Film & Music Posters - How we select vintage wall art design

The all encompassing term "wall art" is becoming a more prevalent shorthand for what were once

Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd

exclusively referred to as art prints and posters.  Like when what we thought should be called fine art by NZ painters a decade ago started getting referred to as "kiwiana" alongside the more obvious tiki paintings, four square man etc New Zealand Fine Prints are happy to move with the times and be guided by our customers what they would like to call what we sell even if this new phrase takes a bit of getting used to!

One of the advantages of the expanding definition of wall art (eg from framed prints to wall charts, prints on canvas and even wall decals) is we have been able to expand what we sell beyond the traditional reproduction prints of paintings, maps etc into other things that can go on the walls of kiwi homes and offices, but without straying too far from our core values as a business.  It seems obvious that those folks who show more than an average interest in art would also be interested in music, theatre and film and those of us on our wholesale buying team certainly are into the broader arts as well for sure.

Poster for Fritz Lang's Metropolis

But we believe that delivering value to customers is not just in a good quality item from a production standpoint, it also about selling decoration that will endure not just physically but also continue to be enjoyed as an artwork (ok, wall art) for many years.  This means selling prints by artists who have something to say, prints of places that mean something to New Zealanders and trying not to promote more ephemeral  watered down or generic designs that are, as we say, to match the curtains.   We don't want you to buy an artwork for your walls that "fashions out" really quickly.

So as we grow our range of film and music wall posters we had to devise a criteria that would satisfy demand for a broader range of poster choices without going too far down the path of stocking modern day music posters created for fans (or more cynically created by publishers to cash in on what's popular right now). Drawing a line between what we call the "social expression" market (the teenager whose choice of music or movie posters are a visual shorthand to tell people what kind of person they are) and the broader decorative - ie wall art - market where a poster is there both for its aesthetic merits as well as for its content/subject or design theme.

The Supremes UK Tour Poster

Our wholesale team have therefore decided that we won't - at least initially - stock music posters that are designed purely to demonstrate that you are a fan of a contemporary band or a singer or love a just released film. Musically these are the posters that are a photograph of the act (or actor) doing their thing on stage/film set or showing their attitude or style accompanied with the name of the group, rapper or singer or film.   Given the size of the New Zealand market and the order minimums that make sense when importing posters it just doesn't work for us to try and pick trends, there is nothing less saleable than a cutting edge music poster after the band's popularity has peaked!  But we believe there is a sweet spot where a music poster captures both the spirit of the band/singer with an iconic retro/vintage design aesthetic that makes it more broadly interesting than just to fans of the group. So we are stocking retro or vintage designs that have stood the test of time already and that we believe will continue to resonate for the life of the posters on your walls.

Obviously we would like to have a diversity of designs and acts from around the world and across different genres, so we have lined up four different wholesale suppliers across the US, Australia and Europe to try and achieve this aim.

We think in particular that vintage music poster designs for concerts and album releases are true to the spirit of New Zealand Fine Prints, they fit with our extensive range of vintage travel, tourism and advertising posters from what are now well-known graphic designers. This is where we offer a good quality reproduction of an authentic poster design, a replica as close as we can get to the original - ie without Photoshopping the imperfections.

Illustrating this post are examples of some of the new movie and music posters that are now in stock at New Zealand's wall art specialists since 1966, please check out our music and film poster collection to see everything we currently have for sale.

How to Talk About Art Without Sounding Pretentious | NZ Fine Prints

How to Talk About Art Without Sounding Pretentious

Art is something that we will all encounter in many places in our lives—whether it’s in the reception of an office where you are trying to impress, a friend's home as you pop over for tea, or in its natural habitat, the many galleries that house art up and down New Zealand. But there’s a problem with eyeing up a piece of art and deciding whether to make a comment - the all-encompassing fear of sounding ‘pretentious’. When did enjoying art mean that we must learn ‘art jargon’ in order to talk about it at a level that’s ‘passable’ within the art community? 

Surely, we can just learn to enjoy art and make a passing comment that isn’t unnecessarily snobby sounding. After all, it’s entirely possible to simply enjoy art and just talk about it casually; everyone loves a good yarn! So, without further ado, here are some insightful tips on how to talk about art without feeling queasy about it!

What to say about your friend's new art prints? 

