Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen’s Images of Nature (Part 3)

SM: By the time you opened your gallery, did you already have a substantial body of work?

TM: It was a small body of work. I was doing still shots on the side during the time I did cinematography work. I also met a world-renowned oil painter, Owen Gromme. He was from Wisconsin and was doing some of the first limited edition prints from his wildlife paintings. He became a mentor as well and suggested that I do limited edition prints of my work, and I took his advice.

I started out thinking that I should sell them to galleries. I went to all the major galleries in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Denver. They all said that wildlife art was on the edge of being accepted in galleries, let alone wildlife photography. A couple of galleries took a few prints on consignment, but they relegated them to the back walls. I did a few art fairs and craft fairs, but that was a painful way to make a go of it.

I then decided to try some airport kiosk displays. My brother thought it would be a good idea, so we did one in the Omaha airport. We had some black and white brochures and that worked well. We then opened one in the Denver airport and that was successful as well. We just had an 800 number for people to call. By then my dad had driven us out of the garage where we were doing all of our framing because it kept him awake all night.

We then took an old warehouse that he vacated and hired a couple of framers. We had this mail order business and it did well. We did $30,000 the first year, and the next year was $90,000 in sales. In 1982 we then decided to open galleries in all the airports that we could find, so we went to Chicago, Phoenix, Atlanta, and St. Louis. Most of those did not work. Denver was good, so we now have a real gallery there.

SM: When your other kiosks did not work as well, what did you think was the reason?

TM: In Chicago they kept stealing the pictures off of the wall. They would just break the frames and steal the pictures. That was disappointing. I think locations were a problem, and the traffic was different in Denver and Minneapolis where they worked. There was nobody to man the kiosks, which was also a problem.

Regardless, the results from Denver told me there was a market in wildlife photography. I opened a little gallery across from my office in downtown Jackson. It was an upstairs gallery and was only about 300 square feet. We started off there doing $15,000 the first year. Dan came that year and asked me to hire him. I did not have enough money to hire him for more than a month at the time, but he is still here 32 years later.

We were down in Park City, Utah, during that time and we saw a space that was empty on Main Street. We thought that was a good opportunity to have a real gallery so Dan moved to Park City for the winter. The gallery did quite well and that is where we realized there was a great market for this work in a prime market. Park City is a ski resort, and the people who go there are naturally outdoor people. A lot of them also own condos and they could afford art. Park City is what really enlightened me that I did not have to depend on art fairs or traditional galleries.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen's Images of Nature
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