By Amanda Kraus
This article was published in Museum News September/October 2003.
On a July afternoon, every seat is taken and there’s no more standing room in the theater at the Corning Museum of Glass (CMOG) in Corning, N.Y. The event is the Hot Glass Show, during which a professional glassblower transforms a mass of molten glass into a goblet in 25 minutes, while a colleague wearing a headset mic narrates for visitors. Judging by the faces in the crowd, this could be a magic show; the audience is transfixed by the glassblower’s manipulation of the raw material that bubbles and grows at the end of a 5-foot blowpipe. Nine video monitors show every relevant vantage point, including the inside of the furnace, and spotlights add to the drama. A few visitors put their hands to their mouths as the glass artist weakens the bond of glass at the base of the goblet and gently releases the glass into an annealer, the insulated box that will cool its temperature overnight.
Pleased with the show, the crowd files out of the auditorium and straight into the museum’s bright ground-floor retail area. This includes the café and the GlassMarket, a suite of seven distinct shops that opened in 2001 after a major renovation project at the 52-year-old museum. The GlassMarket offers everything from inexpensive glass-bead earrings to $4,500 paperweights by artist Paul Stankard, whose work is on view in the museum’s permanent galleries. In the Art Glass shop, for example, a Hot Glass patron can purchase a work by one of the glassblowers for approximately $200.
“In renovating, a priority was to integrate the store into the whole museum,” says Victor Nemard, manager of GlassMarket and guest services. A former retailer at Barneys, Nemard is perhaps the ideal manager for the store, equal parts polished and down-to-earth, as comfortable in Manhattan as in upstate New York. The difference between museum retail and commercial retail is that the bottom line always takes a back seat to the museum’s mission, which drives every decision, he says: “The store is not meant to stand apart. Sometimes it’s frustrating that we can’t promote the store on its own, but it’s not intended to work that way.”
The upside is the smooth flow of ideas between the various facets of the museum. “Everything in the store speaks to the collection in some way,” says Nemard, “whether the product reflects an idea, a glass-making technique, or it’s a replica of something upstairs,” he says, referring to the art and history galleries.
“We want people to see glass in a new light, from every possible perspective,” says Creative Director Robert Cassetti. “That doesn’t happen exclusively in exhibits. The shops have proven to be a powerful part of that experience. People are doing double-takes, making connections, going from looking to seeing.” With 14,000 different products in the GlassMarket, that’s a lot of connections.
“The name . . . the GlassMarket reflects the fact that it’s meant to feel somewhat like a series of related but discrete shops,” says CMOG Executive Director David Whitehouse. “It’s a store with many facets that reflect the facets of the museum itself.”
Many of the handmade vases and sculpture on sale in the Art Glass shop are displayed in exhibit cases with biographies and photos of the artists who made them. But visitors don’t have to end their shopping/learning experience there. The GlassMarket has six other stores, including the World Glass area, with wares from such renowned manufacturers as Lalique, Waterford, and Baccarat. In the Jewelry Shop, sparkling Swarovski crystal can be seen from aisles away. Stained glass panels, holiday ornaments, and flameworked glass animals can be found in the Collectibles shop. For practical shoppers, the Corning Home store stocks Pyrex measuring cups, Corelle dinner plates, and other glass housewares. In the Museum Store, some displays include an exhibition catalogue, so visitors can see, for example, that the pattern on this silk scarf came from a particular piece in the galleries. And the Innovation shop, a favorite among CMOG’s younger visitors, offers telescopes, lab glass, and optical instruments that relate to the interactive exhibits in the museum’s Glass Innovation Center. The center’s exhibits cover the inventions and applications that led to everything from windshields to fiber optics.
In all, the sales floor measures nearly 20,000 square feet, roughly 10 percent of the museum’s total space. The open and spacious feel of the sales floor is extended even further by the glass-walled coffee bar and café that bookend the GlassMarket. Decisions about the square footage and location of the shops as well as the flow of visitors were key to the museum’s reinvention of itself and its space, which took place over a six-year period.
