The Australian, Entrepreneur
ARTIST or businesswoman? The question is one that’s often asked about Abigail Crompton.
She started her career creating museum shop souvenirs for the National Gallery of Victoria and Craft Victoria, which gave her the idea to make art a business — the Third Drawer Down Gallery.
She kicked off with 200 tea towels her father had given her. She decorated five herself before becoming bored and farming out the decorating to others.
This was the beginning of over a year of research which resulted in her creating a business that produced limited-edition printed and embroidered tea towels from original pieces of commissioned art.
Crompton’s first year, 2003, was spent stitching tea towels in front of the TV while still working at Craft Victoria to keep some money coming in.
“I think it’s all about making a good business decision and sticking to it,” she says.
That was about researching the concept, refining her idea, understanding the market, developing her packaging around exporting and building her philosophy.
Getting an idea off the ground, she says, is 80 per cent research. “It doesn’t cost you anything. It’s just time.
“I actually designed it around Australia Post boxes. It was all about export. I can calculate that I can fit 50 packs into a box and that is x amount for freight.”
Crompton says the concept of the business is about taking a simple idea and repeating it many times, much like Andy Warhol’s pop art which inspires her.
The tea towels, which cost about $40 each, come in editions of up to 1000.
To date she has worked with 80 artists on tea towels, handkerchiefs, aprons, bibs and souvenirs for museum shops.
“It’s a semi-socialist concept,” Crompton says. “That’s why we do Third Drawer Down with the editioned numbers and at a price point that people can buy into it.”
Third Drawer Down, which has two full-time and three part-time employees, has products that are available online and through agents in the US, Britain, Thailand, New Zealand and Japan.
In Australia the products are available in more than 50 hand-picked stores including boutique bookshops, museum shops and kitchenware shops such as the Essential Ingredient. Crompton says that many outlets are run by like-minded contacts from her days at Craft Victoria.
When she started out in 2003 not all artists were keen to see their work mass-produced. “Artists are now more comfortable with being part of such a project because they know it’s not tacky. We don’t do tacky.”
So far she has worked with artists like David Shrigley from Scotland, James Gallagher and Sarajo Frieden from the US and the German band Chicks on Speed.
Three years ago she was studying website traffic statistics and saw that people were visiting the page that explained how to stretch the tea towels like a canvas onto a frame. This and the Post-It note inspired her to invent Magnart, a magnetic hanging product which sells in the tens of thousands.
“And now that is being sold into art galleries and being used for print and drawing exhibitions through to domestic houses where they are putting up kids’ drawings to tea towels,” she says.
From tea towels her products have followed a natural progression through limited edition aprons, lapkins and bibs. This in turn was spun off last year, when she opened a gallery space in Melbourne’s St Kilda, into a product development agency for museum shops. Her first client was the Tate Modern in London working on a handkerchief souvenir for the French-born American sculptor Louise Bourgeois. The first edition of 1000 sold out in three days.
In her early days Crompton styled herself as a “teatowelologist”. This has been dropped, as she wants to be taken seriously by the world of big art. Her story has evolved, too.
“In a lot of ways we see ourselves as a marketing company because we are taking an artist’s work and we are packaging it and putting them into some of the best stores around the world,” she says. “It is creating an access to a different audience.”
www.thirddrawerdown.com