thePULSEfine local artwork now being sold online
By Brian Goslow
Looking to find some of the best and most original locally made jewelry? How about ceramic and decorative wooden bowls, high quality handbags, giftware, photography, vases and perfume bottles? Well, don’t go looking in the nearest mall or shopping district. Instead, hop on your computer and head straight to The Collective.
The cooperative is the brainchild of Norma Hogan, who was exposed to a variety of art while traveling with her high-tech industry employed husband. They moved from Austin, Texas to Charlton, MA last November. “There was not only culture shock, but the weather,” Norma Hogan says. That shock was tempered by her discovery of the Worcester Center for Crafts, where she enrolled in a flamework bead class. That’s where she met many of the more than 50 artists now found on her website; most hail from Central Massachusetts. “We all had the same interest in jewelry and talked over lunch about pricing and how to sell it,” she says. “We commiserated that there were no good ways to do it.”
Meanwhile, Norma’s husband Mike, looking for a technology-related exercise, wanted to create a new website from scratch; by late December, thecollectivearts.com was online and the Hogans’ living space down a room, thanks to the plastic storage bins containing The Collective’s merchandise. “We bought shelving, put the shelves up, so it’s not a dining room anymore,” Norma laughs.
Most of The Collective’s members have families and full-time jobs that don’t allow them the time to shop their creations to stores and galleries or to launch their own art shows or stores. In addition, the logistics and expense of marketing and promoting can be substantial. Being part of The Collective allows the artists to create as inspiration strikes, not on a deadline, and to bypass overhead.
The Collective’s biggest seller is their mid- and high-level jewelry. Slowly but surely, the Charlton Post Office is getting to know Hogan’s face. Most potential customers already know what they’re looking for when they go to the site. “They want to know about the flamework beads and the quality of the crystals,” Hogan says. “It’s all Swarovski crystal, [encased in] sterling silver. A lot of the stuff, you want to touch it, you want to feel it.” As that’s not an option, her digital photography becomes a crucial sales point. “You want to get close up enough so the customer can see the details of the piece.”
While advertising for The Collective has been limited to newspapers in San Francisco and Dallas and Southern Living magazine, Hogan has found that wearing artwork in public is also a great marketing tool. She shows me a chain mail bracelet she had made. “A woman stopped me and wanted to buy it right off my wrist,” Hogan says, “but it didn’t fit.” She did, however, take an order and custom make one for her.
Up ‘til now, the most distant Collective customer has come from California, although Norma has received inquiries from as far away as Italy. Due to the cost of exchanging currency and custom freight shipping, the site is not currently set up to sell unique items like Ema Kilroy’s Freshwater Pearl Bracelets and Blue Heart Necklaces and Laura Burke’s “Chocolate Pearl Earrings” internationally. That just leaves more of Mike Hogan’s carefully churned wooden pen and pencil sets for that special one-of-a-kind family member.
Check out The Collective, open 24-7, at www.thecollectivearts.com.