Use words everyone understands

Dispel the preconceived notion that you must learn a whole new vocabulary to talk about a piece of art. If you aren’t confident talking about art and find yourself hesitating because you don’t understand what ‘chiaroscuro’ means, then just try to say the words that do come to mind when you see a painting. There’s nothing wrong with just saying you like the shadows or the dark colours in a painting. It becomes a lot easier to talk about art when you start with what you understand. As you become fluent in your own art language, the more complex terms will start to make a lot more sense as well.

 

Keep the detail limited unless prompted

If you’re really encouraged to say things about art (for example, in a situation when you’re around an art boffin and put on the spot to talk about their latest piece) and you aren’t feeling super confident, then just keep your message short and sweet. Stick to one thing you like about the piece, whether that be colour, composition, texture, tone pattern or anything else. Say what you choose to say with confidence and assurance.

 

Tap into your own personal reactions or feelings

Talking about art is usually just boiled down to how the art makes you feel. If you don’t know how to talk about the specific details of the art piece, it can be equally as valuable to discuss how the art made you personally feel or react. Use similar words that you would use to talk about your emotions, such as ‘angry’, ‘calm’, or ‘excited’. It can be as simple as capturing your first impression and putting that into words.

 

Sound pretentious if you want to!

Maybe you’re actually extremely enthusiastic about a piece of art, and you’ve read up about its history and happen upon a piece of art that you’re extremely passionate and know a lot about. If you’re enjoying talking about the art, don’t worry about sounding pretentious! Don’t present a dulled down version of yourself just to conform to the rules of the art world - or anyone else’s world for that matter! Art is something that spreads joy, and if it makes you happy to talk extensively about it, then go ahead. Your confidence and enthusiasm will be a breath of fresh air for whoever you’re talking to. Depending on who it is, they may even enjoy learning something new.

 

There are no mistakes

As a great artist, Bob Ross, once said, “There are no mistakes, just happy accidents”. Take this piece of advice the next time you feel like speaking up about a piece of art, and just go ahead. If you like art, express yourself and enjoy it openly. Fill your home and your office and even your car with your favourite pieces. Share it with your family and friends! Never feel as though you aren’t qualified enough to say why you like about a painting.

 

Art Prints from Art Enthusiasts

When it comes to New Zealand art in particular, we get pretty excited, and we could talk about it all day! If you’re a fan of New Zealand art as well, then there’s no better place to shop for your favourite prints than right here at NZ's art print experts since 1966. From art deco prints to framed wall art of your favourite pieces, we’re your local go-to. Shop our range online today!

Trending New Zealand art in 2018

Today's post is a short video of New Zealand's top selling art prints/fine art posters in 2018.  Counting down the most popular prints based on sales data from New Zealand's largest art print store.

Video made by 11 year old Lucy, wondering if she will be following in the steps of her parents (and grandparents) to be part of the New Zealand Fine Prints company story around 2030 or so? 

Store re-design for New Zealand Fine Prints

Last day for our old storefront design

After two years of customer research, user testing, design & development the fifth generation of New Zealand Fine Prints' online store went live on Thursday August 30.  So many new ways to find art - searching by shape and size were two of our most asked for features and we are delighted to be rolling these filters out alongside hundreds of other changes.

The design of some of our store elements go back to 1999, nearly twenty years which is an eternity in online shopping and user experience terms.  Prints.co.nz has evolved through 5 major re-designs and this was one of the biggest.

Aside from so many new paths to discover art we have re-built the store from the ground up on a responsive platform which will improve customers shopping experience on mobile and tablet devices.  Behind the scenes there are extra layers of security to protect our customers privacy too. 

The launch has gone relatively smoothly apart from some broken image links for recently added products which took a few hours to fix.  We are now in the post launch QA (Quality Assurance) design testing phase, over one hundred outstanding issues with styling yet to be addressed. 

With orders coming through and shipping out we know we haven't broken the site though and it's so exciting to be looking forward to rolling out all the new features over the next few months.

Fine Art Print vs Fine Art Printing

Can a print of fine art not be a fine art print?

I've never really liked the fine print part of our businesses name because it's meaning can be lost in a different context, ie the agreement sounds promising but have you checked the fine print?  But the fact that prints is also a homonym (prints/prince) also bugs me a bit so I think it is my inner language pedant that is at fault here rather than a branding issue that we need to change.

