#82 Leroy Nieman Curling Caper

Issue #82 — Tuesday, February 4, 2020

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2020/02/82-leroy-nieman-curling-caper.html

Posted by Denny Hatch

The Fun Business I Decided Not to Start:

My Leroy Neiman Curling Caper

Back in the late 1970s, Peggy and I were taken to an open house at the Nutmeg Curling Club at the posh Darien (Conn) Country Club. We tried curling and liked it.

     Dues were cheap, and curling was a grand diversion over the winter—a sport to enjoy from age 8 to 80. Fellow members were all party animals. Booze flowed and second-hand cigarette smoke was a fact of life.

     I never got good at curling, but Peggy excelled. She traveled to bonspiels (friendly competitions in the northeast) and had a blast. After a few years, her team won the regionals and she went off to compete nationally. Eventually she became president of the United States Curling Association and a U.S. representative to the World Curling Federation for over 15 years. 
     In 2006, Peggy spent a month in Turin staying in the Olympic Village as Team Leader (and chief chauffeur) of the U.S. Women's curling team. She marched opening parade of athletes. 
     Curling is still deep in our DNA.

Curling Collectibles Back in the 1980s

Booths were set up at bonspiels and championship curling events to sell equipment—brooms, shoes, gloves, clothing and stone tchotchkes made from the Ailsa Craig granite island off the coast of Scotland’s Turnberry golf course. It is the only granite in the world suitable for curling stones.

     Occasionally you’d find a marketer of curling art—mostly reproductions of 19^th century paintings, prints and etchings—depicting Scotsmen in kilts and tams delivering stones on a frozen pond or canal. The modern prints, drawings and paintings were artistic crap.

     Most curling clubs throughout the world—and many competitions—have souvenir pins. Apart from serious drinking, a great curling social lubricant is exchanging pins.

My Leroy Neiman Idea

Back then, ABC’s Wide World of Sports, hosted by Jim McKay, offered the consummate coverage of world class competitions—sailing, skiing, figure skating, the Triple Crown, track and field, gymnastics and, of course, the Olympics. This was long before curling was an Olympic sport and became wildly popular as it is today.

     The premier sports artist of the time was Leroy Neiman—

a cigar-chomping macho man with a massive black mustache that went from cheek-to-cheek. ABC would hire Neiman to appear live on camera and paint pictures of the sport ABC was covering. His trademark was a series of wildly impressionistic images in vivid colors that shimmied and shuddered with energy.

     Posters of his work sold all over the world. Signed prints commanded over $1000 each. Original paintings were out of sight.

     On a whim, I decided to look into hiring Neiman to create a curling painting from which signed prints could be made.

Contacting Leroy Neiman

I found Neiman’s address and wrote him a letter asking if he would be interested at all in the sport of curling. If so, would he consider painting a curling match and having signed prints made up for sale.

     To my astonishment, I received a cordial letter back (now lost, alas) from Neiman who said he loved the idea. He had grown up in St. Paul, Minnesota, lived near a curling club and saw a lot of it as a boy.

     If I were interested in pursuing this, he wrote, I should get in touch with the Knoedler Gallery in New York, and gave me the name of the person to contact.

Knoedler—the Art World’s Summit

Founded in 1846, Knoedler was New York’s premier gallery. Over the years it had sold paintings by Vermeer, Raphael and Rembrandt to the world’s greatest collectors—John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick. Other buyers included the Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Tate Gallery.

     For a little junk mail nobody copywriter in Stamford, Connecticut, even talking to these people was heady stuff. The Knoedler rep was most cordial and sent me the info on how to work with Neiman and Knoedler:

• Hire Neiman to paint an original curling scene: $25,000.00.

• Neiman could choose the venue and event. I had no input.

• Peggy and I would own the painting. Knoedler/Neiman owned all reproduction rights.

• Knoedler would then print a limited edition of 300 signed and numbered silk screen serigraphs plus a set of “artist’s proofs”—I forget how many—to be owned by Knoedler and Neiman.

• My cost: $325.00/per signed serigraph and would agree to buy the entire limited edition of 300 serigraphs.

• I owned them and could sell them for whatever price I could get.

• Knoedler would warehouse them send them to customers on a drop-ship basis.

• Total investment for one painting and 300 signed serigraphs: $122,500.00 ($382,200 in 2020 dollars).

Marketing

• Absolute minimum markup for a successful direct marketing promotion is 5x. Ideally it is 9x or more.

• With any hope of breakeven in my lifetime, I would have to charge per serigraph $1,625.00 to $2,925.00 ($5,070 to $9,126 in 2020 dollars.)

Mother-in-law Market Research

I asked Nutmeg members if they were interested. One or two were enthusiastic. Most shrugged it off.

     At the time, curling was a recherché sport played mostly by folks in the lower economic sphere. To attend a bonspiel, few ponied up cash for airfare. Instead, they drove for hours, bunked in with Nutmeg members or in economy motels, four-to-a-room and ate cheap. They led hardscrabble lives. Curling (and drinking) was how they kept their sanity through bleak winters.

