Hey, come on, you’re earning well, why don’t you hang something decent on the wall?

Sabrina Bos received her Bachelor's degree International Business in 2011. Quickly after her graduation she found a niche in the market and started her own business. AccessART is an online platform for buying affordable art by contemporary artists.

Move a long way away, that’s what Sabrina Bos (aged 28) really wanted after completing her secondary school in The Hague. Of course, the PBL system and the great city helped her choice and so she decided on Maastricht after spending a year in Australia, Spain and France working on her language skills.

During her studies she worked for a year as a committee member of the MUSST Sports Trust (Maastricht University Students Sports Trust is an umbrella organisation for more than 25 student sports associations) and was an active handball player. So what did she learn during this year she spent in a management function? She sounds thoughtful: “You learn what it means to have duties, obligations. That’s something you’re not used to as a student. You have to work together in a small team and you see each other every day. I learned a lot from that.” She often went out on the town with members of the sports association to places like Dikke Dragonder and Ma van Sloun “and if we really didn’t want to go home then we moved on to Allah and Feestfabriek”.

As part of her degree programme she also spent six months abroad. She wanted to go to South America, and Peru was the choice. “A wonderful country with sea, mountains and jungle. I was out travelling for at least half of my weekends.” Wasn’t that dangerous? “By nature I tend to plan ahead,” she says. “I always booked my hostels in advance, travelled during the day and had a big advantage: I speak the language well.”

After completing her master’s programme in Rotterdam, and with two job offers already in the bag, she was able to start work straight away. During her work as a functional consultant at Accenture she visited colleagues who were sitting in their newly purchased houses looking at a blank wall or, worse, at the old IKEA poster. “Hey, come on, you’re earning well, why don’t you hang something decent on the wall?” She realised that people viewed art as too expensive or as ‘difficult’. So Sabrina contacted some artists. And the artists in turn told her that online art didn’t sell or that no-one understood their work, although they certainly created affordable and attractive works.

Strangely enough these two groups weren’t connecting, and in response she started creating a website. And so her company, accessART, an online platform for buying affordable art by contemporary artists, was born. After a cautious start she sought ways of expanding and building up the team, and together with Ralf de Ruijter she forms the core of this Amsterdam start-up. By now they have 1950 works by 265 artists online.

On what basis do you choose a particular artist? “To begin with perhaps I wasn’t critical enough, but gradually we started choosing the better artists. We got curators involved, on an informal basis, who gave us insight into what makes good art. But ultimately it’s us who decide. It’s about people who would like something on their wall. We judge the artworks one by one.”

So where do things go from here? “We saw that potential buyers didn’t understand how the price of an artwork comes about. Why should something cost 800 euros or 2800 euros? Moreover, artists find it difficult to put a price tag on their artwork – this is something in which they receive little or no support. We often visit artists in their studios who have more than 50 works stored in the place, sometimes 300! Then you wonder why they don’t reduce their price a little in order to sell more. This idea is how we aim to develop the platform further. Through sales already achieved, the “crowd” will help the artist to set his optimum market price for the artwork. And in this way the artists will also sell much more. It’s a completely new concept in the art market!”

What’s her dream? “I want to offer people from all over the world the chance to buy art from artists from all over the world. We recently helped to sell two works from Brazil to a Dutch buyer, a work by a Ugandan artist to a Dutch buyer and a work by a Dutch artist to the United States. That’s why I do this work.”

And her ambition? “In one-and-a-half years I want to be market leader in the Netherlands and within three years to be number 1 in Western Europe.”

Click here to connect with Sabrina Bos or here to read more on AccessART

By Denise Villerius, Alumni Officer, Maastricht University