Archive for category: All

April 27, 2020

By Lauren Chapin-Salazar

In these truly challenging and unsure days, all our members are inventing and reinventing ways to sustain their businesses — and themselves. So many of us have had to create new ways to communicate with our colleagues and each other — many, many of them now working at home. As we navigate this time — with no fixed date for a return to normalcy — we would like to offer a series of weekly blogs that are “Dispatches from Home.” Our authors will send ideas about how they are coping with this emergency — with tips, innovations and good humor. We hope that all the varied people in our community help each other, survive and thrive during these incredibly difficult days, and arrive on the other side of this national emergency with their spirits — and businesses — intact.

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It’s a new reality — and we’re all in the same situation. We’re trying to be motivated and productive in a surreal time when everything seems so confusing and frightening.

That’s how I feel much of the time. I have high expectations of how it will work: I will be organized! I will set goals and create to-do lists. Strategies will fall from my fingers and onto my work. And I will triumph over this uncertainty and oddness. Life will be safe and make sense again.

But it doesn’t always work out that way.

Until this week, I was working from home three days a week and working at the museum two days a week. It was a study in packing up and moving  the laptop, the invoices and other materials back and forth throughout the week. What would I need? What am I missing?

With our governor’s stay-at-home directive, I pulled more materials, boxes of catalogs to review and more supplies to take home on my last day at work for who knows how long.

I’m hoarding work — imminent and pending projects, paperwork and tasks to do, projects I’ve been putting off for quieter days. All have come home with me to be systematically completed and resolved, hopefully.

My time working at home is quite pleasant and isolating. I set a schedule and I stick to it, mostly. I get up early, have coffee, shower, get dressed and add jewelry and makeup — all that I need to feel like a functioning human. I make a point of sitting at my laptop by 9 a.m. with a fresh mug of coffee and my colored pens and pad.

The pens and pad are an offshoot of a spiritual practice I adopted for Lent.  I live with a cradle Catholic, so Lent is a big deal! I’ve never really participated, other than eating McDonald’s fish filets on Fridays (deelish!). This year, I decided to skip the toe in the water and jump in with both feet, but to do it through creating, not through giving something up. I bought a book called “Praying in Color, Drawing a New Path to God” by Sybil MacBeth. On her website (Prayingincolor.com), she says it’s a book for people who want a deeper connection, who find sitting still and focusing on prayer a challenge and who love color.  Well, color is something I love and find to be a great joy in life, so this seemed like the book for me! Essentially, you doodle and color and as you’re doing so, you are thinking only of that person who seemed promising. I bought it and began using it to create prayer intentions and lists of people to remember to pray for. But what was interesting is that the act of doodling, coloring and creating these lists caused me to be completely focused, and it seemed to open a door into creativity and joy. It also became something to organize some of my other intentions.

When I was thinking of how to motivate myself while working at home in near isolation, I thought of that book and my new practice and adapted it.

Now, each morning I start my day with colored pens and a pad. I find it makes me happy to start with something creative, and it helps to focus my mind to doodle up a plan in color. For me, it’s a combination of planning, brainstorming and fun!

I try to fill every minute, because in the back of my mind are questions like: Did I make any progress? Did I forget anything? What are my next steps?

Teasing out those questions and adding them onto the page helps me address them. A forgotten project pops up and it goes onto the plan in a spot I’ve labeled “Left Field.” Getting it down reminds me to see it and plan for it.

I might have doodle plan of specific projects, too. One of my key goals while working from home with some staff furloughed and one working from home is to keep connected to all my staff. I think it’s more important than ever to keep that connection. So that gets its own doodle plan, too.

I have my plans, but my one remaining staff person, my manager, has her work plan as well, and I’ve created a doodle plan for that. We talk weekly and have numerous daily emails, but when we do talk, I can quickly flip to that page and go over her project list and note progress or ideas for more items.

Creating these doodle plans works for me. I’m being productive and focused in an unsettling time. Each day I can see I’ve accomplished something. I can turn off the computer, set aside the pens and the plan and know that tomorrow is another day to plan in color.

