NZ Fine Prints sells gallery's land to the Crown

New Zealand Fine Prints and associated companies (such as Capper Press and Avon Fine Prints) moved into the old Royal Exchange Assurance building at 202 Hereford St in the Christchurch CBD from cramped quarters above the National Party offices in Tuam St. It was the end of the 1960s and staff numbers were growing with projects like "Captain Cook's Artists in the Pacific" in full swing.  For nearly fifty years the 1890's era warehouses at the rear of the site was packed full of books and prints and the 1920s two storied building facing Hereford St comprised gallery and office space.

After September 4 2010 we spent well into six figures on temporary repairs and because of this early warning we were extremely fortunate that no-one was injured or killed although February 22nd 2011's earthquake damaged both buildings beyond repair.

Because such a large proportion of our business is now online (New Zealand Fine Prints is behind NZ's largest art print and poster site - prints.co.nz) the physical destruction of our buildings was, we thought, a temporary setback - an opportunity even to rethink the design of our buildings to relate better to other businesses on our block with a more pedestrian friendly access from Cashel St, Liverpool St and Woolsack Lane.   Our plan had always been to redevelop the site over time, preserving the character of the buildings in a central city location with plenty of parking with our unique business offering the largest range of prints in NZ as the anchor tenant.  We were not property developers, ours was a staged development intended to keep 202 Hereford maintained and economically viable for the next generation above all else.

When the Crown announced that our land was going to be seized for the so called green frame our initial reaction was disbelief.  But today we are announcing that along with many other CBD property owners we have been steamrolled by the Crown into accepting their offer for our land.  For an owner occupier with a sentimental attachment to our family's land we would never have sold our land at the low price offered by the Crown in the open market.  The idea that we are a willing seller is ridiculous as with only a single buyer and the threat of compulsory acquisition hanging over us we simply had no choice but to accept.

The ghostly outline of NZ Fine Prints' old gallery after demolition

Our main shopfront may be online but central to the DNA of our business is our love of NZ's visual culture and history, a sense of connectedness that is rooted in a specific geographic location.  The internet is ephemeral, a stock room piled high with packs of art prints on hundreds of shelves is tangible, even if a customer had never visited us they knew that behind the online gallery lay a family run business that had been around for a long time in one place.

Freed from a physical location (we may have been 2 1/2 years in Cashmere but it still feels transitional) we have renewed our focus on growing the online side of the business but despite the exponential growth that a website offers in terms of extra sales for our artists we are very sad that we are not being allowed to rebuild on our completely undamaged land (our place is being taken by a lawn).

It is businesses like NZ Fine Prints that make a central city different.  Taking our land away from us and imposing a top down plan on the rebuild of the CBD removes the entrepreneurial skills that the businesses around us had to make our block work with the hand the earthquakes dealt us.  NZ Fine Prints were also committed to the rebuild (trapped even) and prepared to invest more than a developer would based purely on the numbers as we had a sentimental attachment to making this patch of Christchurch awesome for our kids even if we didn't make much back financially for twenty years.

New location - look out for JK's kiwi sign
on Hackthorne Rd just past the school.

While we assess the options for a future site of a gallery, stockroom and warehousing we have made the decision to stay in our temporary premises (we are working from the basement of a classic Cashmere character house opening out into a superb garden with views across Christchurch, it's pretty nice here if a little quiet compared to the CBD) for at least another year while we wait and see what happens with the rebuild.

Customers looking for prints who are in Christchurch are always welcome to visit us, we now have nearly all prints back on one site thanks to some pretty innovative shelving (our prints are now double and triple bunked instead of luxuriating on a shelf of their own) although we are not carrying quite so many framed prints in stock framing to order within a few days instead.

The fact that the Crown will be packaging up our land for re-sale in the future without possibility of us buying it back at the same price seems really unfair and why businesses got such a harsh deal compared to property owners in residential neighbourhoods where the land was damaged (full payout of GV plus demolition costs) are the two things that we continue to feel bitter about. However we have decided to just give up and move on, lets hope the bureaucrats from Wellington flying down here each week know what they are doing with Christchurch.

NZ Fine Prints shocked to lose our land in CBD rebuild

The release yesterday of the blueprint for the rebuild of Christchurch's central business district is great news for Christchurch, it's going to be a world class city to live and work in. However personally and professionally this writer (Antony Ellis, co-owner of NZ Fine Prints) is  bitterly disappointed that our perfectly ok to rebuild on CBD land that has been the home of New Zealand Fine Prints for nearly fifty years is going to be taken from my family by the council to be part of the green frame to the east of the new smaller CBD.  Our plans to rebuild the largest specialist art print gallery in NZ are now replaced instead by, wait for it,  a lawn.