So we stuck with the Fine Prints part of our company's moniker when we broadened the business name from Avon Fine Prints (which was actually a sub brand of ours that specialised in limited edition reproductions of antique NZ prints in the 1960s and 70s) as we felt that this was now limiting the scope of what we did as we began stocking many more prints by contemporary artists.

This week I was surprised to find that another meaning for fine art print was in use that seems obvious now but had not resonated with me previously.

Northland Panels by Colin McCahon (Fine Art Print?)

We are calling a reproduction of Colin McCahon's painting "Northland Panels" a fine art print, why asked Glenn of Artrite - when it was not fine art printing at all but a photolithograph?  Ah, we said, that is because Colin McCahon is a "fine art" New Zealand artist.  Meaning that he has studied fine art, produced fine art (rather than design or decorative art) and the artist's work appears in collections at prestigious NZ art galleries such as Te Papa or Auckland Art Gallery.

But Glenn had had a call from a gallery concerned that we were selling a "fine art print" of a well-known artist's work for $60, which a customer had pointed out to them looked like the same image they were selling that was printed by Artrite for $600 - in this case a limited edition screenprint (which we also stocked).  From a screenprinters' point of view fine art print meant a fine art production process, rather than a reproduction photo-lithograph like the $60 print.  This had not occurred to me, and it had not occurred to Glenn that a photo-lithograph could be a fine art print as it was a print of fine art!

We do not want to sow seeds of confusion, we are not trying to convey that the $60 print in question is of the same quality as a limited edition screenprint - but we also need to use the words that are in common usage for what we sell in order for customers to find what they wish to buy.  The case I remember from the early days of online marketing was the luxury car brand that insisted that second hand cars were "pre-owned" rather than "used", but had to change this when they realised that nobody ever looked for "pre-owned cars".

Occasionally we are taken to task over whether a print is actually a "reproduction", or if a reproduction print should actually be called a "poster".  I refer back to the car example above, to some extent we have to use the words that customers use even if there is a narrower meaning to an expert in their field, in this case a fine art printer like Glenn from Artrite.

We are making some big changes to prints.co.nz in the next few weeks, one job I will do during this process is to check every one of our thousands of product listings to make sure we are describing prints as accurately as we can - some listings are now just on 20 years old and in the light of this interesting discussion I will make sure that descriptions are as clear to as many of our visitors as possible as they are to us when we are writing them.

2017, Year in review for NZ art market

Like many retailers a big story for us in 2017 was the great election pause, the spending hiatus between September's election and the coalition's formation of a new government several weeks later.  Why people chose to put off buying decisions while we waited for Winston Peter's to decide which parties he would go into coalition with is not clear, but New Zealand Fine Prints was not alone in noticing very flat sales for our artists and publishers during this period in what was otherwise a pretty normal trading year.

We didn't notice any big new art trends emerging, it was a consolidation year with a broad range of styles, genres and artists selling rather than a concentrated burst of sales like we have had previously for street art, or mid century modern.

The most popular prints in New Zealand were a familiar roll-call of the well-known, the well-distributed and the well-priced.

