Kasmin Gallery
Viewing Room
The Brief:
To create and replicate interactive digital viewing room experiences for key exhibitions at Kasmin, or to support digital-only exhibitions.
The Outcome:
Visit https://www.kasmingallery.com/rooms to see the most recent virtual viewing rooms, in motion here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B2Mx-T5AHZv
The Caravan team worked closely with the Paul Kasmin Gallery to redo their Website and eCommerce Webshop. This involved creating a new digital strategy, designs and developing a new front-end.
The Project Story:
Coming off of a recent rebrand and site redesign, Kasmin engaged Caravan to help create a bold, innovative new tool for their sales staff to extend the reach and quality of how their art is shared online. Their vision - to create interactive digital viewing room experiences replicating key exhibitions from their physical showroom space, and to support digital-only exhibitions - would put them on the cutting edge of an emergent digital renaissance transforming art galleries and museums.
The ‘rooms’ needed to support high-quality imagery with zoom and 3D panoramic views, provide a way to inquire about the availability of specific art, and allow Kasmin to give either public or private access to a viewing room per the gallery’s preference. Additionally, a robust custom analytics panel tracking views and inquiries linked to known users and email addresses provided a secondary purpose to the project - to build and grow an actionable email list. As both a sales and promotional tool, the viewing room venture was to become a central element of Kasmin’s digital strategy.
The Plan:
The fully scoped version of the viewing room project is a feature-rich custom CMS that allows non-technical users at the gallery to create custom interactive content. To ensure that our endeavor would deliver strong ROI and meet early initial deadlines, we partitioned this project into multiple phases, allowing us to work toward longer term goals while prioritizing the production and promotion of an interactive front-end deliverable. Technical documentation was written and designed to facilitate the use of the more complex mechanics of the system for users intending to build with it. Since Kasmin viewed this undertaking as a core tool for future outreach, the end goal was oriented around 100% hand-off from Caravan to the client, allowing them to perpetually create robust viewing room experiences on their own without expert in-house developers.
The Process:
Beginning with a collaborative design process between Caravan’s UX specialists and Kasmin’s designers, a visual representation of all necessary views and interactions was created and animated in Framer X and After Effects. Research was conducted to source JavaScript plugins and build custom scripting that could accommodate more complicated feature requests to deliver an optimized experience offering high-speed performance for numerous assets exceeding 15-20 MBs. Additionally, the design of back-end systems powering custom analytics, advanced privacy settings and publication preferences accompanied the initial architecture. The first viewing room was constructed in March 2019, with six other rooms following over the course of the year. As the process evolved, each subsequent room was built to support an increasingly robust set of tools and customizations.
Measuring Success:
By every metric, the viewing rooms have been a resounding success.
Increased site traffic, gallery prestige, in-person visits, and subsequent inquiries and sales were all achieved. Sales of artworks have increased due to the viewing rooms. The tool has become a crucial element of Kasmin’s sales and marketing strategies.
Additionally, the gallery has collected hundreds of email addresses with extensive contextual information around which advertising and outreach campaigns can be targeted and messaged. Analytics have added insight into customer interest and behavior and has revolutionized the sales organization internally.
About Kasmin:
Founded by Paul Kasmin in SoHo in 1989, Kasmin cultivates a rigorous exhibition program that places historic figures of Post- War art in dialogue with the evolving practice of established and emerging artists working today. For over 30 years, the gallery has nurtured the careers of eminent modern and contemporary artists including Tina Barney, Walton Ford, James Nares, Ivan Navarro, Roxy Paine, Elliott Puckette, Mark Ryden, Bosco Sodi, and Bernar Venet, among many others, and put on the first-ever U.S. gallery shows of artists including Les Lalanne.
About Caravan:
Caravan is a leading firm in the field of art and technology.
Caravan has worked with some of the largest art institutions in the world to sell millions of dollars of art and art merchandise online.
Contact us today at https://crvn.net