Temporary repairs following the first quake

Although people buying prints in Christchurch are actually a relatively small part of NZ Fine Prints' overall sales (our biggest markets are Auckland, Wellington and overseas (if you group sales to expatriate New Zealanders and gifts sent out of NZ together) we were excited about being part of the rebuild of the Latimer Square precinct, a gallery like NZ Fine Prints is just the kind of unique niche retail business that makes the central city different from a mall or business park and draws people into the city to shop. We never wanted to be stuck in some utilitarian distribution centre out by the airport, it might make logistical sense for an online retail business to be right next to CourierPost but you would be mad to choose to spend 1/3 of your daily hours in the bland monoculture of industrial buildings when you can be in the heart of a city instead.

The DNA of New Zealand Fine Prints online store with its "long tail" of every NZ art print available in stock has been shaped by our unchanging location of nearly fifty years in in Christchurch's CBD.  NZ's largest art print store is obviously now predominantly an online business but even in today's world of online shopping customers knew there was a physical gallery to visit, that they were buying from a family owned and New Zealand based company.  We were not one of the huge American websites offering photo library scenic shots as "NZ posters", nor were we one of several dozen websites who have come and gone offering NZ prints, posters, framing etc run from home and relying on others to drop ship the prints to customers on their behalf or simply being an affiliate site fulfilling sales via an affiliate program.

Far end of our gallery stockroom (following Sept 4's
earthquake the table was for sheltering from aftershocks)

Owning our own warehouses (originally built for the Zealandia Wax & Candle company in the 1880s) in the centre of the city for such a long time led to a wonderful experience for print buyers. The smell of paper when they walked through the door, the sight of racks and racks of prints with the balance of editions carefully wrapped in brown paper and stacked on top of the shelving sometimes up to the ceiling.  Labels with the names of NZ's most famous artists and printmakers, files of correspondence with the likes of Colin McCahon, Rita Angus or Gordon Walters. Packages of prints of famous paintings imported from the States, Europe and Australia and decades of catalogues charting the changing tastes of New Zealand art buyers. 

We sometimes joked we were the "print sellers of last resort, a buyer would be looking for an obscure NZ print, for example a particular early view of Auckland, and this would trigger a chain of phonecalls and emails to us from galleries and picture framers as the buyer rang around repeatedly trying to find the picture but everyone knowing if they hadn't managed to find it yet if anyone still had the print it would be somewhere in our warehouse in Christchurch. And yes, sometimes we knew we had the print a buyer wanted in stock - but took some hours digging to actually find it.  Given both the size of the NZ market and the need to publish reproduction prints in such large editions before digital printing we did a brisk trade in replacing prints for people because if a print was damaged we might still have prints from the very same edition published twenty years before that were in pristine brand new condition.

Until very recently even our print codes told you where they were located on a physical shelf (letter was the bay, number was the row), there are some amusing artifacts of this system still at Prints.co.nz where for instance code "B00" meant the pile on top of the B rack!

Sign for NZ Fine Prints going back up after Sept 4

Personally for this writer 202 Hereford St has been the stage and backdrop of my life, where my family has lived our personal and professional lives since before I was born.  It's the place where my sister and I would wait all day for Dad to finish "a couple of things at the office" before we could leave for our holiday, where in the late 1970s we would watch the weird green light coming out of a photo copier the size of small car for hours and where we would be employed to lick the backs of hundreds of envelopes in return for caramel milkshakes from the cafe two doors away. It's where my wife to be and I came up with the idea to use the new technology of colour photocopying to create catalogues of prints to send to picture framers, galleries and schools. And we photographed all the prints with a new fangled digital camera on the deck by the carpark when we decided to put our mail order catalogues online back in 1999.

The ghostly outline of our buildings following demolition

We have been excitedly planning our part of the rebuild and were looking forward to having a modern (i.e. warm!) warehouse, office and showroom in the heart of the new Christchurch. What an amazing process to actually live through we thought, to watch the city being rebuilt around us. We looked forward to being one of the first businesses to "re-colonise the inner city".

After 18 months of working from shipping containers and from a temporary office in Cashmere yesterday was supposed to be the day we could begin getting down to the detail of rebuilding our buildings we lost in the quakes, we simply wanted and expected to put our gallery back on our land and this compulsory land acquisition announcement is a cruel twist in the already traumatic journey we have been on since September 2010. We don't want to shift, we'd lost our buildings but want to rebuild on our land, our place to stand, NZ Prints' turangawaewae.

Christchurch earthquake photographer releases canvas prints

Gillian Needham, the Canterbury designer who took the famous photograph of the Christchurch skyline at the moment of the February 22nd earthquake, has signed an international distribution deal with photo library Getty Images and NZ art publisher Image Vault. This means that the famous Christchurch earthquake photograph is now available in a larger range of print formats including a stunning range of stretched (ready to hang) and un-stretched large canvas prints.