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April 7, 2020

By Michael Higdon

In these truly challenging and unsure days, all our members are inventing and reinventing ways to sustain their businesses — and themselves. So many of us have had to create new ways to communicate with our colleagues and each other — many, many of them now working at home. As we navigate this time — with no fixed date for a return to normalcy — we would like to offer a series of weekly blogs that are “Dispatches from Home.” Our authors will send ideas about how they are coping with this emergency — with tips, innovations and good humor. We hope that all the varied people in our community help each other, survive and thrive during these incredibly difficult days, and arrive on the other side of this national emergency with their spirits — and businesses — intact.

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Working Remotely Is More than a Laptop …

As many of us in the Museum Store Association adjust to working remotely, we are quickly learning that working this way is more than just a laptop, a phone and an internet connection. With so little time to prepare for this sudden transition from our daily customer interaction environment to being at home without the centralized confines of our institution, these unprecedented times have left us to define what working remotely means and what it takes to do so.

Regardless of what you call it — teleworking, mobile work, flex work or just simply working from home — we have suddenly moved into a new environment with its own unique challenges. How do you maintain a culture working remotely that still embodies the collaborative team environment of trust when you are isolated from your team? What technologies are needed to develop this new working environment? How do you make sure the work process supports clarity of the goals to be accomplished? Where do you create a seamless experience in the home that builds on achieving work expectations?

Building an engaging workplace when working remotely is essential for continuing the collaborative environment that supports your team still feeling valued. The first few days of conversations with senior management about remote working was a time warp; it quickly became apparent that assessing who, how and what process would work became a reality. Two of the technologies we chose to use at the National Building Museum were Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Zoom is a web-based video conferencing tool that works with local, desktop client and mobile. At its basic level, Zoom offers both free and for-purchase plans that allow you to meet face to face with your team. Microsoft Teams is a hub for team collaboration that integrates people, content and the tools to allow your team to be more engaged and effective. Both platforms allow for sharing and collaborating in one common place. By adopting both tools, the collaborative environment that embodies the National Building Museum work environment has been maintained outside the museum and in our staff’s homes.

Not all technologies are the same, and not all devices are equal: PC, Mac, iPad, tablet, Android or iPhone. Nothing could be truer as you assess the work environment that staff will need to be physically productive in their homes. In today’s world, owning any one of these devises will allow you to remain connected and will determine the degree to which you might be able to take on home projects that form the remote work environment. In these early days, overcoming and understanding how these all are not the same and learning how to overcome the hurdles that different operating systems that drive the functionality when connecting to different software, servers or the cloud is almost mandatory for the user. Fortunately, at the National Building Museum, we have an excellent team of IT partners who helped many of us overcome the hurdles that we could not ourselves resolve. Getting yourself connected is one thing — but getting multiple people connected takes an enormous amount of fortitude and patience.

Home alone or in the crowded madhouse full of your kids, spouse or whoever you might decide to hunker down with, one thing is for sure: Work has come for a visit in your home, and now you have got to figure out how to deal with this new interloper. Making space to define your work environment is essential to achieving the new expectations of your job. Whether you have the space to set aside a single room, a part of a room or curling up on the sofa with a laptop defining your work environment — when you perform your work responsibilities can prove challenging until you establish some normalcy or routine. While working remotely certainly affords a greater degree of flexibility to perform your work, you must make time and space to do it.

As all our institutions struggle to minimize the impact of the pandemic COVID-19, our rapidly changing work and responsibilities have shifted. Unfortunately, the cause and effect of this pandemic might be that your staff has been laid off. One thing is certain: What we do and how we do it has changed. Fortunately, the National Building Museum has committed to maintaining our staff at present. While this could change at anytime, my role as supervisor remains intact. As a manager, the need to define what work is to be performed by our teams is critical to maintaining the value of our team for our institution. Achieving productivity from a distance requires understanding your process and how these translate to the remote work environment. Adapting and putting into place a remote work environment means defining the expectations of your team, establishing achievable goals and objectives to be accomplished, and accounting for the productivity of our staff. Some questions to keep in mind when building this out:

• Will the employee be working the same hours?
• Will the employee hold the same responsibilities while working from home?
• What times do they need to be available?
• How do they need to be available (phone, email, DMs, etc.)?
• If they are hourly or nonexempt, how will they be tracking their time?
• Will they be required to e-join a team or meetings?

