and search, filtering and reporting quickly become much harder.

The medium e.g oil on canvas needs to be documented, but it’s also not how customers search. Customers are searching for paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, etc. They don’t want to select oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas, oil on paper, oil on board, watercolour on paper, etc. just to see the available paintings. So you need to capture both the category and the medium: Painting > Oil on canvas, Sculpture > Bronze, Print > Lithograph, etc.

Provenance should be more than a PDF: 

Provenance is just a fancy word for an artwork’s history. Who owned it before you, when and where it was sold, whether it has been exhibited, what restoration or conservation work was done etc.

This is usually stored in PDFs, which makes it difficult to search, verify or add to over time. I wanted to be able to add each provenance entry separately, so the history of an artwork is structured and searchable rather than buried in a PDF. Eventually, every artwork should have a digital passport with its complete provenance that follows it around for life.

Multiples are not as simple as quantity: 

Often I would buy one poster or print, then come across and buy another copy several years later from a different seller. I couldn’t just change the quantity from 1 to 2 in my spreadsheet. The two prints have different costs, different photos, different conditions and different locations. They were essentially two different products, even though they were the same artwork.

This also created problems on my website. I could end up with duplicate listings for the same print if I treated them as separate SKUs. Also, if I have five copies of a poster, I want to show just one as available on my website to make it appear more exclusive. Then there are editions. You can have 5 of 50, 10 of 50, Artist Proof, Printer’s Proof, Bon à Tirer, Hors Commerce, Presentation/Publisher Proof and more variations. Each individual work has its own edition number, while still being presented as the same artwork.

Need to store high-res and compressed images: 

Artists and dealers want to keep the original image at its original size and resolution so it can be downloaded at any time. But they also need images to load quickly for customers browsing their website. A 20MB image is going to take too long to load, so an inventory management system needs to store the original file while also creating a separate, lossless compressed version (1MB or less) for loading quickly and displaying the work online.

Pricing is complicated: 

For almost all bulk products, pricing is a simple number. In the art world, it’s not that straightforward. You need to be able to show the price, show POA, or hide the price completely, while still keeping the actual price stored in the backend. The problem was that Shopify forced me to either leave the price field empty if I wanted to show POA or hide the price entirely. I then had to create another column in my spreadsheet to store the actual price for future reference.

Search depends on metadata: 

A few years ago, I spent 2 weeks straight tagging 3,000 artworks, each with between 10-20 tags for colours like blue, green and red, subjects like mountains, grass, sky and woman, and other relevant subjects so my collection was easier to search, both for my customers and me. It was so tedious, I got through the entire backlog of 90 Day Fiancé.

My customers don’t ask for artworks by XYZ artist, they instead make requests like “do you have red paintings of dogs from the 1970s from Poland”?. Tags helped make this possible. If an artwork had a puppy in it, I would add hierarchical tags: puppy > dog > animal. Automating this manual work, also things like SEO titles, meta descriptions, image alt text and Google categories, was something that would save me weeks of admin.

The same inventory needs to be grouped in different ways: 

The same artwork might need to appear in several different contexts. I might want to create a selection of 20 works with the price hidden to send to a gallery as a PDF, create a private password-protected viewing room with a custom discount for a loyal customer, list the same artwork on my website with Price on Application, download artwork QR codes for an exhibition wall label, or export the artwork as a CSV with its price to upload to a different website.

An artwork needs to be able to belong to multiple collections, appear in multiple selections, have a different price or discount in a particular context, and still retain its original inventory data and public listing.

Sync to multiple sales channels: 

I sell art across multiple websites and marketplaces. I’ve had trouble in the past because every artwork has to be manually created on each marketplace or channel. So if I sell an artwork on one platform, or change the price or information, I have to manually update it everywhere else. I’ve forgotten to do this and sold the same artwork twice, then had to tell a disappointed customer that the artwork they bought was already sold.

That’s a particularly painful inventory error when there is only one of them. The inventory needs to be the source of truth. If I sell or update an artwork, that change needs to flow through to every place it is listed.

My platform is called KANDINSKY, and we help the art world focus on the art, not the admin. You can find more info through my profile. I don’t want to share any links here because that feels spammy.

I’ve been building this for the past 18 months, and there are still a ridiculous number of edge cases I haven’t mentioned. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who manages inventory for other one-of-one products, get your feedback and recommendations, and would love to discuss/answer your questions in the comments.

When you have less than 50 artworks, you more or less know where everything is. As your collection grows, it becomes much more difficult to keep track of everything.

It's better to create a storage system before your collection grows beyond 50 artworks. Otherwise, you'll eventually have to go back and manually document the location of every artwork.

Knowing where your art is stored becomes even more important once you have artworks in transit, stored across different locations, being restored, on exhibition, out on loan, or on consignment.

A storage system doesn't need to be complicated.

Every artwork should have a Location and a Sub-location.

The Location is the building or place where it's stored, for example Almaty Apartment or London Warehouse.

The Sub-location is the specific place within that location. For example, if you store artworks in plan drawers, the top drawer could be labelled D1, while the fifth drawer might be D5. If you want to be more precise, especially when you have 50 or more artworks in a single drawer, you can also record the artwork's exact position in that drawer

For example, Almaty Gallery, D3-34 means the 34th artwork from the top in drawer 3 of your Almaty Gallery.

Creating a simple storage system makes it a lot easier when you need to find an artwork quickly. Rather than spending 30min searching through your collection, you can find an artwork in 30 seconds. It also reduces risk, because every time you unnecessarily handle an artwork, you increase the risk of damaging it.