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[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to CART guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy.
[Ad]: Today's checkout features George Hartley, co founder of Bluthar, Australia's online art Marketplace. Representing over 20,000 emerging and established artists from Australia, Blue Thumb's mission is to make discovering artists and buying art easy. They've onboarded a third of Australia's indigenous art centres and have recently launched in the us.
Nathan Bush: George, welcome to the checkout. We've had a great conversation around Blue Thumb and what you're building there. 300,000 artworks expanding into the US and some of the dumbest pivots that you discussed with your team, which was great fun. We're here to learn a little bit more about you. I've got five quick questions. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
George Hartley: A brand new car. I bought a Tesla online without test driving it or anything. It blew my mind because when we launched blue thumb in 2012, there's a lot of scoffing at no one will ever buy art unseen or spend real money on art online. It just won't happen. And that was pretty much most of the people. Their consensus was no one's going to spend more than a few hundred dollars. But we like, oh, I think we can get there. And you know, Zappos was selling shoes and so it's come all the way along. We sold the piece for almost $100,000 last year. Again, sight Unseen. And so, yeah, the biggest extravagance of my shopping life ever was buying a Tesla. But, you know, just buying this thing, click, buy it, blew my mind. It's crazy. I love that we're there.
Nathan Bush: Even little things like no haggling, because I can imagine even that's the thing for the world about being transparent on price up front. You know what you're in for. There's not a haggle, there's not a game is what it is.
George Hartley: Correct. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: On that hundred thousand dollars piece of art, when you sold that, did you get involved in any way to make sure that it was shipped securely? Like, how does that all work? Because that's a whole different ball game, right?
George Hartley: It is, yes. No, we, we did. We made sure it was properly created and have a couple of curators who immediately jump on the phone to make sure everything works at that size. But yeah, it just came through online.
[Ad]: It's amazing.
Nathan Bush: Do you reckon you'll ever get a seven figure sale?
George Hartley: We don't have any seven figure art yet. I think we will, I think we will. But we'll see, we'll see, we'll see.
Nathan Bush: All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer? Apple.
George Hartley: I love Apple. I was inspired by them to start working technology and kind of the smartphone has given three quarters of the world have access to the Internet now because they have a smartphone and like Apple really kind of gave that to the world and so, yeah, I just love them as a brand and I do think their actual e commerce experience is pretty mid, to be honest. But yeah, Apple, yeah, nice.
Nathan Bush: Just a low benchmark there to live up to. Number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
George Hartley: SEO driven content writing, you know, good content is amazing. You know, really a really good blog post or like, it can change your life or like a video's super funny or whatever. These kind of, they connect so well, but the Internet's amazing for that. But SEO driven content writing just fills the Internet with kind of average mediocre nothingness. And I just, I want it to go away. And I'm hoping LLM Search will make it go away soon. Who knows?
Nathan Bush: As an art marketplace, I can imagine you have a lot of artists who aren't, what do we say, digital natives. When they're uploading art, do you have to give them tips on things like searchability to make sure that they're describing their artwork or titling their artwork in a way that users can easily find it?
George Hartley: Yeah, and we also auto tag and we use actually an AI API to Kind of help auto generate the description for them. And we do as much friction removal as we can. And we keep doing that, you know, keep improving that. But yes, they. Why would I put a tag on this artwork? Most of them don't know that. And so we have to kind of do it for them and explain why it's important.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Great. All right, number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
George Hartley: Yeah. Okay, so I, I really like reading biographies and there's actually a couple here, so I'm going to cheat. I've. Yeah, I got a couple that I've loved and reread.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
George Hartley: Number one was Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. You know.
Nathan Bush: Right.
George Hartley: Building a company, looking backwards seems inevitable. And at the time everything's fragile and crazy and who knows what will happen. And that's just a perfect story about that brand. The second is like Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. It's sort of exactly the same. It just shows these meandering, kind of failure driven paths that these really epically successful founders took. You know, all these failures along the way. It's super interesting. Just a bunch of interviews with founders.
Nathan Bush: Cool.
George Hartley: I love Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Apple. I love Snowball by Warren Buffett. Not by Warren Buffett, about Warren Buffett. I think it's Alice Schroeder maybe that helped me with investing. And the last one is one I'm reading right now, which is called the First Tycoon about Cornelius Vanderbilt. Who's that? It's like, it's mind blowing. You know, this guy, companies are invented while he's starting. You know, a limited liability company wasn't a thing. And then it was. And is this better than a monopoly and democracy?
[Ad]: Better?
George Hartley: You know, all these things were sort of concepts that were being battered around. You realize how much infrastructure and how much stuff we already have to build stuff now versus these guys back in the day. So. Yeah. And also like, it's this story of kind of USA exceptionalism. You know, this sort of the invention of the steam engine was like the Internet. Now it opened up the world and it's just, it's just a great story of his grit and his ability to turn a steam engine into kind of the richest man in the world and lay the pipes for America to be the dominant thing it is now.
Nathan Bush: It's amazing. Great recommendations. Thank you. With your recent expansion into the U.S. have you noticed significant differences in the way business is done in the US versus Australia?
George Hartley: Yeah. More trusting, less kind of. I don't know if this is the right set, but I read that it takes 11 brand mentions for an Australian to trust a new brand and four for an American. And so it's true, E commerce is sort of easier in a way. More competitive.
Nathan Bush: More competitive. But yeah, it's further down the track.
George Hartley: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: All right, George, last one I've got for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is personalized.
George Hartley: I just think AI is radically change E commerce and I don't know how, but I just think it's going to become less mass, less bulk and more tailored through AI. Yeah, who knows? I don't want to make too many predictions. It's just changing so much. It's kind of an exciting time.
Nathan Bush: But it sounds like you're already incorporating AI and personalization in the platform. So a lot of the times we'll be experiencing AI or personalization without even knowing we're experiencing it.
George Hartley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And we have, you know, as users on YouTube, the AI driven feed just changed everything and all those small things happen in the background anyway. So it's just going to keep happening.
Nathan Bush: It's great, great stuff. And George, we didn't do it on the fourth question, recommending a book or a podcast. Of course, we can't go without recommending your own podcast.
George Hartley: Give it a plug 100%. The greatest art podcast you'll ever listen to is called the Art in My Home. Yeah, it's our new Blue Thumb podcast. Check it out.
Nathan Bush: Love it. George, thank you for joining us on the checkout.
George Hartley: Thank you very much, Nathan.
[Ad]: To hear more from George, jump back into episode 388 where George shares the life changing impact the marketplace has had on individual artists. He shares the tech venture that Blue Thumb made possible and how they've almost quadrupled their average order value since launching. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