Whatever agreement you come to with your staff, you should make sure you are keeping not only the employee’s needs in mind, but your institution’s needs as well.

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March 16, 2020

By Tom Dykes

Last year, while scrolling through the National Theatre Bookshop’s work feed over morning coffee (read: being easily distracted by Twitter), I came across an article on Medium by a digital marketing specialist, Lori Byrd-McDevitt, that really stayed with me.

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“Museums have this funny problem of needing to keep up with the Joneses (other leisure time activities) but refusing to play in the same sandbox. For museum social media managers, it means keeping up with companies like Coca Cola and Disney with 0.01% of the budget that these monster accounts have … or sometimes no budget at all. Generally speaking, this is because museum leadership has been slow to understand the importance of digital as compared to traditional media, or the impact of social as a first touchpoint.”

This struck me for a few reasons, notably that you could swap out the job title and replace it with any number of roles in an arts institution. But it particularly appealed to my personal experience of juggling social media with several other roles in my day-to-day job. I’m sure many of us recognize the curse of working in the arts: that we love what we do and where we work and therefore should put up with more expectations (and workload) for less money than the private sector, precisely because of the “privilege” of working where we do and the understood squeeze on funds.

So, how do you do it? Through using what the private sector doesn’t have: the love, passion and sense of ownership our visitors have for our unique cultural organizations.

In my talk at MSA FORWARD, I’ll discuss digital in a wider sense, but here I wanted to focus on how to get the best out of your social media if you’re juggling other roles and don’t have large amounts of time or resources.

1. Exploit your unique selling proposition.

For me, this meant learning to get the National Theatre’s social content editor and marketing team on board and leveraging the expertise and reach of our institution. Instead of working in isolation, I went out of my way to cultivate relationships with colleagues in other parts of the building. We’re all aware that it can be difficult getting the artistic or curatorial sides of our organizations to engage with the commercial sides, but I made this a priority. The NT has over 450,000 followers on Twitter and over 210,000 on Instagram. Although I’ve worked hard to get the NT Bookshop’s Twitter from zero to 11,500, it’s a no-brainer.

We worked hard at finding the right kind of content that the main marketing team would love and would fit with the NT’s digital strategy. This meant pitching online-exclusive products that spoke directly to our audiences and to not being overly commercial.

2. Engage your customers.

Listen to what they talk about and feel passionate about. For example, we partnered with Tonic Theatre for International Women’s Day — featuring plays by women in the shop’s merchandise offerings and online for a few years — or items from the National Theatre’s Black Plays Archive. Some of my favorite experiences have been when a young writer finds their play on our shelves.

3. Personalize your content.

The National Theatre Bookshop’s niche is as the world’s greatest performing arts shop, with knowledgeable and passionate staff who are usually writers, actors or directors themselves. So, how could we use that on social? We created #MonologueMonday where one of our brilliant team members would sit with me one day a month and answer people’s questions live. It was a hit. We’re currently looking to how this could expand onto the main NT channel.

4. Reward people with free stuff.

People love free stuff. Don’t be above doing competitions and asking people to follow you in return. If we’re running smaller accounts specific to our retail outlets, or a small venue with a local footprint or few resources, this is a brilliant way to gain attention. It also has the very important benefit of rewarding your followers.

5. Take creative risks.

Nobody is going to pay attention to another magnet or tea towel. If you take risks with your product development and design, you stand a chance of going viral (the good kind). A great example of the above playing out well on social was the National Theatre Bookshop’s Lady Macbeth’s Hand Sanitizer (tagline: Out, Damned Spot!). This sold well and gained a lot of engagement from our own social posts. Most importantly it got people talking. Some in the theatre thought it wasn’t deferential enough to the production, or that people might not get the sense of humor. But it went viral on social several times. NT has even experimented with partnerships with local breweries, creating exclusive beers for certain shows.

If you do it right, you get messages like this.

