July 22, 2025
The familiar face of Mike Mayerck, who we have welcomed as our Wholesale Sales Manager, is your main point of contact. Along with some limited help from me and others on the Blick staff, he is working on literally hundreds of inbound requests. It’s buried us. We know we need to improve our responsiveness.
We are doing our best to match Mac pricing through the end of the year. However, there are areas where prices will be increased. Most pricing policies are available for ex-Mac customers under this philosophy. This is true for the two most common price books, which aligned with 90% of the customer base.
Some background is important, because there is still some misinformation about Mac’s actual situation. Despite being efficient and technologically equipped, MacPherson’s lost money from 2021 to its final liquidation. Joann’s bankruptcy was a problem, but far from the only reason MacPherson’s went out of business.
In the best of circumstances, wholesale is a low-margin business. However, MacPherson’s layered on some unsustainable practices that Blick will not repeat.
Blick will not allow very large customers to negotiate money-losing relationships. This includes Blick (we were MacPherson’s second-largest customer), but their number one customer was even worse. For that large customer, entire years’ worth of cost increases — which all of us accepted during Covid — were simply not passed on. Blick will pass on vendor price increases.
MacPherson’s also had — given their mix and margin profile — an unsustainable free freight policy. For all customers, they seem to have ignored the near doubling of LTL and parcel rates that occurred during Covid.
As a result of tariffs and the weak dollar, many vendors are attempting to increase prices. Obviously, we are trying to resist this when possible. We have some good arguments.
Often the US market is charged more than the global markets — this should be a bone of contention for all of us — so there is some room for the manufacturers to buffer us, in our opinion.
Our policy in the near term is to increase prices to the extent necessary to recover the additional cost, but not to receive margin on those increases. For example, if Blick is hit with a 10% price increase, we will pass on about 7%, given our margins of approximately 30%.
We increased MacPherson’s free freight threshold from $750 to $1,500. It costs a minimum of $200 to ship a pallet after discounts — $250 for lift-gate service is commonly required.
Given Mac’s product margins of about 30%, it means that lower value orders didn’t cover any picking or warehouse expenses, let alone overhead and profit. That’s unsustainable.
Our charges will be $200 for orders under $750, decreasing in steps until the free threshold is reached at $1,500.
We’re especially uncompetitive to the West Coast (about $350 cost to us with liftgate), and as we get more sophisticated in how we approach freight, this too will need to be adjusted.
The goal will be a system that correctly cues customers on the tradeoffs caused by different methods of ordering. There are also optimization opportunities for us that might lower our costs.
Initially, Blick will cancel backorders of product not in stock. This is consistent with how we treat our own retail stores. We know this may be burdensome, depending on your internal ordering systems.
Eventually, we will customize our system to aggregate backorders onto the next large shipment — however, wholesale margins are too low to allow for reshipment of subscale backorder shipments, as MacPherson’s appears to have done for some of its customers
We’re moving as quickly as possible on an upload system that lets Dealers build an internet cart directly from a spreadsheet, but that is not in place yet. This will make it easier to avoid canceled backorders on a PO.
Early next year, we will adjust the depth of discounting to prevent what we strongly suspect are money-losing situations. This will impact relatively few customers.
MacPherson’s remaining private-label inventory that we purchased was significant (about 150 trucks across all brands) but consisted mostly of slow movers, since everyone had already picked over their fast movers. The majority of these “E-brands” have long supply chains — about 60 to 90 days from order.
Montana Spray Paint: We have substantial inventory available from our own stock and the liquidation purchase, though it may not include fast movers. We have placed direct-import orders with Montana and expect to improve our in-stock position on fast movers by the end of August.
Art Alternatives: Inventory is available now, and we will continue reordering from their primarily Asian manufacturing base to meet demand as needed.
Lead times are about 90 days for out-of-stocks and are subject to changing tariff conditions.
We expect AA accessories to remain a key part of our assortment and will continue evaluating AA canvas as planned before the liquidation.
Fredrix Canvas: We have inventory from our own stock and the liquidation purchase. In this case, we acquired some fast movers by buying inventory that the manufacturer had built but withheld after Mac stopped paying.
Ashley Lee, Fredrix Brand Manager, is on board; we have re-established ties with the Mexico factory that produces Fredrix. We are optimistic about supporting the brand long term.
Blick will offer Fredrix exclusively to independent, non-chain Dealers with physical stores and “grandfathered” buyers (e.g., Hobby Lobby).
A Minimum Advertised Price policy for Fredrix Pro Series will maintain the focus on its superior quality.
While Fredrix will remain available on DickBlick.com, it will not be the focus of our canvas strategy, which will remain centered on our private label offerings. Its minimal in-store presence will not expand.