     For national competitions Peggy flew to such venues as Fargo, North Dakota (potato country) or Bemidji, Minnesota (the “iron range”), where the economy was in the tank.

     For example, in Hibbing, Minnesota Peggy slipped on the ice and broke her ankle. Friends drove her to the hospital. It had no doctor on duty. An administrator called around and found a local pediatrician who drove over. He read the X-ray and set the ankle.

     The pediatrician’s parting words: “When you get to Connecticut, see your doctor there, because basically I don’t know what I’m doing.”

     In short, trying to sell high-end signed and numbered curling serigraphs (unframed) in these markets began looking preposterous.

Did lists exist?

Nah. The Curling News was published sporadically by a sweet older couple—Frank and China Rhyme. According to David Garber, former Executive Director of U.S. Curling, the little newspaper had 9,000 subscribers. Many issues were sent to curling clubs—on a "take-one" basis—rather than individual home addresses. A nationwide list of curlers’ names and addresses did not exist back then.

     Quite simply an ad in Curling News would pull bupkis.

Canada? Europe?

     Curling was (and is) huge in Canada where more 500,000 avid curlers play in public and private ice facilities all over the country.

     Canada’s population is roughly 10% of ours. Thus 500,000 Canadian curlers would be the equivalent of five million in the U.S. Curling is Canada’s national sport. But like down here, not many were affluent prospects, and no doubt they’d never heard of Leroy Neiman.

     Worse, at the time, the Canadian Dollar was worth US 60¢, which meant one of my Leroy Neiman prints would be priced at $2,700 to $4,900 Canadian (the equivalent of $8,100—$14,700 in 2020 Canadian dollars).  

     Curling was big in Europe—Scotland, Switzerland, Scandinavia, etc. But...
   • Were lists available? 
   • Had any of them heard of Leroy Neiman? 
   • Were they mail order buyers?

     Having cut my teeth on direct mail arithmetic, it was immediately obvious this dog would not hunt.

     Peggy and I said the hell with it and bought a house instead.

Fast forward 40 years

When curling became a medal sport in the Olympics in 1998, curling took off like a NASA rocket. It is now the most-watched sport in the Winter Olympics. NBC has devoted hundreds of hours to coverage.

     The United States Curling Association reports 180 member clubs in 40 states including such unlikely venues as Florida, Arkansas, Arizona, Mississippi, Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

     In addition, the World Curling Federation boasts 63 member countries from the obvious biggies to Andorra, Armenia, Belarus and Bulgaria to Slovakia, Slovenia, Taiwan and Ukraine.

     Every four years Olympic curling spurs thousands of TV viewers to hunt down local curling clubs and give the sport a try. According to one source, the U.S. has around 180 curling clubs and 25,000 curlers.
     When John Schuster's U.S. Men's team won Olympic Gold in 2018, curling in America went into orbit.

     And many of these are older upmarket folks with discretionary income in a sport growing like crazy.

Would I Revisit the Leroy Neiman Project Today?

In a heartbeat.

     My heartbeat.

     Alas, not Leroy Neiman’s heartbeat. Neiman assumed room temperature in 2012 at age 91.

     Nor Knoedler’s heartbeat. The great art emporium was caught selling forgeries for tens of millions of dollars and promptly shut its doors forever on November 30, 2011.

     In short, the market now exists.

     The lists exist.

     The artist does not.

     Compared to Leroy Neiman’s energy, color and kaleidoscopic action, today’s sports artists (in my opinion) are weak piss.

     Have a look:

Regrets?

Nah.

     The value of Neiman signed and numbered serigraphs has tanked—$500 to $7,500 today.

     I’m glad my money was tied up in nice places to live.

     And I’m delighted Peggy and I have seen much of the world rather than spending years in a state of perpetual worry handcuffed to a stack of prints gathering dust in a forger’s warehouse.

Takeaways to Consider

• Meet Leroy Neiman.

 

• Whatever business you want to start, know your arithmetic down to a gnat’s eyebrow.

• Know your market.

• Dry test.

• Know how to reach your market and upsell your market (turn buyers into multi-buyers).

• Do not be afraid to say no when the stars are not in alignment.

• If you’re thinking of a limited edition serigraph or lithograph offering by your favorite artist, fuggedaboudit. Last week this distressing story was in The New York Times:

     Art Experts Warn of a Surging Market in Fake Prints

     Spurred by advances in photomechanical reproduction,

     forgers are increasingly selling unauthorized copies of

     famous works on the internet, and elsewhere.

• What’s more, BEWARE! In the cutthroat immorality of 2020 business, anything you create can be on sale at a fraction of your MSRP before you have shipped a single SKU.

• The only sure, safe way to test the marketability of a new product or service is old fashioned direct mail.

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