AIL meets Colin Chester

What does your job involve?
I manage a team of three buyers, and between us we create all of the retail ranges that you see within the shops at the National Gallery. We work for the National Gallery Company which is a different entity to the National Gallery, in the sense that our company has been set up with the prime objective of making money for the National Gallery, and all of our money goes back into the gallery, making sure that it’s free for everyone to visit.

What qualifications or experience does someone need for this job?
I fell into it by accident because I studied European politics and literature at university, but I had quite a lot of retail experience from Saturday jobs that I’d had as a student, and I managed to get on the Debenhams training scheme for buying. I actually started in menswear at Debenhams, buying across various brands like Maine New England and J by Jasper Conran. I didn’t know anything about textiles but I learnt on the job. I think that’s the best way of learning, and then as you get more experience you work your way up.

Are there specific places you keep an eye on to find the right products?
We have products that are based around our core selection, so things based around Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and the Water Lily Pond by Monet which are really popular paintings, we’ll continually refresh those ranges on an ongoing basis to ensure we’ve got new products coming through so that we’ve got interest from regular visitors, and also that are still appealing to tourists who might only visit us once a year. We start planning our other exhibition programmes about nine months in advance, and we’ll look at the works that are likely to be coming into the exhibition; they’re made available by the curator. We’ll sit down as a team and have a brainstorm about what the exhibition is about and what are the themes, but also linking it to trends, so we’ll go to trade shows, the high street, we’ll look at magazines. A recent example is the Making Colour exhibition, we’ve got a beautiful Tom Dixon gold tea set and there’s a whole gold trend in the home at the moment. It ties in beautifully because there’s a room of gold products with gold paintings within the exhibition. There’s a fur trend coming through as well, we’ve tied that in with some fur trimmings on Rembrandt paintings for our forthcoming Rembrandt exhibition that opens in October.

Do you have to keep an eye on fashion?
Absolutely, we buy all the key home magazines and things like Vogue and make sure that everyone in the team is reading them and that we’re bang up to date with what the trends are going to be. Of the various trade shows we go to Maison & Objects is a big homeware-inspired exhibition that takes place in Paris. There are a lot of seminars we go to just so we make sure we’ve got our finger on the pulse. My buying team all come from the high street so they’re used to being very forward thinking, I’m ex-Debenhams, my boss is ex-John Lewis, we’ve got people who used to work at Heal’s, Paul Smith and Liberty.

Are some exhibitions easier than others?
Yes, with something like the colour exhibition we had such a vast scope because it was all about how artists use colour, and we had a really wide remit of what we could do, whereas there are certain exhibitions, particularly smaller ones like Building the Picture that are quite limited. It’s about the role of architecture within Renaissance painting so it’s kind of limited within that, but we came up with this whole cool concept based around Corinthian columns, which again we’ve seen quite a bit of in magazines.

What exhibitions would you like to see happen next?
We’ve actually got one that’s coming up next year that’s going to be based on Impressionism, and simply from the perspective that Impressionist themes are the most popular ones in the gallery, it just means that we can create some beautiful products that we know our customers are going to really want to enjoy. Having a blockbuster exhibition like the Rembrandt one means that we know we’re going to have hundreds of thousands of people through the door. It’s satisfying that we can generate a hefty amount of profit for the gallery.

What percentage of visitors to the gallery buy something in the shops?
About one in ten will buy something, and one in eight will visit the shops, it’s quite a high strike rate.

What proportion of funds goes back into the gallery?
I think we delivered something along the lines of £1 million worth of profit back into the gallery last year, so it is quite hefty. I think the important thing to remember is that no matter which government is going to be in power, arts cuts are likely to continue and the challenge for us is to ensure that we always have the most commercial range because we need to drive as much revenue as possible. I do believe we are going to be the only institution with an Act of Parliament saying that we have to remain free. At the end of the day the gallery needs as much money to continue with its fantastic work and its education programme.

What are the most popular items?
It depends on which shop you’re in. In our main Portico shop which is our main tourist shop, we have a range called Vintage London, and in the gallery’s archive we found an original 1950s hand printed postcard of the gallery in Trafalgar Square. We’ve got a really lovely range that’s based around that and I would say that’s one of our core tourist ranges that’s really really popular. In terms of being inspired by the permanent collection there’s Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, we did particularly well when we had the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam’s Sunflowers painting displayed alongside ours. We did a range of commemorative merchandise for that which worked really well. And the fridge magnet set! Anything with sunflowers people will love.

Do you have a favourite room within the gallery?
My favourite painting is the Execution of Lady Jane Grey which is just off the central hall. It’s massive and I just think the drama of what’s about to happen really springs out, but it’s not an easy one we could do a merchandise range around!

What makes the National Gallery unique?
We’re a destination for Western European art before 1905 and we’ve got one of the best collections. Also I think our location in London makes us unique because even if you don’t come into the gallery we’re such an iconic building in the middle of Trafalgar Square at the centre of everything that‘s going on in London. We have thousands of people who walk past us every day, and I think we’re just so familiar to people even if they don’t come and visit us very often, we’re just one of those homely parts of London that people love.


Now you know what goes on behind the scenes be sure to make a stop at the National Gallery.