Website with selling paua

By CHRIS DANIELS

Making a dollar from the world of art is never easy. It is even harder when you are trying to make a market for some innovative - and pricey - paua presentations.

Wellington paua artist Alan Hucks has come up with Paua2thepeople.com, an online gallery to showcase functional art.

But if you are looking for a cheap ashtray for that kiwiana-themed pub keep moving, because items such as paua soapdishes, cellphone holders, curtains and jewellery do not come cheap. A paua dish on a tripod sells for $225.

Hucks says his online gallery is a way of showing other artists he is serious about the business, while giving them an opportunity to sell their work.

If a New Zealand artist wants to sell something through the online gallery, they contact Hucks, tell him what they have, organise photos and sit back, hoping for a sale to come through the net.

The artists can continue to try to sell it through other avenues, but must be able to supply the item should any online customer want it.

"It's like a mail-order gallery, so that the artists will probably put that item on reserve - it has to be arranged to be available to be sold."

"It's for the young, funky people with money who want something of a high quality."

Hucks did a small-business course and put together a business plan for Work and Income New Zealand.

He was eventually given a grant of about $7500 to help set up his workshop, buy drills and some of the pricey paua shells he needs to work with.

Only one out of every 1000 paua shells is suitable for Hucks' work. They have to be thick enough - and therefore old enough, to be worked.

"I have to pay huge amounts of money for them to begin with, hence the price, because they are so rare," he says.

"I have to buy them through a shell trader, who buys them off the divers. They have already been bought and sold four times by the time I get them."

He polishes the shells and grinds the lime off the back. The more he grinds the shell, the thinner it gets.

He sands it down to a clean surface, before double-coating it with polyurethane, making it "food-safe" and more durable.

Hucks, 33, has one assistant, and turned over about $50,000 last year.

The internet catalogue and online gallery is a way paua2thepeople can put his entire range of work out into a fragmented retailing community.

"This is the problem we have with the giftstores and the galleries ... they don't know what it is, so don't know how to sell it."

Hucks says he is lucky his website has not cost him a fortune. It was put together by his friend, Auckland graphic designer John Kelleher, who took on the project to develop and promote his website design skills.

There have been only five sales through the website so far, three to the US and two to Britain. Not huge, but Hucks says the online gallery, while an attempt to steer business his way, is also about promoting functional New Zealand art.

"There are so many people out there who just don't have the avenue to sell their stuff.

"They might put it in their local gallery but they haven't got time to go round all the galleries all round the country, they haven't time to turn it into their business"

Hucks is trying develop a way for other artists to contact him easily.

"If it works for me it'll work for them. It relies on people visiting and enjoying what I do, trying to cross the Kiwi ingenuity with NZ natural materials."

paua2thepeople