The idea originated from a collaboration with a store specializing in frames, paintings, and artwork. In their warehouse and showroom, there were some unsold artworks, including older pieces that were harder to sell. Looking for a way to earn some extra income, my wife and I came up with the idea: why not rent out these artworks? We approached our friend, the store owner, about this, and he was immediately enthusiastic since part of his inventory was “dead stock” at that time.

We developed the idea further by consulting with several artist friends. After several evenings of brainstorming about rates, website, and other aspects, we decided to start with renting existing artworks that were stored in artists’ warehouses, showrooms, and attics.

The first step was registering the domain name ‘wijverhurenkunst.be’ and variations thereof. We spent months building a website that was as complete as possible. A big task was photographing all the artworks. We spent several evenings systematically photographing each artwork, ensuring good lighting and using a fixed object as a reference for size.

Cataloging the artworks in the database was the next challenge. We had to categorize each piece: type; modern art, classical art, paintings, metal objects and other categories, dimensions, owner, and more…

For marketing, we used various channels:
* Facebook campaigns
* Instagram page
* Email marketing to artists
* Building an artist database
* Website scraping to find galleries and artists

The idea was that customers could buy the work at a discount after a rental period.

We had bigger ambitions for all of Flanders, but that brought logistical challenges. Artworks needed to be transported, a payment system had to be implemented, and customers needed to be able to fill out forms on the website, along with countless other obstacles that emerged.

After about a year, before we really got started, we decided to stop for various reasons:
* The logistics proved practically unfeasible
* The margins were too small
* The time investment was too great
* The response from artists was too low

We considered an alternative plan: a Marketplace where artists could upload and offer their own works locally. For this, we expanded the website with that extra functionality and investigated various subscription models, but ultimately this also proved unprofitable.

Although the project was eventually discontinued, we still have our doubts whether we stopped too soon, as we still think it’s a good idea today.

Perhaps we gave up too quickly, were too afraid to take risks, too fearful?