New Christchurch Earthquake Photo Canvas Print

Christchurch Earthquake - City Skyline From Cashmere 12:58pm February 22 2011   Photographer: Gillian Needham © 2011

Prices and size options for the new canvas prints are as follows:

600 x 200mm  $84.95 or $129.95 stretched (ie around a wooden stretcher frame ready to hang)
1000 x 330mm $219.95 or $299.95 stretched
1.5metre x .5metre $349.95 or $659.95 stretched

To place your order please call New Zealand Fine Prints on 0800 800 278.

New Zealand Fine Prints have just a few of the original giclee prints in stock of the earthquake image today and this print will be replaced in our catalogue by the Image Vault publication offset print which is in a slightly different size once stock runs out.

Christchurch Earthquake Photographer Gilly Needham releases print

Christchurch Earthquake Photo by Gilly Needham

Gillian (Gilly) Needham has this week released a print of her famous photograph taken of dust clouds across Christchurch at the moment of the Feb 22nd earthquake. Fashion designer Needham was at home in Cashmere when the earthquake struck.  Her camera was sitting on the kitchen bench and she grabbed it to capture the scene in the city below.   A few hours later a low-resolution photo was on Facebook and it quickly went around the world to become one of the most enduring images of the Christchurch earthquake.  A large panorama shaped print of the photograph has now been printed and is available exclusively from Christchurch art print specialists New Zealand Fine Prints.

NZ Prints: Christchurch Earthquake Update 3

We are slowly getting back to normal service levels.  Special thanks to Paul Ryan, National Sales Manager at shelving specialists Hydestor New Zealand who are replacing our shelving at lightening speed (when we emailed photographs of our current shelving we were delighted to realise that Hydestor supplied our current racking over 30 years ago).  Paul had concept drawings to us within hours and rapidly re-configured the standard shelving set up to suit our new location and the latest standards for storage of fine art (it's all metal shelves now).  Sonoco NZ who supply all our poster rolls are doing a special run for us today in our standard sizes - an incredible help when we have virtually no mailing cylinders left.  If we ran out of these we can't ship a single art print.  Packaging House Auckland has delivered our special acid free tissue that we use to wrap prints already. Our incoming couriers are now delivering artists' prints to us again, our supply chain is cranking back into gear.  Thanks to artists such as Tony Ogle who are kindly drop-shipping prints directly to customers who need them immediately for gifts too.

Mary Lou Dolls by Matt Guild

Also a huge thanks to our customers who are continuing to buy prints from NZ's largest art print store over the past week. Especially to those who are patiently waiting for us to track or ship orders made around the time of the Christchurch quake and the customers waiting for framed prints that have been delayed for at least another two weeks.  Your patience during this difficult time is helping us concentrate on the key tasks as our business recovers from this event.

It was also a personal milestone for our catalogue manager when the first new print by a NZ artist to be catalogued for sale after the earthquake, Kiwiana specialist Matt Guild's "Mary Lou Dolls", was processed and uploaded to www.prints.co.nz earlier this afternoon (the first print in the prints for children collection we were working on at the moment the quake struck Christchurch last week). With a three month waiting list for new work this list doesn't get any shorter if Antony's not doing his job of cataloguing NZ's latest art prints for sale for a whole week.

NZ Prints - Christchurch Earthquake Update 2

From Monday 28th February NZ Prints staff are now working at our temporary office outside of the CBD.  All our computer systems are unaffected and running as normal.  Please note all NZ Fine Prints contact details such as phone numbers and email addresses have been diverted and have not changed - all NZ Prints contact details are listed here.  Artists and suppliers please re-direct all deliveries from 28th February to our temporary office at 139 Hackthorne Rd, Cashmere. 

We are currently unable to ship art print and poster orders due to our gallery being within the Christchurch CBD cordon and normal courier services being unavailable.  Thank you for your patience during this difficult time - we will start shipping prints and posters as soon as possible. 

NZ Prints - Christchurch Earthquake Update

All NZ Fine Prints staff and families are ok.  We are unable to ship orders due to our building being within the CBD cordon as well as disruption to normal post and courier services.

We appreciate the emails and calls of support from our artists, suppliers and customers throughout New Zealand and around the world.

Our focus is on our families and friends during this difficult time. Our staff will respond to emails and telephone messages in due course, please be patient at it will be at least several days before we can even begin to offer anything close to our normal levels of customer service. Please email us at enquiries@prints.co.nz or leave a message on 0800 800 278 and we will get back to you as soon as we can.