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The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa., features a gift store with items, including jewelry, reflecting the region and a hauntingly beautiful landscape so aptly captured by generations of Wyeth painters.
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useum stores offer museum goers something they often cannot find at traditional jewelry stores — a fashion statement that’s stylish, educational and different.
Jewelry is a way that someone can take home a little piece of their museum experience, said Dianne Birmingham, director of museum sales and merchandise at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Many museum stores make a concerted effort to stock or manufacture jewelry in a range of price points, making sure to offer affordable items and high-quality costume pieces. Perhaps that’s why it is a top-selling category for many museum stores across the country.
“Out of 15 categories, (museum store) respondents were asked to rank their top three selling items based on revenue,” said Kathy Cisar of the Museum Store Association, of the 2009 MSA Retail Industry Report. In the survey, jewelry tied with toys and games for second, after books and related items.
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Delicate jewelry for sale at the Brandywine River Museum’s store. The attraction is surrounded by wildflower and native-plant gardens, and much of the jewelry takes its inspiration from nature as well as art.
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Wearable Art
It makes sense that art museum stores stock items crafted by jewelry artisans. The San Francisco Museum of Craft+Design, the Dalí, the San Diego Museum of Art and the Getty all employ this strategy to make their store offerings distinctive. Surprisingly, though, the practice is a successful one for natural history museums as well as historic properties.
“The museum store sells jewelry that reflects the collections within the museum,” said Chacho Herman, the museum store manager at the San Diego Museum of Art, in California. “Most of the jewelry we sell comes from local jewelers in San Diego. We sell everything from beaded to cast pieces — many are one of a kind.”
Artisan jewelry, buyers said, tends to be selected because it’s high quality, collection inspired, one of a kind or limited production.
“Each piece is hand-picked and we like to allow customers to really see that,” said Susan DeLand, the museum store buyer for the Getty Villa Museum Store, in Malibu, Calif., and the Getty Center, in Brentwood, Calif. “Many are made by artisans and we have small signs that give a brief bio and artist statement.”
Both the Getty and the Dalí also offer customers proprietary designs based on their collections. In the Dalí’s case, though, the artist himself designed jewelry, much of which is in the museum’s collection, so the store offers costume pieces of Dalí’s jewelry.
One advantage museums with a strong jewelry focus have is with jewelry exhibitions that the stores can support with sales. The Dalí Museum’s recent “Dalí: Gems” exhibit, which closed this April, spurred jewelry sales, Birmingham said.
“Seeing jewelry in the gallery makes it more tangible, more meaningful,” she said.
The San Francisco Museum of Craft+Design’s “Designers on Jewelry: Twelve Years of Jewelry Production by Chi ha paura…?” exhibit, which closes May 16, is where museum goers can actually take a few select pieces of the exhibit home.
Store Manager Ray McKenzie said that jewelry always sells well for the craft museum because the shop offers cutting-edge pieces. “The pieces we sell may not be fine jewelry in the traditional sense,” he said, “but the pieces call into question what ‘fine jewelry’ means with their use of materials, designs or both.”
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A view of the San Francisco Museum of Craft+Design’s gift store. Minimal, clean merchandising makes the small space work at this California attraction.
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A Natural Mission
With one of the world’s finest collections of minerals, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, in Cambridge, Mass., mostly sells semiprecious or mineral-based jewelry in its store. Here, museum goers can find familiar things like topaz or aquamarine items and rare stones they will likely not see in any jewelry store, such as multicolored crysophase, said Kevin Ebert, the museum’s assistant director of operations.
The shop has branched out product-wise, though, to reflect the museum’s mission of conservation and preservation, Ebert said. The store now sells recycled-beaded jewelry made by African artisans and butterfly-wing jewelry made by a conservation-minded company that uses the wings of butterflies that died naturally and has helped increase the butterfly population in certain areas.
Blending nature and art, the Brandywine River Museum, part of the Brandywine Nature Conservancy in Chadds Ford, Pa., houses a large collection of American landscape paintings of the region, including many works by the Wyeth family, and is surrounded by wildflower and native-plant gardens.
Store Manager Erika Bucino sells handcrafted jewelry that focuses on the museum’s mission to preserve art and nature.
“Some of our jewelry depicts native plants or American art illustration,” she said. “Some is recycled, and all is handmade in the United States. Whenever possible, we prefer Pennsylvania-area artisans.”
Where display space allows, Bucino places information indicating if a piece is custom, created by a local artist or how it links to museum’s mission, so customers can connect with the jewelry.
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An extensive jewelry selection is displayed in a well-lit case at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, in Cambridge, Mass.
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About Place
It is hard to imagine what Los Angeles was like before the motion picture industry, let alone electricity, but at the Heritage Square Museum, a living history museum dedicated to the architecture, history and lifestyle of how Southern California developed between 1850 and 1950, people can experience just that.
The museum store rises to the occasion by selling vintage and reproduction jewelry in styles popular during the time period, said Jessica Maria Alicea-Covarrubias, director of museum administration and operations.
Watch fobs, hatpins and pocket watches are displayed along with earrings, rings, necklaces and pins, and she said the store uses antiqued photos in the displays to add interest and to clue customers into at what they are looking.
The Gropius House is Lincoln, Mass., however, may reflect a time period, but it is one that still feels ahead of its time. Designed in 1937 by architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus design school in Germany and the former head of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the home is minimalist, modest and uses traditional New England building materials and industrial materials in new ways.
“We look for distinctive pieces that reflect the spirit of modern design and modern materials with our jewelry,” said Wendy Hubbard, store buyer and Historic New England site manager. “The jewelry also reflects his architectural perspectives and some pieces are simple and geometric.”
Ise Gropius, Walter’s wife, was a bit of a style maven herself and designed her own clothes as well as had a good eye for objects. “Ise has some awesome costume jewelry. She’d buy silver in Mexico, ethnic pieces on her travels,” said Hubbard. “And she had jewelry designed by Alexander Calder and the faculty of the Bauhaus.”
In her spirit, Hubbard said, the store stocks some fun costume pieces in Lucite, for example, and Configurations, a pliable necklace that customers can transform into wearable art.
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