We also plan to develop other high-quality brands as dealer exclusives to help avoid “free rider” issues when non-art supply retailers sell these products.
Sennelier, Isabey, and Raphaël: We expect to place Sennelier orders on a direct import basis with the manufacturer, Max Sauer, very shortly. This means any out-of-stocks will remain an issue until mid-September. Raphaël and Isabey brushes may follow slightly later than Sennelier product.
Fabriano: We have some inventory available and have placed orders on a direct import basis. We should begin clearing out-of-stocks by the end of August. We also have displays for the Eco Qua product line available.
Cretacolor and Stabilo: Bluntly, these two vendors have frustrated us.
Stabilo is a large European office supply brand; US volume may be insufficient to be a priority for them. In any event, it has been a slow process.
Cretacolor is more surprising, but we believe we’ll reach a deal soon.
For now, we have no further news. We won’t make these brands available until we have a workable direct-ordering model in place.
We have substantial inventories for all brands listed below from our own stock and the liquidation purchase, although fast movers may be limited. We have also placed new direct orders.
Posca / Uni Posca
Copic
Angelus
Mabef
Silicoil
Lamali Paper
Woodland Scenics
Artfix
E6000 / Goop
RGM Painting Knives
Bag of Rags
Leaktite
Lascaux: Distribution through Greg Daniels Fine Art; Blick also hopes to offer.
Nitram: Distribution through New Wave LLC; Blick also hopes to offer.
OKTO: Distribution through Fainotoys; Blick also hopes to offer.
RICO: Blick is working on distribution.
Sunnyside: Blick is working on distribution.
Awagami
Primo
Micador
In the coming weeks, we will develop a plan that allows Dealers to get price quotes directly from Blick’s custom operations online at a significant discount.
Key Benefits:
These services cover any size, any stretcher bar system (including custom bars and our exclusive European-patented system), any fabric, and any coating we carry — with turnaround times as fast as one day, compared to the 6–8 weeks typical with other sources.
We also have in-house centralized printing with many types of printable papers and canvases in stock.
If you provide a logo, we can brand custom orders to your specifications. For regular instock orders, we are manually working to ship them in plain boxes rather than Blickbranded ones.
The industry faces extraordinary headwinds. I’ve been running Blick for nearly 30 years, and I’ve never seen a more challenging environment, except maybe the lockdown phase of Covid — and it’s not even close. Bottom line, if you are concerned about your top-line, so are we.
Amazon is expected, if they haven’t already, to surpass Walmart as the largest goods seller in the United States. This is especially true for specialty products such as ours, where Walmart is weaker.
Obviously, Amazon’s share of growth impacts us all negatively. Vendors are losing share to cheaper Asian knockoffs, and some sellers of branded products on Amazon evade manufacturer “Authorized Reseller” and MAP programs.
There is also significant gray marketing of product being bought from non-US distributors and/or that use the de minimis tariff exception to create an unfair playing field. These loopholes effectively allow sellers to avoid the high cost of maintaining service and selection for these brands in the US that burden both you and us.
The movement away from the traditional material we sell in commercial and academic areas has accelerated. There are fewer studio art classes and, overall, lower enrollments at art schools. While some schools have higher enrollments, they are more than offset by schools that have closed.
Within our categories, we are seeing a significant shift from two-dimensional forms of art toward three-dimensional areas like ceramics and fabrics (the latter trend started well-before the JoAnn’s fiasco). This is an example of how Blick can start to help you confidently identify trends in the market and to adjust your inventory selection with lower risk.
During the next few decades — without significant immigration — a baby bust will reduce the number of college-age, high school, and elementary students.
Many not-for-profit customers have lost direct government funding from sources such as the NEA. With few exceptions, we are in a historic down-cycle for public arts funding at both the local and state levels. The Department of Education announced on June 30 that it is suspending about $6.2 billion in funding just in time for the new July 1 scholastic fiscal year. It’s chaos.
The economy has been worse, but it isn’t booming.
If you are down, you are probably par-for-the-course based on what we can see in our results, in MacPherson’s data, and reports from other vendors. If you are up in sales, you’re bucking the trend — great job.
Longer term, our goal is to play a positive part in fostering a growing art and Dealer community in North America. To succeed, we aim to reduce the effort and cost that it takes to run an art supply store efficiently, so that Dealers can spend more time developing their local art community.
Every moment spent worrying about stock levels, the POS system, the payroll, or bookkeeping is time taken away from community-facing activities. The long-term goal is to use Blick’s expertise and technology to reduce these tasks
We have the most complete sales trend data in the industry. Historically, when we have acquired art supply Dealers, we’ve used this knowledge to increase sales between 15% – 25% within the first few years.
For interested customers, I will share a presentation combining inventory levels, sales percentages, and growth by category. Schedule: to be determined.