Jerry’s Artarama Brand Guidelines: The Discount Art-Supply Chain Started on Long Island in 1968

A discount art-supply shop on Long Island.

Jerry’s Artarama began on Long Island, New York, in 1968. The Dallas news site CultureMap reported in September 2021 that the company was founded that year by Jerry Goldstein, who saw that no retailer was selling art supplies at a discount, and that he opened the first store in Great Neck, New York, with his wife Arline. The company’s own press releases from October 2014 and October 2015 tell the same story in its own words: Jerry Goldstein opened the first Jerry’s Artarama on Long Island in 1968 “with the goal of offering quality discount-priced products to established artists.”

Discounting sits at the centre of how the company describes itself. In those releases it called itself a national retailer of art materials and supplies and said it offered more than 70,000 art materials, both from manufacturers’ brands and from Jerry’s own exclusive product lines, through three channels: an online store, an art supply catalogue and what it called Jerry’s Artarama Superstores. It added that the founder “believed in treating customers like family, a tradition that still continues.” Those are the company’s own words about itself.

The releases say the very first shop already carried the Jerry’s Artarama name, which joins the founder’s first name to the word “Artarama.” By the middle of the 2010s the business was run from Raleigh, North Carolina: the 2014 and 2015 releases describe Jerry’s Artarama as headquartered in Raleigh and quote Ira Goldstein as its president. The same releases give a count of 15 physical locations across the United States, plus the online store.

Stores, framing and demonstrations.

Jerry’s Artarama stores combine retail shelves with services. CultureMap described the chain in 2021 as selling art supplies and materials and offering custom framing, canvas-stretching, demonstrations and special events. A short profile of the Providence, Rhode Island, store in the March 2020 issue of The Bay, a Hey Rhody Media magazine, gives a picture of one shop: a ground floor of paints, pencils and specialty paper, and a second floor given over to custom framing and stretched canvases, for artists and collectors alike.

The same profile called Jerry’s “a national franchise” and said the Providence location was locally owned, with demonstrations by and for local artists. It mentioned a VIP card that gives members discounts, free coffee on “Wake-Up Mondays” and free demonstrations and events, and it said the store felt “as much like a club as a retail venue.” The magazine chose the shop for its “Rhody Gem” series on local places that residents like.

The chain has grown city by city. In September 2021 CultureMap reported that Jerry’s would open a store in Dallas at the Preston Valley Shopping Center, taking over a former Tuesday Morning unit, and that it would be the company’s fourth store in Texas, after Austin, Houston and San Antonio. The site described Jerry’s as “a small chain based in North Carolina,” with stores in 15 cities in 10 states, and said it opens only one location per city. A spokesperson for the chain’s real-estate broker, Bradford Commercial Real Estate Services, said in a release quoted by the site that Preston Valley was the only spot they had toured.

Alongside the shops, the company ran a show. Art of the Carolinas was an annual trade show and workshop programme that Jerry’s hosted in Raleigh each November. The company’s release for the 2014 edition, the 14th, said it covered more than 30,000 square feet, offered more than 100 workshops in media such as acrylics, oils, pastels and watercolours, and had drawn more than 6,000 visitors; the company called it the country’s largest consumer art supply trade show. The October 2015 release, for the 15th edition, repeated those figures and said visitors could try products and put questions directly to the manufacturers.

Art-supply retail chains.

Art-supply retail chains sell materials made by other companies, so much of their identity lives in the shop itself: the sign over the door, the name on the carrier bag, the catalogue cover and the colours of a website. The chains in this guide come from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Canada and Singapore, and each presents that identity in its own way, often in a name its founders or owners chose decades ago.

Store formats vary widely. Some chains run large stores on the edge of town; German Wikipedia gives the average sales area of a Boesner branch as about 3,000 square metres. Others keep compact shops in city centres or near art schools, and several run both, alongside web shops that now carry most of their range.

Print still matters in this trade. Gerstaecker, which began in Eitorf in 1953, built its business on a mail-order catalogue that the company says took its present form in 1982, and Boesner publishes its own catalogue and customer magazines. Chains also name their own-label ranges and services, such as framing workshops, and many describe courses, demonstrations and workshops held in their stores; where this guide repeats such descriptions, they are given as the companies’ own words.

Corporate pages tell the rest of the story: who founded each chain, who owns it now and how it grew, through new stores, sister chains abroad or changes of owner. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, separates documented facts from what the company says about itself, and states plainly where a chain has changed hands or closed.

A founder’s name, a discount promise and teaching.

The company’s public voice in those years leaned on a few repeated ideas: lower prices for working artists, a very wide catalogue, and teaching. Its 2014 and 2015 releases described Jerry’s Artarama as “an artist resource” offering “instructional workshops, new art supply demos and special art-related events,” including the Art of the Carolinas show. Ira Goldstein, quoted as president in the 2015 release, called the show a chance for experienced and budding artists alike to build their skills.

The one-shop-per-city pattern that CultureMap described in 2021 gives each store a whole city to itself in the chain’s own network. The Providence profile in The Bay placed that shop on an unassuming corner of North Main Street rather than in a mall, and said that passers-by would not guess how deep and well stocked it was.

For a palette, nothing official is documented, so the tones here are our own. A deep navy carries headings and small text; a raw ochre, the colour of an earth pigment, marks section openers and calls to action; a canvas white keeps pages light; and a slate grey handles captions. The sans is plain and sturdy, in keeping with a shop that sells by the shelf rather than by the single product.

For a design guide, Jerry’s Artarama shows how a retailer can build a brand on a founder’s name, a promise of lower prices and in-store teaching rather than on one signature product. Compare Blick Art Materials, another US art-supply chain, and Michaels, a US craft retailer. For this guide we use a deep navy, a raw ochre and a canvas white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Jerry’s Artarama’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.