Time was when a visit to a museum included shopping for a postcard or an exhibition catalogue. Nowadays, most art institutions have expanded their wares to include home furnishings, jewelry, clothing, toys and books. While it might enhance the museum experience, selling all those products can become a distraction for administrators, taking away time and money from their primary business: curating and exhibiting works of art. If that weren't trouble enough, retail operations, intended to supplement museum admissions, don't always end up in the black.
Last year, to try to solve the problem of doing art and commerce profitably, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA) became one of the first museums in the country to spin off the management of its retail operations into a for-profit company, Museum Enterprise Partners Inc. (MEP). Owned by the MFA and senior management, MEP replaced the museum's 30-year-old Enterprise division and the MFA became its first client. From its offices in Boston's South End, MEP operates both the main MFA store and an exhibition store inside the museum, two mall stores in downtown Boston at Copley Place and Faneuil Hall, the MFA catalogue and Web site, the catalogue outlet store on Cape Cod and a wholesale/corporate division. To handle distribution and fulfillment, MEP has a state-of-the-art 100,000-square-foot warehouse in Avon, Mass., which includes an 85-seat call center.
So far, the results of the changeover in status and management system (many of the employees stayed on) have been good, especially as far as book sales are concerned. According to MEP president and CEO Joe Gajda, "our goal really is to have the store be a destination, especially with the vanilla chains springing up. Of all areas of the store, I think the book department has taken the lead. One of our objectives was to do everything we could to establish books. They're important to the museum's members and the mission of the institution." Despite narrow margins, books are now responsible for one-third of the MFA's sales overall, closer to 40% at the main MFA bookstore.
Sean Halpert, retail buyer for MEP and former manager for Waterstone's flagship Boston store, has been largely responsible for increasing book sales, which are about $3.5 million at the main store alone. "I know it sounds hokey," Halpert told PW, "but it's my mission; I'm buying for a community: students, visitors and area residents." Given the dearth of independent bookstores in downtown Boston, Halpert has chosen to step into the fray by expanding the MFA's book offerings beyond art books, although those form the backbone of the 10,000-title stock. "First and foremost, we have to have every art book published in the U.S. It's absolutely crucial that we be one-stop shopping for art books."
"We were the only bookstore in New England to sell Helmut Newton's big book SUMO from Taschen," said Halpert, whose tastes tend toward quirky art books and small press. The main bookstore has a carefully selected fiction section, ranging from Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, loosely based on the life of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, to Jonathan Lethem's hard-boiled detective novel, Motherless Brooklyn. "I'm a Lorrie Moore, Denton Welsh, Lydia Davis fan. You won't find Barbara Kingsolver and Stephen King in here, because you can buy them in any supermarket," Halpert said. "We added cookbooks because we got a very famous chef at the museum restaurant." MFA bestsellers include Century: 100 Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope (Phaidon), edited by Bruce Bernard, which sold more than 1,000 copies in the main store and another 1,000 through mail-order and Dan Eldon's journals, The Journey Is the Destination (Chronicle), which also sold 1,000 copies. Cat books and children's books, especially hardcover picture-book classics and book-and-plush sets, are also steady sellers.
Although the mall stores have focused more on jewelry and other nonbook items in the past, last fall Halpert began adding more books to the product mix. "At Copley Place, we are having tremendous success with art books (photography, advertising, architecture), D.A.P.—type books, fashion, graphic design, Chronicle books, MIT Press, Harvard University Press, Yale's books, local interest, cooking and selected fiction. We increased the assortment and it continues to surge," Halpert said. "At Faneuil Hall, Mini-Century did very well. We blow out of the right book."
One plus for the stores inside the museum is that many people who come to the MFA plan to stay and make a day of it. "Museums are the new malls," Halpert said. "You can eat here, hang out, go to a movie or shop." For those who haven't discovered the MFA bookstore yet, MEP has begun promoting it as one of Boston's "hidden treasures." A recent print ad in the Boston Phoenix reminded the public that they don't need to belong to the museum or pay for admission to shop at the store.
To date, the MFA bookstore and MEP have made strides, but if MEP is to continue to grow, it will need to expand to other institutions. Gajda is already working on that. "We've done nothing to publicize the service," he said. "It's not an exaggeration to say my phone has rung off the hook. We're currently in discussions with six institutions." He has targeted 200 more that could benefit from separating retail and art and put the profit back in nonprofit.
