Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button:
It was 2008 and Maria Brito was miserable. By that point, she had spent the better part of a decade in corporate law, a career she hated and had only entered out of familial obligation. “I grew up in Venezuela in a conservative family,” she told me in an interview. “My parents thought that the only path for me was to become an attorney or a doctor or an engineer.”
Brito graduated Harvard Law School in 2000 and soon got a job at a New York law firm. “I was so depressed and had no meaning or purpose in that job,” she said. She now refers to that period as “the dark ages.” In a recent Instagram post she described it as “countless hours, all-nighters, lack of creativity, lack of diversity, boring routines.”
But Brito did have one bright spot in her life; in the early 2000s she started going to NYC galleries and buying some art. She’d always been interested in art since she was a young child, but the density of galleries in New York allowed her to take this interest to a whole new level. “As I grew more fascinated with the field, I started recommending art to friends,” she said. “And it was very interesting to see my friends calling me and saying, ‘that artist you recommended me is getting hot. The price is going up.’ Those calls provided me with little clues that I needed to change careers.”
Eventually, Brito reached a breaking point. In 2008, she went on maternity leave, and the thought of returning to her job filled her with dread. By that point, the economy had entered a tailspin, with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers both collapsing. She decided that if there was ever a time to shift careers, this was it. “I went back to the law firm after maternity leave, and then they paid the bonuses in January, and then I quit.”
Within months, Brito had launched her own art buying consultancy. By then, she had built up a small network of high net worth individuals who trusted her recommendations, and that network served as her initial client base.
But Brito also invested a significant portion of her time into creating online content, first with a blog and then later on social media. She eventually grew her audience to over 200,000 followers across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and email, and she’s leveraged this audience to sign book deals, run brand sponsorship campaigns, and bring in dozens of wealthy clients that include Gwyneth Paltrow and Sean "Diddy" Combs.
How did Brito accomplish all of this? In a recent interview, she explained to me her content creation process, her philosophy on Instagram sponsorship deals, and why so many high net worth individuals trust her to buy art for their collections, often after seeing only a static iPhone photo of the piece she’s recommending for purchase.
Let’s jump into my findings…
It all started with a blog
To understand why Brito became so successful in her career as an art advisor, it’s helpful to know what an art advisor does. On the surface, it’s simply recommending art to her clients for purchase, and then she takes a commission on the sale price. In theory, she’s recommending art that’s not only aesthetically pleasing, but also projected to go up in value.
But the market is so much more complicated than that. An up and coming artist doesn’t simply produce their art and then list a purchase price. They use galleries as intermediaries, and those galleries evaluate potential buyers on all sorts of criteria — not only price, but also whether the clients have purchased art before, whether they intend to display it in a well-regarded museum, and, perhaps most important of all, whether they will simply turn around right away and sell it at auction for a profit. Engaging in that last act can get a client blacklisted from a gallery forever.
Brito’s reasons for launching a blog were twofold. The first was that it provided a vehicle through which she could learn about this labyrinthine world. “I did it for my own education,” she said. “I’m not from this world, and I was learning on the go. The blog was the perfect link to build out an audience but also try to make sense and educate myself even more.”
It also brought her closer to the very gallery owners who would decide whether a client of hers could purchase a particular piece of art. “I did it with the intent of connecting with the artist,” she explained. “It started to become a thing that artists wanted to become part of this project. I would write well, and I had a photographer who photographed their material in the best possible light. I would also distribute it like crazy because I was building up this audience on social media.”
Brito launched the initial version of her blog on Blogspot. “It looked horrendous,” she said. “We had an option to do Wordpress, but that required a lot of coding and I didn’t have the time or inclination to learn how to code.” She posted to it about once a week, and the posts usually consisted of a short summary of what she saw at the galleries she visited.
She monitored the analytics closely, and though the blog never attracted a huge readership, the audience was influential. “I think what really caused an impression on me was the messages and emails and comments on the posts. That gave me a lot of impetus. I felt that, well, if these people who read super sophisticated publications like Art Forum were reading and sharing my content, then I must be doing something right. It was not that much about the traffic, it was about the people who were influential and responding really well to my posts.”
Paywall incoming…
The rest of this case study is behind a paywall, but if you aren’t ready to subscribe, you can also download it as an ebook over here.