Here are the 80 most popular prints in New Zealand for 2017

Mickey to Tiki by Dick Frizzell
Native Birds of NZ Poster
Tui Print from Bullers Birds of NZ
Fantail from Buller's Birds of NZ
World Map Poster (NZ centred)
Native Birds of NZ Canvas Art Print - Ready to Hang
The Endless Summer Poster
Captain Cook's Map of the Coast of New Zealand (Large)
Dawn/Water Poem by Ralph Hotere
Grounded in Papatunanuku with Strength and Unity II by Jane Crisp
Treaty of Waitangi Poster
New Zealand Tramping Huts Poster
Boats, Island Bay by Rita Angus
Castaways (Kina) by Jo Bridge
The Answer (Meaning of Life) by Dick Frizzell
Vintage World Wall Map Canvas Print
New Zealand Vintage Poster
The Fall of Icarus by Bill Hammond
NZ Map Poster
Tomorrow will be the same by Colin McCahon
Bill Hammond Print "Jingle Jangle Morning"
Ena Te Papatahi by Charles Goldie
Goddess of Mercy by Rita Angus
Diana Adams Print "Secluded Cove"
Gordon Walters Print - Makaro
Grahame Sydney Print "Fiddler's Flat"
Indigenous Preservation II - Tahi by Jane Crisp
Rangitoto by Diana Adams
The Starry Night Poster by Vincent Van Gogh
Vintage Tasman Empire Airways Poster
Winter Sports at Tongariro National Park Vintage NZ Poster
All 'e Same t'e Pakeha by Charles Goldie
View Towards Mount Richmond by Toss Woollaston
Cass by Rita Angus
Hot Buttered by Dick Frizzell
Koru by Diana Adams
River's Journey by Diana Adams
Vintage Geological Map of New Zealand
Auckland Harbour from Ponsonby by Fiona Whyte
Dominion Map of NZ - Vintage Canvas Style
New Zealand by Captain James Cook
Rangitoto View Canvas Print by Irina Velman
Seven Minutes (Crayfish Print) by Dick Frizzell
The Kiss by Gustav Klimt
Vintage Queenstown Travel Poster
Almond Blossom Poster by Vincent Van Gogh
Balloon Girl by Banksy - Large Poster
Dick Frizzell's Print Mickey to Tiki (Reversed)
Fish species of New Zealand Poster
Kowhai Botanical Print by Emily Harris
Memories by Charles Goldie
Virgin Forest by Henri Rousseau
Botanical Print - Pohutukawa by Sarah Featon
Hawkdun Spring by Grahame Sydney
NZ Vintage Fly Fishing Poster
Print of "Garnet Dairy" by Graham Young
Queen with Moko by Barry Ross Smith
Starry Night Print by Vincent Van Gogh
Tip Top Times by Sam Mathers
Treasure Hunt - Kotare’s Taonga by Jane Crisp
Tree (1943) by Rita Angus
Wellington Lights Photograph
Winery Doors Poster - Hawkes Bay & Wairarapa
Aotearoa Canvas Print by Jason Kelly
Calloused Veneer by Barry Ross Smith
Fishes of New Zealand Poster
Lunchtime atop a skyscraper New York 1932 by Charles Ebbets
Native Flowers of NZ - Ready to Hang Print on Canvas
Riverhead by Karl Maughan
Road to Leigh 1979 by Retro Posters
Summertime Wellington by Marianne Muggeridge
Tony Ogle Print "Harotaonga"
Tututables Reproduction Print by Weston Frizzell
Vintage Native Flowers of New Zealand Poster
Wellington Vintage Poster
As there is a Constant Flow of Light by Colin McCahon
Cabbage Tree by Diana Adams
Great Wave by Katsushika Hokusai
Kapiti Island by Ernest Papps
Kids at Play by Matt Guild

Looking forward to 2018 which will be the new artist names entering this list?

Buying art by price - pragmatic approach to the fore during the gift buying season

Here at Prints.co.nz we spend a lot of time learning about the different ways people use to discover art, and how people actually look for art to buy once they are browsing our online catalogue.  Back in the early days of putting our catalogues online (last century!) we had a very academic approach to classification.  Prints were catalogued by artist (to answer the question - what prints are currently available by NZ artist x?) and movement.  Yep, we assumed customers would narrow their selection down by first considering the place the print was going and then would say to themselves something like, "I think a post-impressionist print would be ideal above the fireplace in the living room". Reality is rather different!

However as we head into the busiest selling time of the year - due to the enduring popularity of prints as Christmas presents - probably the most unromantic and practical way to select art comes to the fore. When buying gifts (and obviously gift vouchers) the most common starting point is of course the budget so top of mind are the prices of the artwork for sale!

Our website offers the ability to sort any category of prints by price in the drop down menu at the top of the main product listing page.  However we have found that when, for example, buying a leaving gift for a work colleague etc sorting the entire range of art prints for sale into clear price points saves a lot of browsing time.  Unlike buying for yourself a gift purchase is sometimes more of an obligation carried out with a degree of grudging reluctance rather than the pleasure of dreamily browsing artworks picturing them on the wall of your home or office.

Purchasing art by price is certainly not the only way that we would like to present the range of prints we have on offer but prosaic as it is if you just want to get the Xmas gift buying done as easily as possible going to the search by price collections listed on the browse by categories page and selecting a print from near the top when sorted by best-selling is one of the simplest ways to keep to your budget and give a gift that will be popular with the recipient.  Using our sales figures means you are crowdsourcing to find the kind of art that more New Zealanders like.  Quick, easy and reliable way of ensuring a happy smile when the gift is unwrapped.

