Sotheby’s New York holds two general design sales a year. Those sales, which include furniture, antiques, rugs, mirrors, and other kinds of decoration, usually contain around 200 lots. At most, then, Sotheby’s will auction 400 lots annually—just enough to fill a single Park Avenue apartment.
Even if you add the auction house’s other design sales to the mix—single-owner sales, “English Furniture,” “Rugs and Carpets”—you’re still not looking at more than a couple thousand interior objects a year.
Which means there are many, many more consignors banging at its door. “We have a lot more material coming into Sotheby’s than we can sell,” says John Auerbach, general manager of Sotheby’s Art and Objects division in New York.
So when the company announced in February that it had acquired the online decorative arts consignment marketplace Viyet, the move made intuitive sense; now, instead of rejecting items outright, Sotheby’s could sell them, while avoiding the onerous costs of actually holding a live auction. “With many of the items in decorative arts, the value of moving these things around is the same high-touch model that we use with a million-dollar painting,” says Auerbach.
In other words, Sotheby’s was going through the same basic rigmarole (storage, handlers, insurance, auction specialists, marketing) to sell a $2,000 candlestick as it was to sell a $2 million painting. With Sotheby’s Home, the online marketplace it launched last week, replacing Viyet, “it has a low-touch model that just makes more sense for everybody,” Auerbach says.
Sotheby's is moving into online retail https://t.co/K48Z3ajfmI
— Bloomberg Pursuits (@luxury) October 15, 2018
The Business Model
From Sotheby’s perspective, the beauty of Sotheby’s Home is that the company never has to be physically responsible for the object. Consignors who contact Sotheby’s will either be visited by a Sotheby’s Home “curator,” who will inspect and appraise the object, or, for people who aren’t located near one of the 13 major markets serviced by Sotheby’s Home, detailed photos of the object will suffice.
If the piece passes muster, Sotheby’s Home will arrange for an object to be photographed, then put it up on the site. The object itself, though, will stay “with the consignor in their home or office or warehouse,” Auerbach says. When the object sells, Sotheby’s will help facilitate its transport. “It goes directly from the seller to the buyer,” he says. After six months, if a piece doesn’t sell, the company simply removes it from the site. No muss, no fuss.
Consignors pay Sotheby’s Home a whopping 50 percent of the sale price for the service—and the Sotheby’s brand—so whoever is selling this lovely stack of Danish nesting tables for $1,280 is willing to trade half of its value to unload it. The silver lining (for the consignor at least) is that whoever buys it will have to pay for packing, shipping, and insurance.
The 50 percent consignment rate is standard for the industry, says Bruce Tilley, the owner of Decor NYC, a furniture and design consignment showroom in New York. “Before I opened this gallery seven years ago, I checked around the country,” he says. “In some cases it’s even higher.”