I was delighted to commence my appointment as LAPADA’s new Chairman in January 2011, and I hope that I continue the tradition of service to the Association as well as my predecessor The Earl Howe, in whose very able footsteps I now follow. The following Chairman’s Review is a traditional fixture at this time of the year, when we look back on the year just passed and remember the people and events that made the year so memorable.
There were several staff changes during the year; Emma McVittie became the proud new Mother of Master Oliver Hamish Linington McVittie, Emily Wynne-Jones left us to study for her MA at the V&A and the Design Museum and we welcomed Mieka Sywak in November, to organise the LAPADA Fair and continue progress with LAPADA Modern.
Remaining with ‘people’, our Members are of course the life-blood of the Association – without you, we would not be here! We were very pleased to welcome a good number of excellent businesses to the Membership in 2011. Dealers, Shippers and Restorers – you are all so important to us. Our band of Approved Service Providers also continues to grow and we believe that the services you provide really add value to LAPADA and the work we do. We are very grateful to all of our Members, both new and longstanding, for all your support.
Sadly, we also lost some valued members during the year – Members Eric Ford, Owen Humble, and Garth Vincent, who will all be very much missed by their family, friends and colleagues.
Inevitably, it is the big events that catch the attention, especially Fairs. Our own flagship fair at Berkeley Square in September, continues to develop and grow and each year we feel we have improved upon the year before – 2012 will be better than ever! Our association with Clarion Events continues, and our active involvement with the National Fair, and the June and November Olympia Fairs. We are very aware that many of our Members do not take part in fairs, however we believe that the invaluable PR spin-off from these events is of great value and benefit to all our Members, wherever they trade from.
The fairs are also a useful opportunity to promote other exciting initiatives – for instance we were able to have a LAPADA Modern stand at the Summer Olympia fair and at our own Berkeley Square Fair, both featuring stunning items brought by LAPADA Modern Members. The June Olympia also featured a stand dedicated to the Country Life/LAPADA Object of the Year competition, showcasing the short-listed and winning items. We shared our own stand at the November Olympia Fair with National Antiques Week, promoting the competition to find Britain’s best Antiques Shops (results due in March 2012).
As Chief Executive of Huntsworth plc, marketing and PR are of course very close to my heart. Our 2011 Conference at The Wallace Collection was the perfect opportunity for me to speak on my favourite subject! Public Relations is so important and the tougher market conditions become, the more important good and creative PR is.
LAPADA also ventured abroad in 2011 – in March, Sarah Percy-Davis lead a party of LAPADA Members to the British Embassy in Moscow for an important trade mission supported by the Government agency UKTI. The event resulted in excellent exposure to high-worth client groups in Moscow and a great deal of immensely valuable PR for the Association and its Members in Russia, which as we know, is a potentially lucrative market.
Sarah returned to Russia in June, representing LAPADA at the CINOA Annual Assembly and Conference in St Petersburg. This international confederation of art and antiques dealers is a valuable way to build networks and contacts with our partners abroad, we all have so much in common. CINOA has commissioned a fascinating study of the development of the role of the antique dealer, I recommend it – it is available on the CINOA website, www.cinoa.org.
Closer to home, The British Art Market Federation (BAMF) personified by the indefatigable Anthony Browne has been lobbying on a number of issues affecting the art and antiques trade. However the dominant topic in 2011 has been the Artists Resale Right (Droit de Suite). You will have read about this contentious issue in several issues of our newsletter during the year. As you will have seen in the last issue, our worst fears have now been realised and as from 1st January 2012, this resale tax will now also apply to dead artists. The bitter battle to oppose this tax which is likely to be so damaging to the UK art trade has been fought long and hard and is not over yet. But in the meantime, art dealers must familiarise themselves with the implications and I believe our Seminar on 11th January raised as many questions as it answered!
We carry out some of our own research every year through the LAPADA Annual Membership Survey. The results of the 2010 survey were published early in 2011 and the results were more positive than might have been expected in the current climate, with an overall increase in business reported and an optimistic outlook for the coming year. We have just sent out the 2011 survey shortly and it will be fascinating to compare the results. We also conducted a survey on the threatened demise of the cheque – we were not surprised to receive a large response to this, mostly in favour of retaining this form of payment and it was a huge relief when a reprieve was announced in July. Towards the end of 2011, we conducted our last survey of the year, when we asked for your views on banking practices – predictably that has also had a very good response and we will be reporting on this soon.
We are very pleased with our three new APPs – for LAPADA, LAPADA MODERN and the Berkeley Square Fair, we hope you will download these from the website and encourage your customers and contacts to do the same. These APPs utilise the best of new communications technology, to everyone’s advantage.
Finally, I would like to congratulate our Members who are being so pro-active in working together to defend their own market places – those dealers in Portobello Road, Grays and Burlington Arcade, I wish you all success with your campaigns.
2012 will be an interesting year, the year of the Olympics and even more belt-tightening, but together we will weather the storm! I would like to wish all our Members every success and I look forward to meeting more of you during the year.
Chadlington – January 2012
Posted on January 29, 2012 by Editors
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