"It Was Totally Bootstrap": Art Entrepreneur Jen Bekman Looks Back on 5 Years of 20x200
BLOUIN | ARTINFO
By Rachel Corbet
On Monday, the VIP Art Fair announced that it was abandoning its twice-a-year fair model and joining fellow e-retailers Paddle8, Art.sy, and Artspace to sell artwork online full-time. But before this ever-expanding influx of net-art startups, there was 20x200, New York dealer Jen Bekman’s pioneering print project that’s celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. In 2007, Bekman launched her site for affordable art prints — the online market’s most successful medium — with two friends in her living room. The site generated significant revenue from the moment it launched, and by 2009, she was making $1 million a year and securing high-profile investors of Flickr and Vimeo fame. This year, having sold nearly 200,000 prints to 70,000 collectors, she expects to break the $7 million mark. [link]
By Rachel Corbet
On Monday, the VIP Art Fair announced that it was abandoning its twice-a-year fair model and joining fellow e-retailers Paddle8, Art.sy, and Artspace to sell artwork online full-time. But before this ever-expanding influx of net-art startups, there was 20x200, New York dealer Jen Bekman’s pioneering print project that’s celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. In 2007, Bekman launched her site for affordable art prints — the online market’s most successful medium — with two friends in her living room. The site generated significant revenue from the moment it launched, and by 2009, she was making $1 million a year and securing high-profile investors of Flickr and Vimeo fame. This year, having sold nearly 200,000 prints to 70,000 collectors, she expects to break the $7 million mark. [link]
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