The Art Mart Alliance

Welcome: The Art Mart Alliance

The Art Mart Alliance Home Page

Thanks for visiting us here at The Art Mart Alliance. Our objective is to help the many and various artisans of Central America gain better access to foreign markets. Our principle asset and the foundation supporting all our endeavors is the broad range of abundant, high quality, truly unique, and perfectly desirable articles at stellar values. The Art Mart Alliance is based out of Valle de Ángeles Honduras, which is itself a solid community with a good leather works producer, scores of artists & craftspersons, and likely the most diversified wine distributor in all Central America. We are located in a pristine location befitting to our name, yet only 30 kilometers from a dynamic capital – as good a place as any to begin a socioeconomic renaissance.

The medium of choice to manifest our vision is the Internet. Three (3) huge areas of development are recognized. These can be enumerated simply as: 1) Sources – 2) Outlets – 3) Payments. A succinct overview of our strategies for these three kingpins follows.

1) Sources: As already acknowledged, everything revolves around our sources. Moreover, we recognize that there are not just hundreds but many thousands of valuable artisans to work with, and the Internet will have precious little to do with finding or cultivating these affiliates. In terms of finding quality artisans, we already have a good start, more than sufficient to get started. However, we fully intend to continually grow this base. Good leads are fine, yet we still need to personally visit rural areas and deal directly with the shops to understand the needs and perspectives of the producers first hand. Good representative photos of the products are also a must. While we’re quite good at this and it’s very valuable initially, it’s obvious that thousands of contacts cannot be handled in this manner. Instead, we’ll form a network from our best initial partners to recruit other artisans in their respective areas.

2) Outlets: The Art Mart Alliance has no intention of ever creating any new online outlet avenues whatsoever. Instead, we will evaluate the mammoth selection of online retail outlets for those best meeting our needs. Notable requirements include, a) an appropriate target market for any given lines of merchandise, b) creditable visibility and traffic on the Internet, c) an excellent record of customer satisfaction and sales. Qualifying online retailers will be approached with offers to test market our client’s wares at very low risks. The Art Mart Alliance will maintain WEB sites that feature detailed product descriptions & photos plus photojournalistic articles covering selected areas and workshops. This material will be freely available to retailers for both purposes of product evaluation and advertising.

3) Payments: While we plan a number of innovative approaches and solutions to many aspects of this endeavor, it is particularly true regarding payments (the life blood of business). In this instance there is no alternative to a great many face to face cash payments at the root level of individual artisans. As one moves up the network however, there will be an increasing need to make and accept payments to remote parties (often in another country which is characteristically complicated by currency exchange rates). Moreover, a number of these good individuals will be graduated to dealing in these matters for the first in their lives and will require a simple system that they can trust and use. The best solution to these varied issues lies within the e-currency arena. Within this realm, however, the best options are wholly clear. However we are attracted to the CRYPTOCard Secure Password Technology. With this system an account’s password constantly changes. Only account owners know their new password at any moment because they are issued an unique smart card that can display said password when needed. This is especially important in this instance, because it allows creation and use of accounts with zero need to own a computer. An Internet Café computer (or any other) can be used as there is no need to protect passwords that are only good one time. Moreover, affiliates unfamiliar with computers can have accounts setup and even latter accessed by ’tellers’ on their behalf; since they’ll still maintain total control over to their funds by virtue of the physical possession and use their personal CRYPTOCard.

The real preponderance of work for The Art Mart Alliance is to assemble and maintain a quality control system for the network. This will assure clear communications and accountability amongst the various pertinent parties of any given transaction.

If any of the above holds enough interest to merit your comments, then we would sincerely appreciate receiving your input below.

Note: Comments do not have to be entered into the above box while you are on online. It’s only necessary to be online (connected to the Internet) when you click the “Submit Comments” button above. You could even save this page and make your input later. HOWEVER, (re)saving a WEB page after you write in comments will NOT retain anything you wrote. Happily the above box does nicely accept text entered through a ‘cut & paste’ operation (from a wordprocessor etc.).