Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen’s Images of Nature (Part 4)

SM: What were they numbers like for your Park City gallery? What did real estate cost, and what were you trying to make in terms of revenue?

TM: We had incredible traffic because we were on Main Street and we stayed open late. We were still open after dinner, so we had people coming in at midnight and buying things. Most of the businesses were closed during the summer, which I thought was silly because then you had to lay off people. I did not like laying off people. We had a manager who worked totally on commission, so that did not cost me anything. I just kept him on for the summer, and we realized that summer business was also quite good. It was not as good as winter business, but it was good enough to keep the gallery open year-round.

Dan lived in the basement of the gallery, so he did not have to pay for housing.

SM: Would you say your biggest takeaway was validation of an anchor gallery concept?

TM: Yes. Right after that we moved out of the upstairs gallery in Jackson. Rent was $200 a month there, and when we started we had calculated that we would have to do $10,000 a year to pay for all of our costs. When we got to year three, Dan said that we had maxed out that gallery at $60,000 and thought we could do better.

About three years after we had moved out of that gallery we were doing $110,000. Regardless, it was a decent start. I had no idea I would make a living with photography, nor did I think a small upstairs gallery off the beaten path could earn $60,000 a year.

We figured if we could have that type of performance on 200 square feet, upstairs, then we could succeed in a bigger gallery in Jackson as well. A gallery space opened up on Main Street there as well and it had 4,000 square feet of space. We felt we could do $400,000 to $600,000 in a major gallery if we were doing $100,000 in our small gallery. That was our rationale. It seemed logical. There were no real blueprints, and I could not go to anyone else and ask their advice because no other photographers had their own galleries.

SM: Have other photographers followed your model? Are they selling from their own galleries today?

TM: There are a few people who have gallery space attached to their studious or offices. Art Wolfe in Seattle had a number of galleries in REI stores. Not very many people have done it that I am aware of.

SM: I know of one photographer in San Francisco who has her own gallery, Lisa Kristine. She does exotic travel photography and has wonderful pictures.

TM: I do not know her work.

SM: I have a few of her pieces. I met her about 10 years ago. She has two galleries, but it is difficult to scale in a retail model. I am intrigued that you have 12 galleries. What happened after Park City and Jackson?

TM: Park City was in 1982. We did the new gallery in Jackson in 1985. We had a lot of customers and a lot of collectors from Southern California. I looked at La Jolla for another location. I wanted to find an area that was not quite as seasonal. We opened a gallery in La Jolla in 1990.

I then had a couple who was very interested in representing me, similar to a franchise relationship. They wanted to open galleries in Palo Alto, Los Gatos, and Laguna Beach. I felt that was a lot less risk for me. I never had thought about franchising, but I thought that this couple, Tom and Linda Hunter, were great people and represented me well. The gallery in Palo Alto did very well, the one in Laguna Beach broke even, and the one in Los Gatos did not work. They ran those galleries for 10 years before they retired to Tahoe.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen's Images of Nature
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