June 2026 | A note to our dealer community
It was great to meet so many of you at NAMTA. Dealers from across the U.S., Canada, and beyond stopped by the booth, and we signed up several new accounts while we were there. Thank you to everyone who took the time to talk with us in person.
This update goes to our full dealer community, well beyond those we saw at the show. If you’re hearing from us for the first time, welcome.
Here’s how we see our role: unlike MacPherson’s, Blick isn’t the exclusive supplier of any vendor brand. Buy direct or through another distributor whenever it makes sense for your business. Our job is to earn your business in the areas where we can be your best option. Trust takes time, so we’re focused on the places where the math clearly works in your favor.
If you haven’t set up a dealer account yet, it’s worth doing so to access wholesale pricing. Wholesale accounts are available to businesses that are primarily brick-and-mortar stores carrying fine art materials. You do not need a credit application to open one; it’s only required if you want dating terms.
The relaunched Fredrix Red Label program, which includes Gallery and Studio profiles, is the bedrock of our dealer plan. We’ve priced it to give dealers excellent margins, and it’s a category where the Blick Wholesale Network expects to be a price leader.
Because our own canvas brands lead the category inside Blick, we will not emphasize Fredrix Red Label in our stores or online, and we won’t promote it beyond 30% off list. That’s deliberate, and it protects your margin on the line.
Canvas is one of the harder categories to source, store, and quality-control, with significant customs and tariff exposure—a single origin error can mean back tariffs of 100% of the invoice. We’ve rebuilt the MacPherson’s QC team in Asia, and if you want to direct-import to your own facility, we can quote more aggressively while removing much of that risk.
Now a Blick-exclusive brand, we are investing in Art Alternatives (AA) lines that we feel will compete best. As part of the Fredrix emphasis, we are discontinuing AA sheet canvas, but we will continue to support AA Value Packs. We can source Value Packs at strong costs, though we’ll be straight with you: it’s hard to promise margin there if you need to match the craft chains, who run low-end value packs as loss leaders, sometimes below landed cost. Red Label is where the canvas margin is.
Montana is well-stocked and competitively priced. The German Montana line was exclusive to Mac and tough to keep on shelves following the bankruptcy; we’ve since built enough fire-code-compliant space in our distribution centers to supply it reliably. For our Canadian dealers: Montana still has a reformulation to work through.
We have re-sourced this product line and can offer better pricing. The new artPOP! Chisel and Brush Dual Tip Alcohol Art Marker Sets are particularly attractive. The product is targeted to be an alternative for our brick-and-mortar locations to be competitive with the Asian brands that sell on Amazon. Blick will maintain exclusive ownership of the brand on Amazon to ensure that our own brick-and-mortar stores and dealers are protected from the “race-to-the-bottom” in price and quality.
Many of you picked up a free embossed Leuchtturm1917 journal at our NAMTA booth. While we are not their exclusive distributor, they’ve been an excellent partner and remain committed to the fine art channel—unlike Moleskine, which has drifted into Target, TJ Maxx, and oversold Amazon listings and changed its paper sourcing to cut costs. If Moleskine no longer fits your store, Leuchtturm is a strong replacement at the higher end. We’re also upgrading our journal selection with competitive options, including Fabriano.
The Overstock Liquidation section of our website is still a bit of a treasure hunt, but everything there is priced well below replacement cost, pricing errors excluded. Current deals include canvas, easels, and furniture, plus a great selection of Art Alternatives drawing tools including AA Gel Pens at around $0.10 each for dealers, AA permanent markers, and AA watercolor brush markers, along with AA and Fabriano hardcover journals. If you’re taking $5,000 or more of liquidation product, reach out to the Wholesale team for an additional discount.
With more than 110,000 products in our catalog, Blick lets you offer customers far more than you can physically stock. If someone wants an item you don’t carry, you can special-order it through us and still make the sale instead of losing it to an online seller.
A few brands don’t permit wholesale discounts, and we honor those requests, so your margin on those special orders may be thinner, but it keeps the customer in your store.
Unlike the first half of last year, we’re seeing mid-single-digit demand increases online and a bit more in our physical locations. The strongest growth is in 3D categories: fabric, sculpture, and ceramics. Some of that is likely helped by the closure of more than a thousand JoAnn and Party City locations. Our second-half comparisons are harder, so we’ll see how much was simply a weak first half in 2025.
