World’s Leading Online Art Gallery Delivers Home Owners the Ability to Spruce Up their Artwork from the Comfort of Their Home
overstockArt.com was founded in 2002 by Stacy and David Sasson. It was a modest beginning in which the newly married Sasson’s financed the start-up with a $5,000 loan from a local Wichita Bank. As the sole employees operating out of the couple’s suburban Kansas home, their first art collection offered only a handful of unframed oil paintings to choose from. The company soon prospered relocating to a converted warehouse on the busy Rock Road Street, just outside of the luxury shopping center, Bradley Fair. By 2005 the company had a handful of employees and stood on the verge of amazingly rapid growth. This success was not only the result of the Sassons’ long hours of hard work and intimate knowledge of the oil painting business. It was also a matter of fortuitous timing.
overstockArt.com was among the earliest online galleries of hand painted oil paintings and the first to focus on art reproductions of great masters such as Van Gogh, Monet and Klimt. The company’s early years coincided with an explosion in the popularity of Impressionist art and the development of exciting new relationships with overseas art studios. As the Modern Art movement was conquering the auction floors getting record breaking numbers in Sotheby’s and Christie’s, overstockArt.com was slowly becoming a destination for art lovers who could not afford the high price tags of galleries, but wanted to enjoy hand painted art of great masters in their homes.
The company has led the way in creating a decorator-friendly website that makes the process of finding and ordering the right art for your space a matter of a few clicks. As the Internet became increasingly more appealing and accessible to interior decorators and home owners, overstockArt.com was finding new and exciting ways to engage customers, creating a fun shopping experience.
With the advent of Web 2.0, overstockArt.com started devoting substantial resources to providing customers with custom-tailored shopping experiences that reflect their specific decorating needs. Home owners can also download the overstockArt.com Oil Paintings iPhone application via iTunes to provide a fresh new way to access overstockArt.com’s vast collection of oil paintings. Using the built-in camera, a client can take photos of their space, and using the augmented reality feature of the app “see” framed oil paintings hanging on the wall. Customers can also browse, decorate, buy and share artwork interactively via Email or Facebook. They can save their favorite art to a personal art gallery, creating masterpieces from their favorite iPhone photos with the “Photos into Art” award winning service.
The overstockArt.com Oil Paintings iPhone app has the following features:
- Visualize a work of art in your own room by simply holding up your phone to the wall;
- View a “My Gallery” section where you can save your favorite art and upload your own art creating a personal gallery to share with friends and family via email or Facebook;
- Turn photos into hand painted art masterpieces with our award winning “Turn Photos into Art” service available on the app directly;
- Browse a vast collection of art and learn more about any work or artist, and zoom into the art to see brushstrokes and texture; and
- Purchase art right from your phone on the responsive new online art gallery.
More recently overstockArt.com introduced ArtistBe.com a platform for emerging artists to build and create their own online galleries. This modern art gallery allows artists from all over the world to create their own virtual gallery where we offer both their originals and reproductions of their work to art lovers. The artists receive a royalty from the sale of reproductions plus have the ability to sell originals to a much larger clientele. This website has garnered much attention in the art world with some of the artists seeing significant sales on a regular basis.
Customers love the options to now not only be able to shop and browse art from the greatest masters in history but also, have the opportunity to purchase contemporary exciting new art works from emerging artistic talent.
Today, overstockArt.com is a successful art gallery. The company has over 20 employees in 2 countries; headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, the company offers the most comprehensive selection of oil paintings and frames to choose from in the online oil painting industry — currently over 90,000 decorating combinations — including works by Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Klimt, Degas, Munch, and much more.
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David Sasson is currently the president and CEO of overstockArt.com. Mr. Sasson is the co-founder and the entrepreneur behind the business. Sasson has a long history of developing online businesses and previously as the President & CEO of Apollon Computers, Inc. and led the organization to great success for a few years. While Mr. Sasson was the CEO of Apollon Computers he had the opportunity to found overstockArt.com. The company was started from David’s home with his wife Stacy Sasson being the only employee in the first year of the business. Soon overstockArt.com started growing and established itself as the most significant retailer of hand painted oil paintings on the Internet. Sasson focuses on all aspects of growing the company and establishing overstockArt.com’s dominance in the online wall décor market. overstockArt.com works with suppliers and providers from around the globe. The company philosophy is to always take care of their customers and employees for that will provide the biggest returns.
