Last week I was down in Wellington organisiing the detals of the upcoming Start-UP TV finale and happened to bump into James Stewart one of the founders of ArtKlick.co.nz.  James was up from the mainland for the week and hanging out in the Silicon Welly Alpha space aka Tim Nortons office, so I had the opportunity to check out his business. 

So, ArtKilck is basically a site where you can go to discover and purchase original kiwi art by up and coming kiwi artists, sounds pretty straght forward I know but once I started trolling thorugh the site I got hooked.  I must admt to intially being a bit sceptical about this type of service, the last thing I wanted to see was a bunch of grassy knoll and stormy sea prints produced by some poor chinese kid out of a sweat shop in Beijing (didn't show that on the Olympics)  but the quality of artists, styles and pricing of the works was really high and I ended up finding a couple of prints that I would seriously look at purchasing.  Some of the fiunctionality was a bit clunky in places but you're willing to forgive those things in an early stage site if they deliver in terms of the products they sell, and this site does.

The fun doesn't stop there though, james then told me about a couple of the new features they plan to introduce in the near future which include being able to order a print of an oriiginal piece or art (cash savings on purchase) and then being able to hire that print for a period of time. Now this is what really grabs me about this service, what that means esentially is that I can have a beautiful piece of original kiwi art from an up and coming kiwi artist hanging on my wall for a fraction of the cost of buying the original. Better still if i like the piece so much that I don't want to part with it then I can purchase it and have part of the rental cost deducted form the purchase price, now thats really cool!  Better still is that I'm helping to support aspiring kiwi artists which makes me feel really great about my purchase/ hireage.

Stuff they could do better?  Well as I mentioned the site is a bit clunky in places and I couldn't order some prints (apparently due to a high res image not being loaded into the back end).  I'd also like to see them buld the viral and sharing aspects of their offering into the site more clearly to really encourage comnunity activity and I think they could learn a lot from communities like Threadless and local guys like Endemic World.  All in all though Artklick gets the big tick from me, go check it out, www.artklick.co.nz.

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