Mixing Class and Cash

By Barbara Rudolph

Not all of New York City's holiday shoppers could be found last week at department-store sales. Thousands of people were snapping up presents at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's gift shops. Calvin and Sharon Petersen of Mantua, Utah, bought build-it-yourself paper medieval towns (price: $6.95). Cathy Smith of Medford, Ore., bought a framed print of Nathaniel Currier's lithograph The Favorite Cat ($38). For his mother, Steven Prince, a Los Angeles businessman, selected a shawl imprinted with the tree of life ($25). Says Prince: "Museums sell items of quality. They bring art to the people."

Museum-store sales are booming. This year the shops are expected to generate revenues of about $200 million. Sales at Boston's Museum of Science store have nearly doubled during the past three years, to $850,000 for the fiscal year that ended last April 30. At New York City's Met, sales reached $34 million for the year ending June 30, up 85% since 1981. For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington saw sales from its nine stores and its mail-order catalog hit $34.5 million, up 29% in just one year. Much of that income is generated during the Christmas season. "A lot of folks find that museum stores are nice places to buy Christmas gifts," says Smithsonian Manager James J. Chmelik. Last year December became the Smithsonian's best-selling month, surpassing April, its longtime leader.

The dramatic growth in museum-store sales partly reflects the sheer variety of products. These range from the sublime to the slightly ridiculous. Staple items include postcards, calendars, notecards and posters. Beyond that, the potpourri is far less predictable. At the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut one can buy a wooden handcrafted model of a ship ($10,000). Shoppers at Boston's Museum of Science store can take home a tiny piece of the moon, complete with a lunar map locating the crater from which the rock was taken. The single best-selling item in the Smithsonian stores is a $1.25 bar of freeze-dried ice cream, similar to the kind that passengers on the space shuttle eat. Houston's Museum of Fine Arts offers a Michael Graves-designed teakettle ($70). The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County sells West African ceremonial feathered headdresses ($160). At the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles one can buy teddy bear pins ($14) and concrete paperweights ($35).

Shoppers often enjoy a museum store's ambience. However crowded the gift shopgets, it suggests an artistic milieu impossible to find in, say, a K mart. Says Cindy Marano, a Washington resident who was visiting Chicago's Art Institute last week: "Museum shops are a wonderful place to buy presents. At malls everything seems the same and impersonal."

Many products also carry an artistic cachet. Says Regina Silvers, a spokeswoman for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: "We're not trendy. We offer functional art with excellent design." Popular reproductions of a vase designed by Alvar Aalto in 1937 sell for up to $135, while the copy of a Tizio lamp, designed by Richard Sapper in 1971, is $336.

Museums began aggressively developing retail operations in the late 1960s. In the past several years, as federal funding has been drying up and charitable contributions have remained difficult to snare, the pressure to make money has intensified. Says Beverly Barsook, executive director of the Museum Store Association, an organization that promotes the industry: "Grants have been on the skids, and museums want to be more self-sufficient."

Retailing is a legitimate and sometimes crucial source of funds. As nonprofit institutions, museums usually need not pay taxes on items sold in their gift shops. Says Steven Buettner, manager of MOMA's retail operations: "If we weren't here, the museum staff wouldn't be here either. We are the revenue producers that pay their salaries."

As their retail-store sales have grown, museum directors have come to realize the need for effective marketing. Some museums have hired experienced retailers to manage their stores and create new promotions. Two years ago, Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History employed a manager from Lord & Taylor. The Art Institute of Chicago, which recently formed a marketing department, has a shop manager who was recruited from Neiman-Marcus, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art took on a general manager who had worked as a buyer at Gump's department store in San Francisco.

Many museum managers have also adopted some tricks of the retailing trade. Most museums publish catalogs of their merchandise, which are mailed to members. Los Angeles' Natural History Museum gives a seminar to encourage elementary school teachers to use its store merchandise, including posters and games, as educational tools. The Smithsonian, though, usually takes a hands-off approach toward marketing. Manager Chmelik explains that it does not advertise its retail goods because "it is not our goal to compete with local merchants."

Museum-shop directors are also learning something that their colleagues at the malls knew all along: consumers are unpredictable. Recently, science and natural-history museum shops have scored a surprising success with dinosaur-related products. At Boston's Museum of Science, customers are snapping up wind-up, walking dinosaurs, sponge dinosaurs and dinosaur-shaped erasers. Dinosaur T shirts are strong sellers at both Los Angeles' Natural History Museum and Chicago's Field Museum. No one can explain why, but this is the year of the dinosaur at the museum store. --By Barbara Rudolph. Reported by Gisela Bolte/Washington and Barbara Kraft/Los Angeles

With reporting by Reported by Gisela Bolte/Washington, Barbara Kraft/Los Angeles