Over the past few days we have updated all of the search by price collections by adding the hundreds of new art prints published and printed over the past few months.

We are delighted to announce that you  can now check out NZ Fine Prints entire Xmas 2014 range of over 2300 prints for sale sorted by price below:

Under $30 | $30 - $50 | $50 - $100 | $101 - $500 | $500+

Current best selling prints in NZ priced between $50-$100 - Screenshot from Prints.co.nz

Cataloguing Prints - an update

After the earthquakes in Christchurch one of the jobs that got less attention while NZ Fine Prints re-organised behind the scenes was the cataloguing of new prints.  Since then it has been a huge relief to get our waiting list for artists who had submitted work down to just a few weeks after stretching out to several months during late 2011 and 2012.

We receive artist submissions most days and the guys answering the phone often get the call to find out what's involved in having reproduction prints made of an artwork after an artist is told they "should be having prints made of that painting".  (As an aside - sometimes this comment to the creator is perhaps meant as a compliment rather than commercial advice, we wonder too if it's sometimes a nice way of saying "no thanks" to buying the painting!).  It should be pretty straightforward to list new prints for sale but for most of the past three years we have had a backlog of at least 150 new prints waiting to be properly catalogued for sale both in our catalogues and at Prints.co.nz

The reason that listing prints is not quick and easy is because we put a great deal of effort into writing interesting listings for our new artists. In addition for each individual print listing we try and anticipate many of the questions print buyers may have in their minds as they are not in front of the print in a gallery but looking at a representation of the artwork on screen.

One blessing is that we no longer have to re-photograph 90% of the prints submitted to us because the ubiquity of digital cameras means artists usually supply us with .jpgs that are ready to use online.  Fifteen years ago we had a $1600 1.2 megapixel camera and a studio rigged with expensive lights and still couldn't take a decent picture of anything with lines in it!  Maps were my particular bete noire, all those decorative borders that had to be photographed straight on and completely level or the image would look distorted.  I don't recall a "straighten" tool in Photoshop back then. [We also didn't have the benefit of articles like "how to photograph a painting"!]

Glenn Jones "Gumboot Graffiti"
Kiwiana AND street art, or maybe Pop?

Apart from writing a good artist biography that combines the best of a background on their life with the drivers behind their work (like an artist's statement, but written by someone else) each print should also have a blurb, or what we call the "curator's comment".   This tells a person looking at the print a bit more about it, what the artist was thinking, how this print fits in to the artist's catalogue of work - for instance have a look at listings for recently added new NZ artists such as Glenn Jones, Holly Roach and Sean Chen. We also spend a lot of time figuring out the best way to describe how the print was made - as we mix both reproduction and original prints, open and limited editions. In the next part of the cataloguing process we have to figure out the galleries or collections that the prints should be placed in.

You can still see glimpses of how we built up the online galleries originally, a very dry and academic classification of prints into movement (eg surrealism, or pop art), nationality and period. Since then whole new categories have emerged (step forward Kiwiana, Street Art) and we have added the ability to search by price and size.  Although we don't want to have our catalogue too finely divided up (because it would be tedious to browse the website if lots of the same prints were appearing in multiple collections) the number of galleries have somehow multiplied to  a list of nearly 80, the latest being portraits and still life.

We thought we were getting to the crossroad where we could either add more and more finely grained collections or try and reduce the number of galleries so customers can find the prints they are looking for more quickly.  However we think we have solved the problem (some small changes coming soon), it's an interesting intersection between indexation and usability that's exactly the kind of thing that keeps me interested in the job of cataloguing prints for sale after twenty years!

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.

Next Art Prints, Posters & Limited Editions Catalogue - Sneak Peek

We have completed the difficult but enjoyable task of selecting and cataloging just over 500 fine art prints, posters and limited editions for the next New Zealand Fine Prints free mail order catalogue.

Here is a sneak peek at our 2014 catalogue in PDF form (although we have compressed it to 8MB it will take a few seconds to download).

Click here to download Catalogue (PDF)

Printed free versions of this catalogue will be available from early July. Please let us know if you spot any errors before we send this final draft off to the printers!

