Over the past few weeks, the Higher Art Galleries Team has been having in person and Skype meetings with mentors and experts in our field. In addition, we have been conducting customer discovery interviews.

As a result, we have pivoted slightly yet again. Our product is still art and our customer base is still the same, but the type of art we will be selling is more specific to the university itself.

Our best selling pieces are pieces that exhibit affinity to Wake Forest. Therefore, we have decided to do more of what is selling more. It is not our job to decide what our customers what. It is our job to give our customers what they want, so that is exactly what we will do.

Through our entrepreneurial studies, Brooke, Zanny, and I have learned that a simple and seamless business has the greatest probability for success. We want to streamline our platform and deliver a simple product through a simple platform that gives the customer exactly what they want.

This week we are in the midst of drafting new contracts and reworking our website. The business model is changing slightly, since we are now commissioning artists instead of simply selling their work.

In other news, we are very pleased with the results and accountability of our new printing partner in Brooklyn, NY.

Stay tuned for next week!

This week Higher Art Galleries has put all of our effort into creating a business proposal and content creation.

Our goal is to publish our content on a reimagined www.higherartgalleries.com that acts more as a hub for all things art and emerging art related, and less of a normal online gallery. As a result, our content will represent our new vision. The content will range from anything from an online video tutorial for painting techniques to our top 10 favorite art blogs. While our content will be honest and true to our core values as a brand, we want to expand our revenue stream to include paid advertising that we can integrate into our content and platform.

Since we have made a lot of changes to our business lately, customer discover is extremely important for us right now. Tomorrow (Thursday) we will be interviewing local emerging artists to test our hypothesis and narrow down our company vision.

Friday we have a very important meeting with a powerful figure who is an expert in the digital advertising and paid advertising field. We have conducted research on his area of expertise and have come up with a list of questions in order to get the most out of our meeting.

Next week I will have a full update on our customer discoveries and meeting recap!

I am very excited to announce that Brooke, Zanny, and I are finally all in the same city (New York City). We have realized that as a team, we do much better all working together and in person. We get more done, and have bigger and better ideas when we are all together.

After meeting we have decided to focus our efforts on content creation and customer acquisition over anything else. We have each tasked ourselves with coming up with content ideas, and at our next meeting we are going to narrow the list down and put the ideas into action.

As for the printing/matting part of our value proposition, we have decided to outsource that. This week we have been researching a company to partner with, and we hope to have that finalized by next week.

In addition to content creation and customer acquisition we have set up meetings with mentors/experts in the art world to pick their brain on our current idea and the pivots and iterations we have begun to come up with for Higher Art Galleries.

The Higher Art Galleries Team is so excited to all be together again! Stay tuned for week #3!

My name is Hana Polizzotto, and I am a co-founder of Higher Art Galleries along with recent Wake Forest graduates Alexandra Dow and Brooke Einbender. In a nutshell, Higher Art Galleries is an online art gallery that showcases and sells student artwork to alumni and parents across the nation. With every piece purchased, a portion of the profit goes back to the student artist and their art department. Brooke, Alexandra, and I launched our company this spring at Wake Forest, but this summer we are putting a majority of our effort into expanding to other universities (primarily in the North).

We are so excited that we are a part of the Summer Fellows Program because the resources from it will help us with our goal to expand! I am already living in NYC working on the company, while Brooke and Alexandra are currently working remotely. However, they will be moving to NYC in the coming weeks, and we cannot wait to be back working together in person!

This week, I spent a lot of time working on our website. Since we are an online art gallery, our website is the core of our business. We have received tons of entries from extremely talented artists, so I have been diligently working on getting their artwork up and available for purchase on our website.

The rest of the week was devoted to launching our GoFundMe. As a startup, we need all the funding we can get. If you are interested in learning more about Higher Art Galleries or want to donate, please check out our GoFundMe here: https://www.gofundme.com/support-higher-arts-growth. Please help us reach our goal and spread the word!