The Story of Convelio: Building the FedEx for Fine Art Shipping
Great businesses often emerge from unexpected places. For Convelio co-founders Edouard Gouin and Clement, their journey to revolutionizing fine art shipping began with a crashed business and two separate ventures in design and antiques. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Edouard shared how a daily frustration turned into a mission to modernize an industry that hadn’t changed since the days of Marie Antoinette.
The Origins of Innovation
After leaving Rocket Internet, where Edouard learned that “execution eats strategy for breakfast,” the co-founders initially pursued separate paths. Edouard started building a design marketplace, while Clement worked for an antiques marketplace. Both encountered the same persistent problem: shipping valuable, fragile items was a nightmare.
“I remember talking about it every morning at three in the morning,” Edouard recalls. “Wow, this is a nightmare. No one ever thought about this.” The shipping process was manual, expensive, and painfully slow. Getting a simple shipping quote took 48 hours, making it impossible to integrate shipping APIs into e-commerce platforms.
From Frustration to Foundation
Rather than accepting this as an inevitable cost of doing business, they started making calls. “We called quite a lot of antique dealers, fine art galleries, furniture manufacturers, and trying to really kind of frame is there some kind of opportunity there?” Edouard explains. “And everybody essentially told us, yeah, it’s crazy expensive, it’s eating up our margins, no one’s doing anything about this.”
They saw an opportunity to build “some kind of a FedEx for the art market” – a one-stop shop offering instant, competitive shipping rates with comprehensive coverage. But entering the conservative art world required a delicate approach.
Building Trust Through Progressive Growth
Instead of immediately targeting high-value pieces, Convelio started with antique dealers in European flea markets. “In the first six months of the life of the company, if an item was more than 20,000, we would really think twice before shipping it,” Edouard shares. This cautious approach allowed them to perfect their processes and build credibility.
The strategy paid off when collectors began recommending Convelio to major auction houses. By listening closely to client feedback and adapting their services, they gradually expanded their capabilities. Today, they handle pieces worth up to $30 million with sophisticated processes where “everything is really calculated beforehand.”
The Digital Transformation of Art Logistics
While NFTs grabbed headlines, Convelio recognized that physical art wasn’t going anywhere. As Edouard notes, “The way you consume NFTs or digital art is quite different from the way you enjoy kind of physical art… standing in front of, I don’t know, whatever, but Chili or whatever, painting will make you feel something because it’s been created like 200 years ago.”
Instead of seeing NFTs as competition, Convelio views them as expanding the overall art market. The digital revolution has brought new buyers into the traditional art world, with one client reporting “40% of the buyers are new buyers because they had just no idea we even existed.”
The Future of Art Movement
Looking ahead, Convelio’s mission is to “move art forward” – both literally and metaphorically. This means expanding beyond their current hubs in Paris, London, and New York, with Hong Kong operations already underway. But more importantly, it means continuing to develop technology that makes art shipping as seamless as e-commerce.
“If we look at the way the art market is moving towards more ecommerce, towards more digitization,” Edouard explains, “I think we will continue to develop significantly more product on the software side that allows us to distribute our shipping services significantly more efficiently.”
For an industry that once moved at the pace of royal carriages, Convelio is building a future where shipping priceless artwork is as simple as tracking a package from Amazon – while maintaining the white-glove service that fine art demands.