Vintage Posters & Prints (NZ Fine Prints Look Book 5/13)

Vintage Poster & Prints Lookbook | May 2013 ©NZ Fine Prints Ltd 

After the gift buying frenzy NZ Prints re-opens after the Xmas break

Xmas is always simply hectic. The sheer volume of gifts to be carefully packaged and dispatched on time not just in NZ but around the world makes it a real test of our systems. We make mistakes occasionally but our dispatch team will always try all alternatives to keep the customer (or gift recipient) happy if something has gone wrong. Xmas 2011 was Prints.co.nz's busiest ever with orders volumes up around twenty percent on 2010 albeit with a slightly lower average order amount meaning only a modest increase in print sales by dollar value.

After safely navigating through the Xmas gift season (our busiest time of the year) it was lovely to receive some complimentary emails that had been sent to our customer service team while New Zealand Fine Prints was closed for the Xmas/New Year holiday. Our favourite this year was the gift buyer who emailed us back "Thank you heaps. This picture brought tears of happiness to the recipient. Print is top quality, beautifully packaged with prompt delivery". Art is such a wonderful product to be selling - and to be spreading NZ's artistic culture onto walls everywhere with every print we sell is part of what gets us to work in the morning.

After a very eventful eighteen months in Christchurch with the ongoing earthquakes and our distribution and gallery moving from our home in Hereford St for nearly 50 years due to the quakes we look forward to 2012 being more benign for our staff and their families. This writer is looking forward to working on a series of NZ artist and print-maker profiles for NZ Art Print News (starting with controversial printmaker Lester Hall) and we are cataloguing our latest series of vintage NZ advertising posters, plus new prints from Dick Frizzell, Greg Straight, Fane Flaws and prints of landscape paintings by Wellington painter Ernest Papps.

And on a completely different note one of our staff snapped this incredible example of a NZ vernacular wooden picture frame while on holiday in the Marlborough Sounds. We are not sure if the framing style is one that would have a broad appeal in the framed wall art market today - but full marks for workmanship and dedication.

The annual Xmas gift-wrap debate at NZ Prints

The tyranny of choice...

Behind the scenes in late October one of the most important aesthetic decisions of the year takes place at NZ Fine Prints. Yes, we have to choose the colour of the gift-wrap that we are going to use for Christmas!  Our gift-wrap requirements are pretty special, it has to be light (because of the cost of delivering by airmail around the world when we are charged by weight), acid free (so it does not affect the paper the prints are printed on) and suit the festive occasion for which the buyer is giving.

This decision always creates a surprising amount of heat around the office.  In the conservative corner there are strong voices supporting green and red to be used as "traditional Xmas colours", the libertarians want the gift purchaser to choose at checkout time and the warehouse manager wants blue because it is his favourite colour! 

We also were faced with finding a new supplier for our gift wrap this Xmas season because the earthquakes in Christchurch closed down our normal source.   Thanks to the delightfully named "Gold Wing" packaging wholesalers in Auckland (with the rather charming company motto: "They are like trees growing beside a stream, trees that produce fruit in season") we have our 48 boxes of Christmas wrap on the courier to us today. And this Xmas gifts will be wrapped in …. gold!

NZ's most dramatic art gallery opening!

A few weeks ago the stockroom of New Zealand's largest art print store was opened in dramatic fashion after the front wall of the 100 year old warehouse sustained structural damage during the Feb 22 Christchurch earthquake. Over the next 5 hours nearly 3 tonnes of prints were then successfully shifted to New Zealand Fine Prints' new location outside of the cordoned off CBD - at 139 Hackthorne Rd, Cashmere. 

New signage for our Christchurch Gallery by kiwiana artist JK

Christchurch painter Jason Kelly is at the vanguard of the kiwiana art movement that is sweeping galleries and design stores across New Zealand. But we also knew that he had initially trained as a commercial sign writer - so who better to design and create the new signs for our gallery in Christchurch following the earthquake in September 2010 than JK?

We got progress emails from him saying things like "Are you happy for me to freestyle a little with timber choices and a have slightly different shape?" and then a few days later "I found some cool pieces of wood and metal work yesterday…I hope you won't mind".  We began to wonder if Jason was heading off on one of his quirky tangents but he assured us we would appreciate the recycled bed head pieces in the final sign/artwork!

The final design was unveiled this morning at 202 Hereford and we are delighted with our new signage that not only makes it a lot easier to find our store but subtly reminds visitors that although we are NZ's largest online art retailer we have been in the art print business for nearly five decades.