Lisson Gallery, a contemporary art gallery based in London, UK, but operating around the world in New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Beijing, has been a SharinPix customer since early 2021. The team at Lisson Gallery are using the SharinPix Mobile App within a flow to conduct artwork condition reports that are enriched using the image checklist. Since implementing SharinPix, the condition reporting technicians have saved time and effort on image collection and upload while streamlining data quality.
Lisson Gallery was founded in London in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail. Over its 50+ year history, Lisson Gallery has represented numerous painters, sculptors, and multimedia artists. It has become one of the most influential international contemporary art galleries in the world.
Exterior Shot of Lisson Gallery (London) - Lisson Gallery, 67 Lisson Street entrance, London, 2017. © Lisson Gallery, Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photo by Jack Hems.
Lisson Gallery has several rotating exhibitions every year in each of its operating locations worldwide. Outside of its ongoing gallery program, Lisson actively participates in numerous art fairs worldwide and collaborates with museums on exhibitions featuring its represented artists.
Lisson Gallery represents over 70 artists and artist estates in their rotating exhibitions. Having experienced rapid growth since 2016, Lisson has expanded from having only UK-based operations to opening locations in New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Beijing.
Lisson Gallery and Salesforce:
Lisson Gallery uses Salesforce for everything from client management to inventory, demonstrating how well a Salesforce implementation can work for an organization if used to its fullest potential. The Salesforce data at Lisson is the source of truth for nearly all the art operations at each of their galleries.
The Lisson Gallery Challenge:
As Alex Sheeder, Salesforce Administrator at Lisson Gallery, moved deeper into the needs of their Salesforce end users, he could identify that there were still more efficiencies to be gained in some of their processes, particularly for their condition reports.
Having moved to the Salesforce-based role from a technician role where Alex himself was doing condition checks as he was doing artwork installations, he had a strong understanding of how Salesforce could help streamline the condition reports. One roadblock was the amount of time and effort it took to get the associated photos of the works of art into the Salesforce record for that condition check.
In a single condition report for a work of art, there are between 10 and 20 photos to document each part of the piece. These photos cover every angle of the piece to ensure no damage occurred during transit.
To make this process more smooth and cut down on the time cost, Alex and the team at Lisson Gallery tried two different solutions:
- The first solution was to use a third-party app built for condition reports. This app worked great in the field but wasn’t linked to Salesforce, which meant that users had to double-enter data and transcribe information from the app to the Salesforce record.
- The second solution was to use related files attached to the record within Salesforce. This ended up not being very intuitive, and Lisson Gallery quickly hit storage and file size limits while losing a lot of time on image upload and going through an arduous amount of clicks to get to the end goal.
To put the importance of Lisson Gallery’s condition reports into perspective, they are required to complete thousands every year, resulting in nearly 4,000 total in 2023.
The SharinPix Solution:
Lisson Gallery wanted to streamline its condition reporting process by easing the capture, upload, and storage of inventory images. With the other two solutions they tried, they also felt that they were missing another dimension of image-related tooling: the ability to easily tag, annotate, and draw on the photos contained in the report.
Alex discovered SharinPix in 2020 and found that the solutions fit all the requirements for solving their problem. Namely, the solution needed to be 1) easy to use, 2) available on a mobile device, 3) have annotations and markup capabilities (and the ability to hide them afterward, such as when the image is merged into a document), 4) the ability to tag, and 5) the ability to view the images as a photo album on the record.
So, Lisson Gallery implemented SharinPix for their condition reporting, using the SharinPix Mobile App within a flow to capture images of the artwork during the inspection.
Using Sharinpix Lightning components' ability to access features through flows was the biggest win for Alex as a Salesforce Administrator because he can construct a guided process on the end user's mobile device with the image capture built right in.
They provide pre-set tags based on the condition reports record type that corresponds with the type of art being inspected, such as a sculpture or painting, so that the photo requirements and tags are different.
Portait displayed inside screenshot is not a Lisson Gallery piece and was used for demo purposes only.
To give an example of what one of their inspections and subsequent reports might look like, they’ll have a requirement in the image capture step to gather images of the miter joint (pictured below) if the artwork is a framed piece. They need to ensure that this part of the artwork hasn’t come loose in transit. If the frame has a problem, they can note that it needs to be sent for repair or restoration before a sale or next exhibition.
After completing the inspection of the artwork for the condition report, all of the collected information and images can be found inside the record in Salesforce:
The Results
Since adopting SharinPix for their condition reports, the overall efficiency and data quality within their system have greatly improved. According to Alex, the technicians conducting the condition reports are saving between 15-20 minutes per report on image capture and upload versus their older methods. These time savings really add up when put into the context that Lisson Gallery technicians have completed over 12,000 condition reports since 2021.
The SharinPix implementation only took a few days to get up and running, and now, with SharinPix on top of Salesforce, Lisson Gallery finally has the tooling needed to support the growth they are continuing to experience and the large number of condition reports that come with all of their operations.
Save Time and Improve Efficiencies like Lisson Gallery
Want to learn more about how SharinPix can help your business with professional image management in Salesforce, as they help Lisson Gallery?
Please learn more about our offerings on the Salesforce AppExchange, where you’ll be able to demo our products and chat with a photo expert:
