Are you someone who knows a trip to a museum isn’t complete until you’ve perused the gift shop?
You’re not alone! On a recent Saturday afternoon, the store at the Getty Center was filled with shoppers checking out the clever, art-themed inventory that lines the shelves. (A tiny gardening kit! A feather pen set! Mother-of-pearl mosaic earrings!)
When the Getty Museum first opened to visitors at the Villa in 1974, its store was small, only offering books and paper goods like stationery, postcards, and posters. Since then, the Getty Center opened with a larger store, and the inventory across both sites has been updated to include souvenirs like mugs and T-shirts, as well as jewelry and other items inspired by antiquity.
Darcy Estes Pinelo, general merchandise manager at the Getty Store, said they stock products that capture visitors’ attention and that complement the Getty experience. The goal is to create a welcoming and meaningful environment that serves as an extension of the visit. Here is the art you can touch, play with, and even wear.
“We are often either the first or last destination of the visit,” Estes Pinelo said. “So we want people to leave the store on a positive note. We hope that they find something special to take home as a reminder of their time here.”
Stocking the Shelves
The Getty Store team looks for five key qualities in potential new items: authenticity, craftsmanship, quality, beauty, and value. Having an educational component is also important, as well as offering a variety of price points.
The Getty Store also works with vendors (and the original artists, if they’re living) to reproduce artwork on items like scarves or postcards.
“We definitely want to refresh things for visitors that come multiple times, so their experience doesn’t feel like, ‘Oh, I‘ve seen all this already,’” Estes Pinelo said. “We also want to bring in items that we know are trending commercially, if they’re appropriate for us.”
For example, Estes Pinelo kept seeing Instagram ads for OuiSi, a set of photo cards that can be played in multiple ways to encourage players to find connections between them. She brought the item in to sell at the Center store and after seeing how popular it was, the licensing team reached out to OuiSi to inquire about a custom collaboration that featured snapshots of artwork from Getty’s collection.
“We worked with the OuiSi team pretty much hand in hand, which was really cool,” said Jeneeka Perera, senior staff assistant in retail and merchandising development at the Getty Store. “It’s getting a lot of positive reviews just because the cards are so beautiful and have a QR code on the back to learn more about the artwork.”
Getty’s Top Sellers
Some of the most popular items for sale at the store include products adorned with Vincent van Gogh’s Irises. Also popular: music boxes that feature details from works of art. These are so beloved that Getty is working on a new lineup of music boxes that feature artwork from the Getty collection.
Hats, caps, and shirts emblazoned with the Getty logo are also always in demand.
Perhaps the most-sold item, however, is a marbled pencil. It’s simple and affordable, yet it appeals to both younger and older visitors and reminds them about their time at the Getty Center: a magical combination.
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The Getty Store is constantly evolving, and the team is working to offer more products by emerging and local artists and artists of color. They’re also prioritizing sustainability by reducing packaging when they can and offering paper instead of plastic bags.
Estes Pinelo and Perera know the stereotypes of museum gift shops—that they’re just trying to squeeze as much cash as they can from visitors via overpriced soaps and keychains. But they pointed out that the store offers items at various price points, and like most museum shops, the profits from the store go right back into the Museum and all the other programs that Getty funds.
And they’ve witnessed that desire many visitors have to find something—a book about an artist they related to, a postcard of a favorite artwork, even a blue Getty hat—that reminds them of their day at the museum.
“At the end of the day,” Estes Pinelo said, “I think many people just aren’t ready to leave.”
