Fine Art America has an interesting backstory that not only explains its success, but also shows why it’s been chosen by so many companies and artists to sell their work.
The company was founded by an automation engineer named Sean Broihier, who had also taught himself to code from a young age. While he spent the early part of his career implementing automation solutions for engineering projects, Brohier came up with the idea for FAA almost by accident.
“At that same time, my older brother was working as a salesman for an art gallery in Chicago,” Broihier recalls. “I built him a simple website to help him advertise the art gallery business and the artists that he represented. Each time one of his artists would debut a new painting or announce a new public appearance, my brother would call me to update his website.
“That’s when the light bulb went on,” Broihier said of his ‘Eureka’ moment. “I realized that there were millions of artists all over the world who wanted the exact same thing: an easy way to upload their content to the internet and offer their artwork for sale. So, I took the code that I had written for my engineering business, made a lot of changes over the course of many late nights, and sometime in the middle of 2006 I launched Fine Art America.
Today, FAA is one of the world’s largest art marketplaces and print-on-demand technology companies. It has never raised any money from investors, and to this day has only eight employees—a testament to Broihier’s expertise in automating systems. With no debt and no one else owning large shares of equity, FAA is now one of the largest art sites in the world, and powers the online sales for more than half a million artists and brands, including Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue, National Geographic, Life is Good, PBS, and of course, New York Magazine.