I hope to see as many of you as possible at “How to be Digital (And Not Alienate People)” at MSA FORWARD in Cleveland on April 21 at 9:15 a.m.

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February 17, 2020

By Catherine McGoldrick

This article was originally published by the Association for Cultural Enterprises.

Cultural Enterprises Academy

A few months ago, I was in a premier visitor attraction shop (as I often am!) and noticed that, despite exiting through the gift shop, visitors were tending to drift through the shop and leave without a purchase.

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Why?

Often the difference between whether one purchases or not in a museum shop comes down to one powerful factor: visual merchandising. I love this quote from Michael Guajardo of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts:

“Visual merchandising is the silent sales team that is always working to impact the bottom line … is always on the clock, and never takes breaks.”

Good visual merchandising will boost your conversion rate, your average transaction value and even attract visitors to your shop on a standalone basis. Here are my top tips for using it successfully.

1. Get them in.

If, like a lot of us, you aren’t lucky enough to have visitors exit through the gift shop, it is absolutely essential to catch the eye of the customer on the way past. Use your shop windows creatively to draw customers in, and make sure the displays at the front of the shop reflect current exhibitions or seasonality to tempt them to come in for a look. If you are lucky enough to have exit through the gift shop, wow them with displays to make sure they stay and purchase.

2. Know what you are selling – and who you are selling to!

It’s really important to know who your customers are and reflect this in your visual merchandising. Nowhere is this more important than in your shop layout. In National Museums NI, all our shop spaces need to offer products for both children and adults. In order to manage this, the shop floor is clearly zoned so customers can find “their” area with color and signage. No one wants to try on expensive jewelry with bouncy balls whizzing past their ears! Products and visual displays are targeted to the target market. A display to attract children is very different than one for adults.

3. Make sure your customer knows, too.

I am obsessed with clean lines on our displays and have clear rules on merchandise positioning. A customer should be able to go to any area of a shop and understand the merchandise immediately. What is the story you are telling? It could be dippy, Irish art, local history, but it should be crystal clear to the customer.

Displays that are fussy and aren’t thought through can actually be detrimental to sales. If the customer doesn’t understand what an area or display is telling/selling, they get confused and drift off bemused by too much “stuff.” As a buyer, I don’t purchase anything if I don’t know exactly where that product will go in the shop and what story it will fit into.

Below is a fantastic example of a clean, clear storytelling display — one glance tells the customer everything. This display says if you love this painting, here is the place to shop!

4. Create beautiful displays.

An unusual or lovely display can stop customers in their tracks. When building a display, start with the core pieces those you need/want to sell; it could be a catalogue or some key exhibition merchandise. Then layer in complementary product such as more generalist books on the topic. Items in a display should be clearly related to the main products.

Create eye appeal by using focal points to add height or creating pyramid displays. I always step away a few times while building the display and come back to review. Is it too busy? Does it feel unbalanced? Often the key is to simplify rather than try to throw too much into the mix. Products should be able to “breathe” within the display and not feel cramped and squashed. If you are selling high-end products in a display, it is crucial to build in space around them to convey the special nature of the product and suggest luxury and value. Add striking accessories or specialist fittings to add drama and interest.

Where you are selling a disparate collection of items — for example, assorted ceramics or homeware — use color palettes to bring them together. Always bear in mind the purpose of the display is to sell. Displays should be easy to access and feel “shoppable” — the customer doesn’t want to feel afraid to touch or reach for products.

5. Add height.

6. Use color to tie the display together.

7. Add striking accessories.

8. Use your suppliers.

The suppliers who provide artisan jewelry or handmade ceramics to your museum are talented, design-led people. Why not use this to get them to come in and merchandise their product for you? They often use props and materials that reflect their own unique vision and help to create special and memorable displays. The supplier below uses etchings, paintings and antique looking drawing books to create a unique look. It’s a win-win for the museum shop and for their brand.

9. Use clear point of sale to highlight the special nature of local or hand made products and their provenance.

10. Don’t forget to grab an extra sale.

Once you have the customers at the till point, why not try to motivate an additional impulse purchase? Provide another chance to buy exhibition catalogues or motivate an impulse add-on buy with items such as beautiful bookmarks or striking wrapping paper.

