Community Market FAQs

How many artists are you hoping to deal with?

At the time of this writing, 12/1, our team is still fairly small (3 board members with 2 we’d like to swear in at our next board meeting, and 3 additional volunteers). We aren’t equipped yet to manage a massive inventory or run a huge operation, so we will probably limit ourselves to 10 artists and 5 pieces at a time from each of them.

How are you planning to sell the art?

Regarding sales on our website, we will begin with local delivery and pick up options in Chattanooga. We will add shipping options once we fine-tune our shipping process. In an ideal world, we will provide artists with shipping labels, packaging materials, and tracking numbers. When the package is delivered to the address provided by the purchaser, we will disburse funds to the artist who produced the product. In this model, art work does not need to be shipped twice, and artists do not need to pay the shipping costs themselves.

We also plan to sell art in person at local markets and events in Chattanooga. We hope to build partnerships with brick and mortar stores to sell items for us as well.

For the moment, we are working on gathering the art for free by ourselves through picking it up and transporting it to Chattanooga.

How will you earn money from this if you only take 10%?

The market is one of WRN’s four sources of funding. We do not expect to earn a lot of money from the market, but it helps that one of the artists is a founding member who intends to drop 90% back into the organization if any of her art sells.

Since helping community members sell their art is in alignment with our organization’s mission, we hope that this program will enable us to receive grant funding. By using our own volunteer labor for the marketing, selling, and distribution, it does not cost very much money at all for us to run this program.

We would like to earn enough money from sales in our first quarter to account for the cost of our incorporation and 501(c)(3) paperwork ($377.35).