Steve Rubenfaer ArtMecca Partner & CMO
Steve Rubenfaer worked for an events company that produced art festivals in San Francisco. He was the operations manager, running things on site, with a staff of over 100 for each event. The events were the largest in San Francsico and some of the largest on the west coast, drawing more than 100,000 people over a weekend.
Steve was also in charge of creating & selling sponsorships, and was approached by a vendor named ArtMecca, which exhibited artists’ work on the Internet. This was in the early days of the Internet, the year 2000, when there was a lot of excitement and a tremendous amount of activity in certain industries that were moving online, even though there might not have been a lot of business yet.
Art was one of those industries, and it seemed like a great fit, as searching for art online could make art purchasing much easier. Traditionally art is sold in galleries, and to find a painting or sculpture that you would like to purchase, you would have to physically travel to many galleries to see not that many pieces of art, in the hope that you would find something suitable. The Internet makes the search process much more efficient, as you can enter parameters such as size, color, etc, and find art that meets your certain criteria.
Most of the art sites on the Internet were just online galleries that emulated the same model in the brick-and-mortar world; highly curated, only showing a few pieces from a select few artists. ArtMecca had a more democratic approach, allowing any artist to show their work online. Steve Rubenfaer was fascinated with this, after seeing firsthand how random the physical artworld was. ArtMecca made Steve a job offer as CMO, and he accepted, becoming a 4th partner in the enterprise.
ArtMecca was very successful with emerging artists, and partnered with art festivals and other organizations to add artists to its database. It had thousands of artists featuring tens of thousands of works of art in many different categories, as opposed to the other sites which only had a few hundred pieces created by a couple dozen artists at most. ArtMecca also offered value added services to artists, such as digital postcards and discounts on supplies, in addition to displaying and selling their art online.
ArtMecca pioneered ‘taste based’ technology, which could tell the buyer’s taste and show them art pieces across all disciplines that matched their tastes. It worked very well and with just a few inputs could show the user art that resonated with them.
ArtMecca did not make it, none of the 15 or so sites ended up staying in business. However, ArtMecca achieved more than any of the other sites did with less than $2 million in funding, and the other sites had each raised in excess of $10 million, in some cases much more.