Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen’s Images of Nature (Part 5)

SM: Have you done demographic analysis to determine your gallery locations?

TM: I have tried. I opened galleries in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and Dallas, Texas, both with partners. The Steamboat Springs gallery is still doing well while the one in Dallas closed. It was not as simple as just looking at demographics. The gallery in Dallas was in a new shopping mall that did not have great traction for the first few years. The lesson I learned was to not open a gallery in locations that did not have a solid history and known traffic.

SM: It sounds as though you went out of your core destination of nature-driven vacation areas.

TM: Exactly. It just showed me that we needed more understanding of our demographics. We had a lot of customers from Dallas, but that did not translate into business for the Dallas gallery.

SM: Your strategy was to open galleries where you had high concentrations of customers?

TM: Exactly. It did not work.

SM: When in this process did you get the formula of what worked and what did not work?

TM: That is the formula and when we get out of that formula we have a hard time. My imagery is from all over the world, but a lot of my photos are from the north. Places like Scottsdale, Arizona, which are primarily desert areas, are harder and don’t work as well.

SM: What about the business proposition? You sell high-quality framed prints. Are there other components to your business, and how does it break down?

TM: We have posters, lithographs, and I have done three coffee table books. I have also done 15 children’s books where somebody else has done the text and I have illustrated them. We also have note cards and calendars.

Our main income by far is from the limited edition prints. That is our core business. We have strayed into music CDs and candles, but whenever I stray from the core part of the business, it is a waste of people’s time. They do not come for music or candles. We have now retracted because they have nothing to do with my images. I was becoming too much of a retail store, and I need to keep it an art gallery.

SM: What has the cumulative revenue of your galleries looked like in different years?

TM: In 1985 we have $500,00o in revenue. In 1990 we had around $4 million. In 1995 we did $6 million, and in 2000 we did $8 million. In 2005 we did $10 million, and in 2009 the recession hit and we went down to $9 million.

SM: This has become a substantial business for someone who did not want to have anything to do with the retail business.

TM: What I wanted to avoid was running a store like a department store. I have been there, done that. It was an excuse for me which is to do what I love to do, and that is photography. My dream was to not compromise my photography with my business. I wanted to do photography and then run the business correctly.

My dad thought I was crazy when I left the family business to go to college, and again when I left college to go to the mountains. It was not until he saw a film on TV by National Geographic in 1985 called “Flight of the Whooping Crane” and saw my name as the principle cinematographer that he realized that his son was a real wildlife photographer. Unfortunately, he died a few years later and never saw my first book.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen's Images of Nature
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