Field notes
The organizations we work with have spent years developing a particular kind of expertise about their audiences, their collections, and what their communities value. We’ve spent years inside those same worlds: museum openings, board meetings, development conferences, botanical gardens on a Tuesday afternoon, symphony lobbies before curtain, and always the gift shop on the way out. Field Notes is where we write about what we notice. Some of it is specific to one sector. Some of it cuts across all of them. Most of it starts with something we actually saw.
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When the lobby becomes part of the performance
At the North American premiere of Coco Chanel: The Life of a Fashion Icon at Atlanta Ballet in February 2024, the audience arrived in black and white. This was not planned. Atlanta Ballet did not put a dress code in the program. But the production’s identity had telegraphed itself clearly enough in advance marketing that…
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The seasonal problem
A botanical garden in April is a different place than the same garden in October, and not just in the obvious sense that different things are blooming. The visitor’s emotional register changes. What they are looking for changes. The pace of a walk through a garden in spring, when everything is opening, carries a different…
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The object after the object
There is a specific quality of attention that settles over people in a well-designed museum gallery. It is not the same as reading, or watching, or listening to music. It is something closer to sustained looking, the kind that accumulates slowly and leaves a particular residue when it is over. The museum store sits at…
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The tiered donor gift
Most regional symphony orchestras offer something at the $250 or $500 annual giving level that is some version of a branded tote bag, a travel mug, or a scarf with the organization’s name on it. The item is usually fine. It is often reasonably well-made. It is also, in most cases, almost completely interchangeable with…
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What the store tells you about the institution
There is a version of the museum store that has nothing to do with the collection. Generic tote bags in institutional colors. A rack of postcards. Journals with the logo embossed on the cover. These objects are not wrong exactly, but they communicate something specific: the institution has not thought very hard about this room.…
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What you take home from a living thing
The Hillwood shop in Washington sits in a genuinely unusual position. On one side of it is one of the most significant collections of Russian imperial art outside of Moscow, Fabergé eggs and imperial porcelain and pieces acquired during the decade when Soviet authorities were selling off tsarist holdings. On the other side, through the…
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The permanent collection problem
The case for exhibition-linked merchandise is not hard to make. A traveling show creates urgency. The opening brings people who are specifically excited about the subject matter. The window is defined, which makes buying decisions easier. You order for the run, you clear inventory when it closes, you move on. The logic is clean. The…
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What subscribers recognize
Performing arts subscription programs have been in structural decline for years, and the pandemic accelerated a pattern that was already underway. The research on audience behavior in the 2024-25 season shows ticket revenue still running below 2018-19 levels in real terms, once inflation is accounted for. Subscriptions specifically, the multi-concert packages that were once the…
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Conservation and commerce
Most cultural institutions do not have an inherent philosophical tension with selling things. A symphony sells the experience of music; selling branded objects adjacent to that experience is an extension, not a contradiction. An art museum preserves and presents objects; selling objects related to those in the collection is continuous with the mission, at least…
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