The thorniest issue in our industry is the pricing brick-and-mortar can’t match on products that are easy to ship, expensive, and fast-turning: popular watercolor sets, marker sets, pencil sets, and the like. Three forces drive it:
International Gray Market Sales: Vendors often impose higher costs on U.S./Canadian businesses than on businesses in less developed areas or their home markets. Retail prices in European stores are at times a few percentage points of our costs. Copic markers routinely sell for under our cost in Japanese retail stores. Amazon makes it easy to exploit this arbitrage. Blick’s approach online is to defend our reputation with end-users, drop prices, eat a lot of margin, and push vendors hard to fix it. We know this puts stress on our relationship with dealers, but it also gives us strong motivation to get vendors to be fair to all of us. No one can support the brands the way vendors want us to without reasonable margins.
Cherry Picking: Some sellers carry only a fraction of a brand’s line, the expensive, easy-to-ship items, and undercut our margins by skipping the costs of supporting the full range. The rest of us maintain the massive SKU counts and inventory that brick-and-mortar requires. Stocking the 432nd color of a major pastel line only works if we make money on the sets it belongs to. You’re seeing a bit less of this since MacPherson’s liquidated. They were a major supplier to Amazon-only sellers like "Vir Ventures" and "Big Fly Office," who pick off high-value, easy-to-ship branded products across every category. Blick background-checks our dealers to confirm they run full-service stores, follow vendor rules, and order in a way consistent with full-service support. We’ve cancelled many orders, some for dozens or even hundreds of sets, that lacked the open-stock breadth a genuine full-service store would carry.
Glacial Vendor Pace on Resolution: You’ve likely heard the usual excuses from our brand partners. They’re hard to credit when one of the smaller vendors in the category, Holbein, resolved most of these issues years ago—big thanks to Tim and Doug Hopper for recognizing that we need to compete on a fair basis with global markets. ColArt also cut off Amazon 1P on many products early this year for policy violations. Some vendors are dealing with counterfeit, used, or deceptive sales of their products. Most are now moving on several fronts at once: narrowing the U.S.-versus-rest-of-world pricing gap, holding international distributors and retailers to their assigned markets, and adding transparency codes to combat counterfeiting. It’s taken far longer than it should, and it still isn’t fully resolved, even with tailwinds like the end of the de minimis tariff exception.
One lesson from reviewing Mac’s business: they pushed lean inventory too far, with some stores down to a single unit of open stock. Thin inventory makes a store feel empty and puts you at a margin disadvantage.
Where it’s reasonable, Blick avoids using our own warehouse to stock our stores, and we’d encourage you to look hard at buying direct before outsourcing your purchasing to a distributor. A one- or two-store dealer won’t match the price a big warehouse gets on quantity orders, but that gap usually doesn’t cover the roughly 25% weighted markup it takes to run a distribution warehouse in our industry. It’s worth exploring vendor minimums, case packs, and the working-capital impact for your own shelves. Domestic direct purchase is the low-hanging fruit: we’d rather buy Golden from Golden, or Winsor & Newton from ColArt, than take on the cost and risk of importing.
You may still need a distributor like us to fill in, but that’s very different from handing over your buying entirely. It’s a genuinely complicated decision, and I’m glad to help you think it through for your location. We won’t use confidential information against you (you wouldn’t need to share any to have the conversation), and we’re happy to sign an NDA.
Blick is a for-profit business, and we entered wholesale because we think we can make money at it. But our biggest challenge isn’t market share, it’s weak industry growth. You’d think a store closing would push that volume online; our own experience closing stores says it mostly doesn’t; it leaves the category.
Physical stores support their art communities in ways online never will. If we can help you compete, we believe we earn back whatever we give up online through more artists doing more projects, plus a share of the wholesale business.
That’s also why our acquisition strategy runs on relationships, not pressure. We’ll compete hard, but the model only works if we deal straight. Being family-owned lets us play a longer game than some of our competitors and put the relationship ahead of squeezing the last dollar out of a deal.
For owners thinking about succession, Blick is one voluntary option. Plaza recently joined Art Media (Portland), Primary Color (Savannah), and Art Mart (St. Louis) in choosing us for that transition, alongside our larger acquisitions of The Art Store and Utrecht. It’s always the owner’s call, never something we push.
I want to thank everyone who took the time to stop by our booth and meet us in person.
Standing on the other side of the booth gives new perspective.
I have a new respect for all the vendors at NAMTA that serve us. It’s a lot of work to put together a booth, and show days are long. You need thick skin. You will get plenty of fair, tough questions, but at times mean-spirited stuff comes your way. It’s humbling. Our job at the booth was to listen to concerns about various issues and try to solve them. We appreciate the feedback from the vast majority who acted in that spirit.
If there’s anything we can do to help your store compete, reach out anytime.
Wholesale Team | wholesale@dickblick.com