Though the CMOG renovation was an all-encompassing project that cost $65 million, the questions the museum contemplated are those faced by museums of all sizes. How does the shop fit into the entire museum experience? What do visitors want to find here? How can we consider our mission and our bottom line simultaneously?
A series of letters to Museum News concerning a comment by NPR journalist Susan Stamberg at AAM’s 2002 annual meeting revealed the depth of this ongoing conflict. Stamberg had said that walking through a museum store at the end of an exhibit “erases the artistic encounter,” eliciting more letters to the editor than any topic had in years. Readers both defended the fiscal necessity of the museum store and acknowledged that the placement, design, and tone of the retail space is the key to linking the shop to the visitor’s over all experience. Corning’s GlassMarket manages to mix commercial savvy with nonprofit ideals, always striving to extend the educational experience.
From Memorial Day to Labor Day, when tourism in the surrounding Finger Lakes region soars, the museum stays open until 8 p.m. One evening in July, Creative Director Cassetti is the manager on duty. Wearing soft moccasins that hint at his artistic past as a glass designer, he talks to a visitor about the museum’s transformation. During the facilities planning, he recalls, “whether we were talking about the science-related exhibits or the retail, we realized we were talking about the same thing: about glass, not about Corning or any particular company. We went forward with a more holistic approach.
“The current shop is very much the result of the merger of for-profit and nonprofit entities,” he continues, referring to the conversion of the Corning Glass Center, a for-profit entity that the Corning company opened alongside the museum in 1951 to sell its glass products. Cassetti describes that shop as “an outlet store before the era of outlet stores.” In 1998, the company gave the space formerly occupied by the glass center to the nonprofit museum.
“The [museum’s original] storeused to be low-ceilinged, small, and attached to an auditorium,” saysCassetti. “. . . That additional square footage worked for us. We planned the expansion based on the equivalent of that general space. There was some amount of second guessing by the staff; do we need this much retail space? But over the course of time, the shops have proven to be a powerful financial engine to the museum.”
Indeed, each guest to the Corning Museum spends $25 on average. Even if that visitor pays the full $12 admission fee—members get in for free and there are discounts for children under 12 and seniors—that means he still is spending $13 in the café or restaurant, on the make-your-own glass experiences in the studio, or, chiefly, in the GlassMarket. According to the Museum Store Association’s Museum Retail Industry Report 2002, the average net sales per visitor in art museums is $3.42, and among all museums, $2.11.
“We did market research within our broad audience,” says Cassetti. “We found out that people expected to be able to see live glass-blowing here. The science exhibits became about innovation in glass, [which] relates to the studio and the walk-in workshops and the glass shows. It really was a Eureka moment two or three years ago when we realized that all of these plans for demonstrations, shops, [and] exhibits were really a unified idea.”
CMOG’s goal to help visitors see glass from every angle begins as people approach the building’s front entrance. The façade, the work of Henry Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects, is composed of huge panes of glass held up by thin wires that resemble spindly metal arms. Inside, museum staff gently guide visitors along a prescribed route; first stop is the orientation film, Glass into Dreams, a dramatic presentation of the mysteries of glass. The film begins with a volcanic eruption and ends with the movie screen splitting to reveal another look at the museum’s stunning glass lobby and, of course, the GlassMarket.
From there, the self-guided tour takes visitors to the Sculpture gallery and the Art and History galleries, which document more than 3,500 years of glass. There, one is likely to meet an educator whose name tag says “Frank Starr” but whose co-workers call him Duke. He knows exactly where visitors spend the most time and what they find most interesting.
“Since the redirection of the gallery spaces,” he comments, “people spend more time in the sculpture and art history galleries. They’re happier and calmer, they aren’t all worn out yet. Better flow means less [confusion]. Before, I would be asked at least a couple of times every day for directions.” After learning about the history of glass in the galleries, visitors often head down to the first floor to refuel at the restaurant or coffee bar or sit in the outdoor courtyard. The first floor works as a rest spot between each facet of a CMOG visit. There, a visitor can find plenty of seating, space, natural light and, of course, the alluring cluster of shops in the center.
