One of London’s leading galleries specialising in 19^th and 20^th century British art, Gerrish Fine Art has always been an early adopter of digital technology, so it’s no surprise the business chose Cubist Cloud as its gallery management platform.

Founder Hilary Gerrish saw the benefit of the internet early on, creating the gallery’s first website over two decades ago, ahead of many art world contemporaries. The next generation, Hilary’s children Georgie and Henry Gerrish, share Hilary’s vision for blending the best of physical and digital to showcase and sell art to the world’s collectors.

An integrated digital strategy to better serve collectors and the business

The pandemic accelerated their plans to fully digitalise the business, and Cubist Cloud has been a key enabler. Henry, himself an expert in 19^th century British landscape printmaking, explains: “Our earlier websites have been largely catalogues with a search function. Customer, sales and stock management has been spreadsheet driven.

“During lockdown, when we decided to go fully ecommerce, we also wanted to introduce efficiencies in our processes, like sales and inventory management. This meant finding a technology solution that integrated our website and ecommerce sales with our stock management.”

Henry and his sister Georgie faced another challenge. The gallery has one of the largest collections of engravings in the world, with over ten thousand works in its catalogue. A single artist might come with 500-600 objects in one go, and some estates may feature over 2,000 works. That’s a lot of digital content to manage and upload, almost too much for Henry and Georgie when processing it manually.

“When you factor in that many works are on loan, or on consignment, so have different stock status, we need to be confident we know where everything is,” adds Henry.

How Cubist Cloud streamlines the gallery

What attracted Henry to Cubist Cloud is how it integrates the pictures on the website with the database of works behind it, which in turn provides key information about each work. When the works database is updated, for example, if it is new or has been sold, it automatically updates the website, which it also links to an ecommerce solution.

“Previously, when the website and the spreadsheets we used for stock and sales management were not integrated, it took us longer to manually update records,” continues Henry. “It worked, but was less efficient than now. Now when one change is updated across everything, invoices print automatically and the website updates. That’s saving us time, which we can invest in our collectors and artists.” 

Henry estimates around 2,500 images of the gallery’s collection are online already, yet the actual stock is three of four times that number: “Cubist Cloud enables us to bulk upload images into its database, which automatically populates the website. This represents a considerable time saving.”

Integrations with artworld platforms such as Artsy are also a major benefit, as is the growing number of integrations with ecommerce, CRM and marketing platforms.

Henry concludes: “We started using Cubist Cloud 18 months ago, and it allows us to have confidence in where everything is, effectively managing incoming and outgoing works in the physical realm, enabling us to be more efficient.”

See Gerrish Fine Art’s website, designed and developed by Cubist Cloud – https://www.gerrishfineart.com