The Museum Depot Shop will close on 1 November. The web store for superfluous art and utensils from Dutch museums announced this by email to clients on Thursday. The online store, opened in 2019, was declared bankrupt on Tuesday.
Founder Arjen Pels Rijcken says when asked that he has chosen the “wrong business model”. “Unlike the successful Catawiki, we do everything ourselves. We collected collected goods from museums, cleaned them, photographed them and then arranged for shipment. For such a labour-intensive process, our prices were too low and the volumes too small.”
The web shop sold about 150 objects every month that about forty museums, such as the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Singer Laren and the Amsterdam Pipe Museum, had collected. The average selling price was 120 euros. “It’s not a viable way to cover the costs,” says Pels Rijcken, who personally invested about four hundred thousand euros in the company. He has had to lay off eight employees.
Also read: Launch of an online store for collectors’ art
Restart
At the same time as Museumdepotshop disappears too collectors.nlthe webshop, also established by Pels Rijcken in 2020, where private individuals could offer art and antiques for sale.
The trustee is investigating whether a restart with a new owner is possible. Pels Rijcken does not rule out that. Possibly, he says, there is interest in the brand name and customer base.