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Category: small business

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Dealing with GDPR

If it stops our data from being sold, that is a good thing. For now, GDPR is just one more compliance task, and I don’t even live in the EU.

Beach toys, by Carol L. Douglas
I read with mild amusement that galleries may be faced with “onerous new requirements” to prove they are not selling undocumented antiquities, laundering money, or any of the other things covered under the Bank Secrecy Act. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad idea. “The art market is an ideal playing ground for money laundering,” said Thomas Christ, of the Basel Institute on Governance, a Swiss nonprofit that studied the issue.
Most galleries in the US, aren’t dealing with foreign princes and Monet-style pricing. Instead, they’re dealing with compliance of a different sort. On May 25, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in the European Union. Living and selling art in a coastal town, even my relatively small list contains names from the EU. There is no exemption from compliance for sole proprietors or small businesses, and the penalties are stiff.
Sea and sand, by Carol L. Douglas
This is why you’ve suddenly been getting emails from vendors asking if you want to remain on their mailing lists. They’re hustling to remain in compliance.
Can I document why I have every name on my list? No way. Some were collected long ago, when I was schlepping a tent from town to town selling paintings on village greens. I will proceed on the assumption that those people would have cleared off my mailing list long ago, had they wanted to.
If you hold and work with data collected from clients, then you need to have a contract with the client stating how that data is to be held and managed. There are two principles involved. The first is that you must have appropriate legal grounds for processing the data and that you do it in a transparent manner. The second is that you must only collect data for a specific purpose and use it only for that purpose.
Off the Marginal Way, by Carol L. Douglas
For the gallerist or artist, this generally comes down to clearly informing your subscribers about how you plan to use their information. It also means that you can’t take the list you got from the church lawn fête and use it for your own business.
You’re also supposed to recite the subscribers’ rights and how they can lodge a complaint. Frankly, that’s more than I can deal with. Luckily, I use Blogger and Mailchimp, and they handle the jargon for me.
I added this note to my blog: “Subscribe here and receive every post by email. Never used for anything else; never passed along.” Had I enough room, I would have added, “because I have no idea how to even collect the darn things from Google, or any plan to sell the names once I collect them. I’m just not that smart.”

Surf, by Carol L. Douglas

It’s one more way that blogs and emails are being pushed into the hands of big operations like Google, but I don’t see any option. Who among us has the expertise to navigate these legal shoals or the resources to lawyer up? Certainly not me.
There is one part of the GDPR that tickles my fancy. That’s “the right to be forgotten.” Say I took photos of you in a drunken brawl at one of my openings and for some reason decided to post them on Instagram. Twenty years later, older and possibly wiser, you objected. You could ask me to delete the photo and I’d have to justify why I shouldn’t. It will be interesting to see how that meshes with American free speech rights.
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The new tax bill and self-employed artists

Are you losing all your deductions? Heck, no. The sky didn’t fall after all.

More Work than They Bargained For (Isaac H. Evans), Carol L. Douglas, courtesy Camden Falls Gallery

The last major tax reform occurred 27 years ago. Our combined household income was in the $10,000 range since my husband was in grad school. I can’t tell you what impact it had on my taxes, because I wasn’t filing by computer back then.

This time around, I read daily reports of how this bill would eliminate the home-office deduction or other important considerations for the self-employed. Many of my artist friends were very troubled. It has done none of those things.
I’m not a tax preparer. For heaven’s sake, don’t rely on this for tax planning. However, I’m keenly interested, because I prepare my own taxes. Anything that would simplify that would make me very happy.
Spring at Rockport, Carol L. Douglas
For many of my friends and family, the biggest change—and one that could cost them dearly—is the cap on state and local tax deductions at $10,000. People in other states used to boggle when I told them I paid $12,000 a year in property taxes in my middle-class neighborhood in New York. It’s one of the reasons I moved. (We still pay income tax to New York, for reasons that are too complicated to go into here.) For artists in New York, New Jersey and California who own their own homes, this cap could hurt.
This will be offset to some degree by changes in the standard deduction and the income tax rate. I sat with a New York artist friend last week totting up her plusses and minuses on my fingers. I think she will be better off even with the property tax cap.
Coast Guard Inspection (American Eagle), Carol L. Douglas, courtesy Camden Falls Gallery
In most cases those households with five-figure property taxes will also see reductions in their tax rate. May they use their savings to buy more paintings.
There are some other changes that might affect artists. One is the threshold for medical expenses, which temporarily drops back to 7.5%. There have been years where that would have mattered to me, and it’s a pity that it couldn’t have been cut permanently. It’s important to low-income people with catastrophic illnesses, especially in this era of high deductibles. My friend Barb will be happy that it’s retroactive to 2017, as she had to have emergency surgery this year.
Winch (American Eagle), Carol L. Douglas, courtesy Camden Falls Gallery
Casualty loss deductions are now limited to federal disaster areas. If a Nor’easter drops a spruce on your roof and your insurance doesn’t cover it, you’re out of luck. There are some other miscellaneous expenses you won’t be able to deduct, like unreimbursed job expenses or moving expenses.
But as for Schedule C filers—which most of us artists are—the new tax bill appears to have helped, not hurt us. It provides an across-the-board 20% reduction of our business income before it gets transferred to our Schedule A. (The rest of its provisions appear aimed at higher fliers than me.)
As far as I can see, the sky didn’t fall after all. But if you’re reading this differently from me, let me know in the comments.
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Online holiday marketing for artists

What’s shifting in 2017 holiday marketing? A lot, especially with email.

