Cut Out The Middleman

It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

Before the advent of e-commerce, the only way you could buy something was to go to a store.

Manufacturers wholesaled products to retailers, and retailers added a profit margin, which became the price consumers paid.

When e-commerce came along, some manufacturers realized they could cut out the middleman - and the term “direct to consumer” was born.

Because consumers are used to paying retail, manufacturers who sell direct-to-consumer charge retail prices - substantially increasing their profit margin. If this model works for furniture, electronics, and sports shoes, why couldn’t it work for art?

Artists typically get paid nothing at all for their work, until their artwork sells, at which time they give the retailer – typically a gallery owner – 50% of the sale price.

New Orleans artist Amanda Stone Talley is rewriting that business model. She cuts out the retail middleman by having her own gallery. And she’s built a website with an e-commerce function that offers a direct-to-consumer experience that’s as easy as shopping on Amazon.

If you don’t like business as usual, start your own business, and do it your own way. That was Michael Newcomer’s response to moving to New Orleans. He was planning on working as an actor in what he thought was going to be a thriving, well-paid theater scene.

When he got here - after being an actor in Los Angeles and New York - Michael found the New Orleans theater scene was neither thriving nor well-paid. So, in 2022 he co-founded, and today is Executive Director of, Crescent City Stage.

The company bills itself as Louisiana’s first fully professional regional theater, offering paid Theatrical Union jobs.

In the early days of the mostly tech-driven entrepreneurial renaissance of the early two-thousands, we heard a lot about “disruption.” Ride-sharing disrupted the taxi industry. Streaming disrupted the music industry. Food delivery services disrupted the restaurant industry.

When entrepreneurs went looking for financial backing back then, if investors didn’t see a potential for disruption, they didn’t see potential for success. Today we don’t hear much about disruption. Not so much because everything has been disrupted already, but because this kind of up-ending, innovative business thinking has become normalized.

So, when people like Amanda set about disrupting the commerce of art, or Michael set sabout disrupting the landscape of local theater, we no longer look at it as revolutionary. But, actually, it is revolutionary. And it takes the same level of vision and courage as it always has to forge a new path.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

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