After our experience in the tech industry, we both discovered a passion for the fine art and the high-end design world. With our background in e-commerce, we quickly realised that the fine art logistics industry is suffering from enormous inefficiencies: lengthy processes, poor customer experience, lack of transparency, limited coverage and a serious lack of digitization.
Those operating in this market, which demands a unique expertise, often had to wait from 48 to 72 hours to get a quote to ship their pieces! The whole value chain was broken and from our conversations with major artworld players, it was clear that their experience was just a nightmare and an important inhibitor to growth. We believe that as the world is becoming more connected the logistics industry should evolve at the same pace.
What we bring with Convelio is a very simple tool to order, book and manage shipments for galleries, auction houses, interior designers and art/design related e-commerces. We want to revitalize the industry by providing instant quotes at a competitive rate for a large geographical scope.
Although service quality, quoting speed and costs are our top priorities, we are also developing a plethora of additional services and tools to make our clients’ logistics easier to handle. For instance, one of our latest product announcements is the development of an API that can be directly integrated into any systems. This is extremely useful for e-commerces and web platforms where you can get our prices for any shipping quote requests (any items, any destinations) in just a few seconds! We believe that the proliferation of e-commerce in the art world requires the development of a dedicated digital strategy to support them. However this is not limited to e-commerce, for instance our tool can be used internally plugged in any bespoke systems as an order management system e.g. for auction houses.
It is true that fine art & high end design are very specific markets that require a unique expertise and knowledge. Quality is essential given the kind of pieces we transport—so there is no compromise on the matter. We select our partners with care and have established an efficient way to monitor our supply chain quality. We managed to create a positive reputation in the art and collectibles sector and are starting to work with more blue-chip galleries and auction houses.
We have grown significantly since our last funding round. In less than a year, we managed to quadrupled in size. We are extremely proud of our team, its diversity and the different skillsets each member brings to the table. Today we are more than 30 people in the Convelio family and expect to double by next year. We will definitely continue to invest in technology and product development in order to answer even more our clients' needs.
In the last year, we have also widened our client based and developed our geographical coverage and customs agent network in order to become a one-stop-shop for our clients. We strengthened our grasp in Europe - with our main markets being France, UK, Italy and Benelux - and extended our foothold even more by targeting the southern regions.
Even though we are able to serve almost everywhere in the world from Europe our main destination from the old continent remains the US, and we put a great emphasis on staying highly competitive in this market. Talking about the US, we are proud to announce that we are now able to arrange pick-ups either for international destinations or intra-US shipments. Our next step would be to continue to develop a strong presence in the US and to open our first office there.