Date of Award

2018

Document Type

MA Project - Restricted Access (SIA Only)

Project Type

MA Project - Business Plan

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Art Business

First Advisor

Roxanna Zarnegar

Abstract

ArtWay is a mobile application company with a goal to provide a simple platform for individuals to visit fine art establishments in his or her city. We believe fine art is an essential part of everyone’s life and provides creativity in our society. We want to inspire people to go see visual art with an app that is simple to use and tailored to the art world.

We discovered the finding of fine art establishments online was time consuming and unreliable. Users constantly had to enter and exit various browsers in order to locate museums or galleries in the area. While there are platforms with similar concepts, each failed to include all fine art venues and displayed poor interface design. After experiencing this issue, we chose to create an application that would consolidate all the information necessary to go see visual art. By including all fine art establishments and simplifying the user interface ArtWay was created, making the experience of viewing fine art stress-free and enjoyable. We believe now is the right time to enter into the market and finally help individuals explore fine art in their city.

To produce this idea in physical form, we will be partnering with a development firm to create a new software system that will be able to aggregate data from various websites of our choosing. This will automatically keep information up-to-date, which will save the company time and energy. In addition, integrating the Google Maps platform will be essential in guiding the user in their journey of seeing visual art. Our user-friendly interface will be constructed by a designer whose expertise is focused on simple user mobility. Overall, the development and structure of ArtWay is our main priority as we want to ensure our core concept is up to par with our consumers.

We will be targeting undergraduate and graduate art students, universities with visual art programs, as well as fine art establishments in the New York City area. To see greater success, we believe starting small in one city and expanding outward will be key to building our company. We plan to partner with 8 universities per month to grow our customer base to 20% and increase sales by 15% in 2020. Based on primary and secondary research, our target audience is more inclined to use mobile applications and have the time and interest to go see visual art near their university to attain inspiration.

To attract our target market, we will be utilizing promotional tools such as social media, but believe generating traffic is of greater importance than spreading brand awareness. Producing high levels of traffic will result in consistent customer loyalty and will be crucial in the beginning stages of our product. With the guidance of an investor we will be given $100,000 to start the business. We have estimated the financials of this venture will be profitable and break even by the third year. The investor will also receive the money he or she lent during the third-year period.

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