Friends,

What an extraordinary year at the International Folk Art Alliance (IFAA). We’ve secured a new world headquarters opening this fall in Santa Fe, launched our first Sister-Market in Arlington, Texas, convened multiple artists sales venues at the Dallas Market Center, and produced the 14th Annual International Folk Art Market | Santa Fe, in many respects our most successful ever. Indeed, 2017 will set a new high in total artist earnings and lives impacted, among other important benchmarks.

All of this illustrates the power of the IFAA Mission to provide the most fruitful platforms for the IFAA artist family to succeed in the global marketplace. Indeed, IFAA is maturing as a global artisan-enterprise incubator and accelerator that serves artist-catalysts for positive social change. 

So, what’s next? How is IFAA looking to create even more value for the global artisan-entrepreneur family?  

In the near-term, we’re planning a pivot for IFAA’s online retail store—International Folk Art Market | Online (or IFAM | Online)—moving toward a business-to-business and wholesale platform, one that includes corporate and museum buyers. This means we’ll step away from the current online retail store model of one-by-one order fulfillment. In sum, we believe that by focusing on a more aggregated customer segment, more sales will be generated for participating artists.  

To get this needed pivot underway, the Online retail store as we know it will close at the end of August so we can devote resources to the envisioned wholesale platform and other sales venues. Thank you in advance for your understanding and support as we pursue this new path to create more value for folk artists globally in keeping with the IFAA mission.

If you have contacts who’d find this wholesale opportunity intriguing—buying one-of-a-kind, handmade folk art products by master artisans who spur positive social change in their home communities—please be in touch! We’ll continue to make available artist profiles that offer insights into inspirational stories of generations-old techniques and materials as well as lives impacted.

Meanwhile, thank you for supporting IFAA and our shared goal of creating as much value as possible for the IFAA artist family: more opportunities + more artists = more positive social change around the world.

With a world of thanks,
Jeff Snell, Ph.D.
CEO