Art prints that deliver for artists and customers alike

Meylt started with a fairly simple idea. Buying art for your home should be a good experience, and the art itself should be the most important part of it.

There are plenty of places to buy prints online. There are also plenty of artists producing brilliant work, often building an audience on their own, without the backing of a gallery or the resources to reach a wider market. We thought there was room to do something a little differently, bringing the two together in a way that works better for everyone.

That idea has shaped how we’re building Meylt, from the quality of the prints to the way we work with artists and the prices we charge.

The art comes first

We care about good art. That might sound obvious, but it’s worth saying.

We want Meylt to be a place where people discover work they love, whether they know exactly what they’re looking for or stumble across something unexpected. Art that makes a room feel different. Work that you keep looking at. Pieces that mean something to you, or that you simply enjoy having around.

We want the collections to reflect that. There needs to be a point of view behind what we offer. We’re interested in artists with something of their own to say, and work that stands out for the right reasons.

That doesn’t mean everything has to fit a particular style or appeal to a particular type of customer. Good art is subjective, and part of the pleasure is finding things you wouldn’t necessarily have looked for. But we do think that choosing what to feature matters.

Meylt should be somewhere to discover art, not just scroll through an endless catalogue of prints.

Quality matters

A good piece of art deserves to be reproduced properly.

The quality of the print, the paper, the materials and the finish all matter. They’re part of the work, not an afterthought. A beautiful image can be let down by a poor reproduction, and we don’t think that’s good enough.

We’re building Meylt around high-quality printing and materials, with care taken over the finished product. The aim is to produce prints that do justice to the original work and that people will be happy to live with for years.

There are cheaper ways to do this. We could cut corners on materials or treat the print as little more than a vehicle for getting an image onto a wall. But that would miss the point.

We want people to feel that they’ve bought something worth having. Something made with care, from the artwork itself through to the finished print.

One fair price

Online shopping has become full of promotions. Prices go up, discounts appear, countdowns begin and supposedly exceptional offers seem to be available every other week.

We don’t particularly like it, and we don’t think it’s a good way to build a relationship with customers.

We’d rather set a fair price and stick to it. The price should reflect the quality of the product, the work involved in making it and the people who deserve to be paid for it.

No inflated prices designed to make a discount look attractive. No endless sales. No need to wonder whether you should wait a few days because the same print might suddenly be cheaper.

Everyone should get the same fair price.

We’ll also offer free shipping on qualifying orders, because we think that makes sense for customers buying more than one print. Beyond that, we want to keep things simple and transparent.

It’s not a complicated principle, but it does require a bit of discipline. We’d rather build a business around prices we can stand behind than rely on promotions to persuade people to buy.

Artists should get a better deal

Artists are central to Meylt. Without them, there is no business.

Yet a lot of the online art market is built around the same familiar model. Platforms spend heavily to attract customers, take a significant cut of each sale and leave artists to compete for attention. The cost of finding an audience becomes a major part of the business.

We want to approach this differently.

Rather than putting a large proportion of our margins into advertising, we’d prefer to invest in the relationships that make Meylt worth visiting in the first place. That means working closely with artists, presenting their work properly and giving them a compelling reason to sell through us.

It also means offering competitive commission rates. Artists should receive a meaningful share of the value their work creates, not whatever happens to be left after everyone else has taken their cut.

We want to build relationships that last. That takes more than a good commission rate, of course. It means being fair, communicating properly, delivering on what we promise and treating artists as people we’re working with, rather than simply suppliers feeding a platform.

If we do that well, artists will have a reason to tell people about Meylt and encourage their audiences to discover the work of other artists on the site, too.

That feels like a better foundation for growth. One built around people who have a genuine interest in what we’re doing, rather than simply buying attention.

A place to discover something new

We want Meylt to grow, and we want more artists to be able to sell their work through it. But we don’t want growth to come at the expense of what makes the site interesting.

We’re interested in building a collection that people enjoy exploring. That means being open to artists and new ideas, while still making considered decisions about the work we feature and how it’s presented.

We don’t think every artist needs to make the same sort of work, and we don’t want to impose a house style on everyone. Individuality is the whole point.

What matters is that the work has something about it that makes us want to show it to people.

Over time, we hope Meylt becomes somewhere customers return to, not just when they need something for a particular wall, but because they’re interested in seeing what we’ve discovered and who we’ve started working with.

That takes time. It also takes a bit of restraint. We’d rather build a collection we’re proud of than fill the site simply to make it bigger.

Building something we believe in

Meylt is a business, and it needs to work as one. We have to make sensible decisions about costs, pricing, production and growth. Having good intentions isn’t enough.

But we also think there’s room to build a business without losing sight of why you started it.

We love great art. We think the people who make it deserve to be treated fairly. We believe the finished product should be good, the price should be honest and the experience of buying it should be straightforward.

Those ideas aren’t a marketing exercise. They’re the things we want to use when making decisions about Meylt, including the difficult ones.

We won’t get everything right, and we’ll undoubtedly learn things along the way. But we’d like to think that, as Meylt grows, those principles will remain recognisable in what we do.

There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about any of this. We just think there’s value in doing things properly, being fair to the people involved and caring about the product.

It’s just the way we think it should be done.