How a three-person gallery in Toronto manages 600 artworks without a database team.

Strand Gallery has been running in Toronto's West Queen West district for eleven years. It represents forty-five artists — a mix of mid-career Canadians, a handful of international artists on consignment, and a small but serious print program that ships internationally. Three full-time people run it: the director, the registrar, and the communications manager. The inventory has grown to just over six hundred active works.

Six hundred works, three staff, and forty-five artist relationships. It sounds manageable until you consider the moving parts: consignment terms that differ for every artist, collectors who have been buying for a decade and expect you to remember what they have, an exhibition program that runs four concurrent shows across two spaces, and a print shop that processes forty to sixty transactions per month.

Strand moved to Galexivo eighteen months ago. This is what changed.

The problem was not one thing

Before Galexivo, Strand ran on a combination of FileMaker (the inventory), Mailchimp (collector email), Squarespace (the public site), and Google Drive (everything else — consignment agreements, artist bios, exhibition checklists, press releases, invoices). Five tools. Five places to update the same information. When an artwork sold, the registrar updated FileMaker, the director updated the website, and the communications manager updated the collector's contact record in a separate spreadsheet. Sometimes all three happened within an hour. Sometimes one of them happened three days later.

"We had a collector come in who asked about a piece she had seen on our site," says the director. "The piece had sold three weeks earlier. The site just hadn't been updated. It's a small thing but it's embarrassing, and it happens when the data lives in five places."

Inventory at scale

The registrar manages all six hundred works in Galexivo now. The key change was the transaction log. When a work comes in on consignment, the registrar opens the consignment workflow, enters the artist and terms, and generates the agreement. The work enters inventory with status "consignment in." When it sells, she records the sale transaction. The work status changes to "sold." The public site updates immediately. The artist's consignment account updates immediately. The collector's record updates immediately. One transaction, everywhere.

The consignment reporting was particularly significant. "We represent artists on different terms — some at 40/60, some at 50/50, some with a fixed fee structure. Every quarter I used to spend four hours producing consignment statements. Now it takes forty-five minutes because the data is already there, correctly attributed, from the moment each sale happened."

Collector relationships at forty-five artist depth

Strand's collector base spans artists with very different aesthetics and price points. A collector who buys large-scale abstracts at $8,000 is not the same person as a collector who buys editions at $400. The communications manager maintains detailed profiles for three hundred active collectors, segmented by artist interest, price sensitivity, and purchase history.

"When a new work by an artist comes in, I can pull up everyone who has bought that artist before or who has told us they're interested. I send them a private preview before the work goes on the site. That preview email converts at about twelve percent. It's the most valuable email we send."

The segmentation in Galexivo's CRM is driven by actual transaction data — not tags that someone has to remember to add, but real purchase history, enquiry history, and exhibition attendance. "If I want to find everyone who attended our last three openings but has never bought anything, I can do that in about thirty seconds. That list tells me who the warm leads are."

Running four programs in parallel

Strand runs four concurrent programs: a main gallery, a project room, a print publishing program, and an online viewing room. Each has its own exhibition cadence. Managing them separately used to mean four different tracking systems cobbled together.

In Galexivo, each program is a space, and exhibitions in each space run independently with their own artwork rosters, press release drafts, and public pages. The communications manager manages all four from a single dashboard. When the opening date for a main gallery show changes, the public site updates automatically. When an artwork moves from the project room to the main gallery for a group show, the location change is recorded as a transaction.

The numbers

Eighteen months in: the registrar has recovered roughly six hours per week that previously went to data synchronization between tools. The director has recovered four hours per month from consignment reporting. The communications manager sends sixty percent more collector communications than she did before, because building the lists no longer takes most of the time.

Sales have grown, though the director is careful about attribution. "The market has been decent. I don't want to give Galexivo credit for the market. But the collector outreach we're doing now — the private previews, the targeted emails — is genuinely more sophisticated than what we were doing before, and that has contributed."

The team is three people. It will probably remain three people for the foreseeable future. The inventory will keep growing.