“We’ve done surveys, and about a third of the people who come to the museum say that they plan to shop here,” Rich Perdott, the Met’s vice president of merchandising, told the New York Times. “They’ve said they want to buy something that’s a tangible memory of their visit. Part of our goal always is to give them something they couldn’t get elsewhere.”

Remember, the visitors are already on-site and motivated to purchase; don’t let the opportunity slip through your fingers!

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Catherine McGoldrick has 20 years of experience in retail buying. Previously, she held a senior role with a major retailer in high street fashion, responsible for buying and sourcing for multiple stores across several countries. She is currently the retail manager for National Museums NI. This role comprises all aspects of retail, including buying and product development for all the NMNI sites, shop fits and pop-up shops. She has 10 years of experience in the cultural retail sector.

January 20, 2020

By Patricia Sampson, Stacey Stachow and Lilia Villasenor

We’ve all heard of Toledo, Ohio, but did you know that it’s named after the holy city of Toledo, Spain? Hence the expression: “Holy Toledo.”

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Toledo in Spain is known as the “city of three cultures” because of the cultural influences of Christians, Muslims and Jews reflected in its history. The old city sits on top of a hill surrounded by the city wall and overlooks the plains of Castilla-La Mancha.

In 1986, Toledo was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today, there are still excavations going on, but Toledo has become a bustling and quaint city. It’s a fascinating town and a center for Spanish tourism, which yearly hosts FARCAMA: Féria de Artesania de Castilla-La Mancha.

Last October, Stacey Stachow from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Lilia Villasenor from the International Rose Test Garden, and I took part in the Hosted Buyers Program of the Regional Handcrafts Show FARCAMA 2019 held in the historic city of Toledo, Spain. FARCAMA is sponsored by the Castilla-La Mancha government and the Foreign Trade and Investment Institute of Castilla-La Mancha (IPEX) and is the leading exhibition of handcraft artisans in the region. Each year, IPEX invites buyers from MSA to take part in their craft show and to learn more about how we shop gift markets. This year, the three of us were their invited delegates to the fair.

During our trip to FARCAMA, we had the opportunity to meet with many Spanish artisans in their studios. We went to Nava’s storefront in the old town of Toledo where we were educated on the traditional techniques of hand-embroidered silk shawls with fringe, which originated in the municipality of Lagartera. Our next visit was to the Anframa showroom. Founded in 1970 after a gathering of several Toledo craftsmen and damascene masters who wished to maintain the centenary tradition, Anframa has become a leader in the manufacturing of damascened articles.

Damascene is the technique of inlaying metal to metal using 18- and 24-carat gold foil and wire to create intricate designs. Building off the tradition of damascene is contemporary artist Oscar Martin Garrido, who is applying the traditional technique to contemporary subjects. His studio was very exciting to visit. We had the chance to see him work firsthand on a new work of art and had the opportunity to play with swords that he had created. Yes, sword making is going strong (and you need to be strong to lift them) in Toledo. We also visited Credansa Grupo, which reminded me of the Spanish version of Popcorn Custom Products and Museum Store Products rolled into one. They make lovely cork-back coasters and ceramic magnets and keychains among parts for airplanes. These were just the studios we visited, now let’s talk about FARCMA.

FARCAMA is a vibrant craft show of Spanish artists who make traditional crafts along with other items with contemporary flare. We saw handmade copper kettles, silk scarves, soap makers, jewelers, ceramics, swords, etc. They even had a furniture and food section where we were able to taste test olives, cheeses and vino. Many of the buyers were from different regions and countries. One of the interesting components of the show was that it’s open to the general public. Also, your purchases were packed in a shopping bag that had the FARCAMA logo. We thought this was a great marketing tool!

This was an amazing adventure, and we highly recommend everyone visit Toledo and FARCAMA if you ever have the chance. A couple of words of advice: Do your research and study up on your Spanish. We were fortunate to have our wonderful hosts, Jose, Armelle and Javier who translated for us during the day but explored on our own for dinner. It was a true adventure in an amazing city!

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