Duke and other CMOG staff members consider the GlassMarket an important part of the museum’s educational mission. In fact, earlier this summer, Duke used the store to talk to a group of business students about the history of glass. Though Duke is a little cagey about when he started working at the museum, he has been there long enough to reflect on how much has changed. In the early 1980s, the only glass objects the museum sold were little bags of glass nuggets, he recalls: “We talked about selling artists’ glass and reproductions of collection objects in the shop, but it was a pipe dream to us back then.”
Eventually that pipe dream would become a reality. “We knew this was an ambitious venture for a museum of our size,” says Cassetti, “and . . . that the nonprofit idea of introducing people to ideas about the world of glass was right for the shop’s formula. [But] we didn’t have many examples in the museum world.” For guidance, the museum consulted with Foresight Design, a retail planning group based in Lincoln, Mass.Vandy Savage is the principal of Foresight. “The question [in museums] used to be, should we have retail or not?” she says. “Now it’s, how much retail should we have? That’s a big change.” Formerly a vice president at Macy’s and the Nature Company, it was Savage’s expertise in retail design that led to her involvement in the Corning Museum project.
“It’s been an emotional struggle to let the commercial aspect into the museum walls,” Savage says. In “every [museum] I’ve worked, you feel the tension between the curator, whose job it is to protect the intellectual property of the museum, [and] the commercial aspect that the shop represents.” That tension is certainly present at CMOG. For example, notes store manager Nemard, some curators are bothered because Lalique vases are displayed in the galleries and their exact replicas are for sale in the World Glass shop. The curators are concerned about “devaluing the piece in the collection,” he says. “But for the visitor, it’s exciting.
“It can be hard to find the balance when you’re making retail choices that have to be approved by the curator,” Nemard continues. “But as the curators come to trust that you understand the museum’s mission, they will become more comfortable with your ideas.” Vandy Savage adds: “There’s a line you don’t want to cross either legally or emotionally, perception-wise. Everyone involved in the museum’s work must know where that line is.”
Executive Director David Whitehouse, a Cambridge-educated scholar of Islamic glass, speaks eloquently of the planning process for the shop. “The ground rules, if you like, were that the merchandise . . . must be museum-related; we don’t want to get into any more unrelated business and tax than we need to. We want the range of goods we offer to strike a comfortable balance between . . . the rather tight focus of the museum and the predictably diverse interests of our many visitors.” But Whitehouse advises museums not to be afraid of the research process. “There absolutely is no rocket science involved,” he says. “It’s good old common sense.”
Savage describes the planning process as putting together the pieces of a puzzle, which involved collaborations between Foresight and the museum’s staff. They asked themselves a series of questions, such as: Who will come here? What will they buy? How many cash registers are needed? What is the appropriate aisle width? How should we light the different shops? How should we handle security? Most important, says CMOG’s architect, Henry Smith-Miller, was “establishing a sense of drama and surprise for the shopper while directing their movements within the facility.”
“Staff, lighting, presentation, adjacency are all important,” says Savage. “People contemplating a $2,000 Steuben bowl don’t want to be interrupted by kids running around playing with kaleidoscopes.”
Museum staff projected the visitor base, and then Foresight predicted the potential sales per square foot. That helped the firm develop a design for a functional retail space. “What works in a gallery won’t always work in a retail shop,” says Savage. “In a museum exhibition, you have precious objects in glass cases. [But in a store], you want to have objects on top of the case so visitors can self-serve. You don’t want to have to overstaff the shops because that affects your bottom line.
“[W]ith the Corning Team it was a total collaboration,” Savage continues. “That’s how design works best both artistically and functionally.”
According to Director Whitehouse, the success of the museum store relies on the relationship between the staffs of the store and the other departments of the museum. He describes store manager Victor Nemard and colleagues as “very much in sync with the museum’s mission. All of us are very conscious that there are some things you can . . . put on a scarf or a necktie and some things you just wouldn’t want to do.”
Amanda Kraus is Managing Editor of Museum News.
