Show HN: VSUAL, a museum-grade art print marketplace
vsual.coFWIW, "museum-grade" sounds great, but doesn't mean anything. The gift shops at the San Francisco, New York, and Paris fine arts museums have reproductions with noticeable and disagreeable color shifts, tonality inconsistencies with the original, and frequently look like they didn't even get a focus lock.
It might be good to highlight how you're aware of these issues and what you're doing to ensure high fidelity reproductions.
Educate your would-be customers to be more discerning!
That’s fair! On our products page we talk about the ink we use as well as the paper options, but ultimately, the point is that our prints are “high quality”—which hopefully speaks for itself! You bring up good points though (:
My partner Charlie and I built VSUAL because the other print-on-demand solutions didn't feel right for the fine art prints he was making: if they did sell prints, it always felt like those were an afterthought to T-shirts, mugs, and phone cases. Even then, the prints felt cheap and low-quality.
VSUAL solves that problem for artists by giving them a prints-only marketplace focussed on quality. Every print is made with archival ink on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, Canson Baryta, or high quality Epson Semi Gloss paper. It also enables artists to sell a large selection of prints without keeping any inventory on hand: we handle printing, framing, and fulfillment.
For buyers, VSUAL solves the problem of size: all too often, you can find a print the size you want, or of the art you want, but you can't find the right art at the right size. With VSUAL, it's easy for artists to list their entire inventory at multiple sizes, making shopping easy for buyers.
We're still just getting started—we have /some/ traction with artists, but haven't quite cracked the code on marketing to buyers. What do you think?