ART, TECH, & STREAMLINING SALES (IN A TECH-PHOBIC INDUSTRY), WITH FIRST THURSDAY FOUNDER CALLUM HALE-THOMSON
Callum Hale-Thomson is the Founder of First Thursday, a collector intelligence platform for the art world. He shared his insights on navigating industry challenges, especially as a startup in a traditionally tech-averse space, and his vision for the future of First Thursday.
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Takeaways:
Working across sectors can bring useful perspective.
Callum’s background in start-ups meant he was used to seeing how systems, data, and processes support growth. Entering the gallery world from a different sector allowed him to notice inefficiencies that had become normalised inside it. The first failure and subsequent pivot came from learning how galleries actually work, rather than trying to apply a pre-existing model.
In most galleries, data and information are scattered.
WhatsApp, notebooks, emails, and often just in people’s heads. A mid-sized gallery can easily be dealing with over 1.2 million data points across all these channels. The aim of First Thursday is to bring this information together and help galleries make better use of every person they meet.A lot of momentum is lost after fairs and events.
Callum talked about seeing teams come back from art fairs with notebooks full of names and business cards. Often this information is researched days or weeks later, if at all, by which point the energy of the interaction has gone.Seeing how galleries actually work changed the direction of the business.
After an early model didn’t prove sustainable, Callum spent time inside galleries to understand their day-to-day reality. He expected slick systems, but instead saw tools that didn’t talk to each other and databases that weren’t keeping up with the pressures of gallery work. Watching an intern manually research every contact from a Moleskine after a fair highlighted how inefficient this process was - and how much opportunity was being missed. The first version of the app came directly out of this moment.There are lots of CRMs out there
Existing systems tend to be built around sales and transactions. Galleries need tools that support relationship building over time, which reflects how the art world actually operates.First Thursday grew out of close observation rather than assumptions.
Spending time with gallery teams and attending 23 fairs in a year helped shape a product based on real behaviour, not how things are supposed to work.