Keeping your own website and plugging in Cubist Cloud gives you freedom and saves you hassle.

“A lot of galleries have been running for 50 years or more,” says Cubist Cloud’s director, Phil Anderson. “That means they have solid relationships, styles and ways of working that are very specific. A website for that kind of outfit has to work with that identity and those constraints. Before Cubist Cloud, they had to either create their own website and system completely from scratch, or use templates from one of the current gallery management platforms. Neither of those options are ideal.” 

After 15 years as a web designer and developer, and seven at Sirrus Computers – the IT company that spawned Cubist Cloud – Phil saw a chasm in the market for a simple plugin that would allow galleries to outsource their digital needs yet still retain complete control of their identity and systems. “We run websites for over twenty gallery clients at Sirrus, and so many of them told me that they wanted a way to sell their art and operate their gallery business through their sites, but they wanted to make the decisions about how that would look and operate.”

The Sirrus team are all IT experts who design and build websites for big name clients from the ground up. Ideally, Phil would like to be plugging Cubist Cloud into Sirrus-built websites for the most seamless integration, but he understands that galleries have good reasons for using the solutions they already have. That’s why he and his team wanted to make sure that Cubist Cloud could gel with any WordPress made site.

For a gallery owner with a keen aesthetic sense and an independent spirit, using the templates and standardised systems that come with most of their current solutions is understandably jarring. With Cubist Cloud, the only requirement is that a gallery’s website is built and operated within WordPress. Everything else is customizable and flexible. Cubist Cloud is essentially a plugin. While it runs the functionality of a gallery’s website, it allows owners to make that functionality their own, as well as giving them the freedom to retain their brand identity and style. 

“It allows you to select the exact information you want to show for everything you’re selling or displaying,” says Phil. “You can get granular: you can say I only want to show the title, for example, and the artist and the price. Or if you don’t want people to see the price, or anything else, you can go a step down and granulate. It allows you to be really specific.” 

On the finance side of things, Cubist Cloud also integrates with WooCommerce, so any sale that you make on that platform instantly reflects back on to Cubist Cloud, and vice versa. “If you’re on the phone and you make a sale, then it updates your website to say this is no longer available. It’s a powerful tool,” says Phil. 

The platform does more: If a gallery wants to run an online event, an owner can create ‘groups’, which enable online exhibitions, viewing rooms and art fairs, where a user can add items to the groups and manipulate them, and push them onto the website. And if a gallery owner wants to list their artists and point customers towards live information on their upcoming shows and events, Cubist Cloud can do that too. 

After a pilot launch, Phil was happy to find out that the platform’s flexibility and way it integrates so easily into other platforms won it a lot of points. “It automatically captures contacts from any customers who sign up for anything, and stores them in a central database so there’s no need for another system to do that,” says Phil. “It also blends perfectly with MailChimp and Klaviyo, which we find more and more customers are using as it’s more geared towards sales than other mailing platforms.” 

Cubist Cloud’s whole system is based around users being able to change the look and feel and functionality of it to suit their needs and tastes. “You can customise the navigation you can customise the views, you can customise the information you see, you can customise the colours. You can just really make it your own application to work for you. 

“We originally built this software because we had so many people feeding back to us about the holes in what they used at the time. We created Cubist Cloud to fill those holes.” Eighteen months in the coming, Phil says “it got stuck together like Frankenstein’s monster in a way at the beginning, we were testing and reviewing and creating exactly what we and our customers wanted.” 

The Cubist Cloud business model is built on flexibility and freedom. “I don’t feel like people need to be pressured, to have us build their entire website from the bottom up, although of course we can do that. People don’t need to put all of their eggs in our basket if they don’t want to.”