Off Marshall Point, by Carol L. Douglas. This is for sale in Chrissy Pahucki’s new venture, pleinair.store.

If you sell paintings, you’re in retailing. And if you’re in retailing, you’ve probably learned by now that holiday sales are an important part of your business. While all retailing sees a jump during the holiday selling spree, the jewelry sector posts more than a quarter of its annual sales during the holidays. That’s important because jewelry sales and painting sales have much in common. They’re both luxury items, and their value is primarily aesthetic.

For a decade, seasonal spending outpaced the US economy, meaning we were concentrating our money more in that one-month period. Then, in 2016, something changed. Seasonal sales were down, except for automobiles and gasoline.
One year does not a trendline make, but I’ve noticed a few things this year. The absurd deals that created Black Friday culture weren’t in my Thanksgiving newspaper (which cost $4, by the way). Retailing is in a major meltdown right now, with bricks-and-mortar stores closing in the face of new consumer trends.
Tilt-a-Whirl, by Carol L. Douglas. This is for sale in Chrissy Pahucki’s new venture, pleinair.store.
But the thing that really hit home was the abuse of my in-box over the past week. I’ve been deleting a few hundred email ads a day without even opening them. I receive multiple, similar offers from the same vendors. They’re all companies I like and have purchased from, but they’ve created a wall between me and the emails I need to see. In other words, they’ve tipped email into a black hole as a marketing strategy.
How does an artist make his or her voice heard in that cacophony? The short answer is, we can’t. I’m only looking at mail from my close friends and business associates right now, so if you sent me a seasonal special offer, it was deleted without opening.
Glen Cove Surf, by Carol L. Douglas. This is for sale in Chrissy Pahucki’s new venture, pleinair.store.
Artists must watch retailing trends carefully. It’s not enough to understand what others are doing now, we have to understand what others plan to do. I watched a webinar recently about creating an email marketing funnel. This is an advertising concept that converts brand awareness to sales. Like every other one-person shop, I could be a lot better at it.
The presenter taught us how to collect email addresses and then qualify and refine information about the buyer. That was fine, but it ignores a basic reality: people sent and received 269 billion emails per day in 2017. With all that chatter—and it’s so much cheaper than snail mail—it’s almost impossible for your message to stand out with any clarity.
Marginal Way, by Carol L. Douglas. This is for sale in Chrissy Pahucki’s new venture, pleinair.store.
In the end, on-line sales will have created new and different problems from the ones they seemed to fix. As always, the muscle will lie with the big marketers that have the time and talent to tinker with new strategies, not with sole proprietors like us.
What’s a poor artist to do? First, realize we’re not alone in this. Every small retailer faces the same problem. From my vantage point, we do the same things we’ve always done: reach out to regular customers, create opportunities to buy, and carefully analyze the competition’s marketing strategy. Above all, we have to be open to new ideas, which is why I’m trying out Chrissy Pahucki’s new venture, pleinair.store.
And somehow, we need to find time to paint.
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Redeeming the day

East Main Street, Rochester.(Photo by Douglas Perot)
It’s just ten days until my move to Maine, and it’s a pretty ragged time. The Volunteers of America truck will be here tomorrow, my house looks like the aftermath of urban rioting, and I figure I’m about three weeks behind on my to-do list. Everything, in short, has been going as well as can be expected.
Rochester, struggling? Yeah, that’s one reason. (Photo courtesy of Ivan Ramos.)
Then a series of cascading events hit yesterday:
  • My Prius was hit by a flying traffic cone, shattering the front bumper;
  • Our Civic needed $500 worth of brake work to pass inspection;
  • I dropped my mobile and shattered the screen;
  • An hour after the Civic got new brakes, it blew its muffler.

Rochester. (Photo courtesy of Ivan Ramos.)
Of course, all these things needed attention before I leave town. The only solution was to throw money at the cars, but after dropping a thousand dollars on them, I wasn’t keen to spend more on a new phone.

I’ve enjoyed my weeks of packing and sorting, oddly enough, and didn’t want my good mood to fizzle. “Lord, don’t let this steal my enjoyment of this day,” I prayed.

Rochester. (Photo courtesy of Ivan Ramos.)
I called Verizon; they wanted $180 to fix the screen. A used replacement was about $200, only marginally less than a new one. We watched a Youtube video on fixing it ourselves, but the replacement parts were $33 plus tax with two-day shipping, and when and how I’d do it remained up in the air.
Just to tell myself I’d checked off every option, I called an independent repair shop. Run by two nice young men, the Wireless Wizard fixed my screen for $70 including tax. The young man who helped me told me he’d worked at Rochester General Hospital before he and his brother rehabbed their first office space on East Main Street two years ago and opened for business. They moved across the street two months ago, and have just added a nail salon next door to their shop.
Once a star in Rochester’s firmament, East High now graduates about 39% of its students. (Photo courtesy of Ivan Ramos.)
My last studio was almost across the street from their shop, so I know the neighborhood well. There are parts of Main Street that are almost genteel, but that block is struggling. Any new enterprise that moves in is a triumph of hope over experience.
At N. Winton Village, East Main becomes almost genteel. (Photo courtesy of Ivan Ramos.)
Seeing a new business succeeding in Rochester cheered me up a great deal. Having my phone fixed at a decent price cheered me up even more. The day was redeemed.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in August 2015. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.