Case study — Fine art

$1.8M of art, sold to people who buy it by the floor.

namuh sells art to collectors. Collectors buy one piece. Designers buy forty. We did not change the art. We changed who was asked.

$1.8MTrade revenue added

9 monthsStart to run rate

52%Net margin held

Results at a glance

New B2B pipeline generated$0 before$2.6M

Close rate24%35%

Qualified leads, first 30 days150+

Primary acquisition channelPaid adsB2B outbound by day 90

Marketing budgetCut to 1/10 of previous spend

Avg. cost per qualified lead — cold email vs paid

Google Ads$610

Meta Ads$540

Cold email$57

Cold email brought in qualified buyers at roughly a tenth of paid CPA — and every dollar not spent on ads goes straight to the net. That gap is how the marketing budget fell to 1/10 of previous spend while pipeline kept growing.

Part 01 — The challenge

A gallery waits to be found. That is the whole problem.

namuh had the hard part solved. Real artists, real work, real buyers who paid well.

But the model was a gallery model. Wait for the collector. Hope they walk in, or click in. Every sale started from nothing and ended with one piece on one wall.

Meanwhile the biggest art budgets in the country were being spent by people who never visit galleries. An interior designer finishing a hotel needs sixty pieces. A developer signing off a lobby needs a statement work. A corporate office needs a floor.

Those buyers were never contacted. Not once.

Part 02 — The solution

Stop selling art. Start solving a wall.

A designer is not shopping. They have a deadline, a budget line and an empty wall. We built the offer around that, not around the artist.

Step 01

Curate to the brief, not the catalogue

Send the project, get a curated selection back. The designer stops browsing and starts choosing. That one change is the entire offer.

Step 02

Make the margin theirs and say so

Trade pricing with a clear choice: pass it to the client, keep it as commission, or split it. Most galleries never admit the discount is the designer’s income.

Step 03

Handle everything after the yes

Framing, crating, delivery, install, certificates. The designer hands over a wall and gets it finished. You just removed a week from their project.

Step 04

Target the live project

We reached designers and procurement leads with a project already running. Timing beats persuasion every time in this category.

Part 03 — The outcome

One designer is not one sale. It is every project they run.

$1.8M in 9 months. Net margin 52%, because trade art carries no acquisition cost and no discounting war.

38 designers and buyers opened accounts. The best of them specified namuh on 4 separate projects inside the year.

The gallery still sells to collectors. It just no longer waits for them.

Before you decide

If you are thinking…

“Art is taste. You cannot sell it like product.”

Correct, which is why the offer is curation, not a catalogue. You are not asking them to like a painting. You are removing a week of searching from their project.

“Our pieces are too expensive for volume buyers.”

Hospitality and corporate budgets are the largest art budgets there are. High price is why they take the call. It is the low-ticket galleries that struggle here.

“Designers already have their own sources.”

They have sources who are slow. Curate to a live brief inside two days, handle the install, and you become the source they use next time. Switching cost in this category is built on speed, not loyalty.