Business Strategy·Art MarketplaceThe Foundry began as an exchange for leftover studio materials. Ten interviews challenged that idea and led us to a marketplace for graduating designers’ finished work. I led the pivot, developed the business model and designed the buyer experience. The five-year financial model projected what the marketplace would need to earn; it was not a measured result.
Graduating designers invest time and money in physical work that may be shown for only a week at a degree show before going into storage. Interviews pointed to interest in discovering emerging designers, but few established routes for buyers to find and purchase that work. We saw an opportunity to connect the two beyond the show itself.
“We only have very few ways to meet new / young talent each year.”
Buyers, budget and supply sit in one city, and the supply refreshes every spring.
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We first proposed an exchange for surplus studio materials. Across ten interviews, aesthetics mattered more to potential buyers than the materials’ sustainability. Trust in recycled stock was low, and we could not identify a clear budget for scrap. We shifted to finished work: something buyers could assess, designers wanted to sell and a marketplace could earn a commission from.
Not executed. These were the next steps the pitch proposed.
The Foundry is an online gallery where schools list their graduates' work and buyers purchase it directly, so the platform earns on every sale it makes possible.
Three revenue lines. Commission carries the model, subscriptions cover the floor.
Walkthrough: gallery room, product page, artist profile.
The model assumed an average artwork price of $1,000 and a 30% commission, or $300 per sale. It also assumed school subscriptions and 2,100 sales in Year 1. These figures produced a viable projection on paper, but interviews at this scale could not validate the price, sales volume, commission or subscription demand.
| Projected revenue (Year 1) | $788,000 |
|---|---|
| Transaction commissions | $630,000 |
| Subscriptions, school and individual | $158,000 |
| Projected cost (incl. $69,500 initial) | $750,400 |
| Salaries & wages | $560,000 |
| Advertising & marketing | $140,000 |
| Cost of goods sold and other | $50,400 |
| Projected net income (Year 1) | $37,600 |
The next test would have been whether schools could supply enough work and whether buyers would return after the degree-show season.
Build it multi-tenant, one storefront per school, so each campus runs its own shopfront. The school becomes the hub that facilitates the sale.
Validate every assumption we priced on. The $1,000 artwork price, the 30% commission and the $10,000 school subscription were all assumed from user interviews at a much smaller scale.
Estimate the customer acquisition leverage we would need to keep artists and creatives on the platform after they graduate.
The projection made the opportunity look viable. The next step would have been testing whether schools could reliably supply work, and whether buyers would return beyond the annual degree-show cycle.