
Show HN: VSUAL, a museum-grade art print marketplace - gangstertim
https://www.vsual.co/
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mceachen
FWIW, "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!

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gangstertim
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 (:

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gangstertim
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?

