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Warhol Store deals in the funky and fabulous
Wednesday, February 09, 2000 By Caroline Abels, Post-Gazette Cultural Arts Writer
All the products sold by The Andy Warhol Museum fittingly reflect Warhol's fascination with celebrity, beauty, sex and oddity. After that, they differ as much as lip-shaped pasta differs from cow wallpaper, or a poster of Grace Jones differs from a martini set emblazoned with Marilyn.
The items for sale at the museum also include a mouse pad featuring a Campbell's Soup can image, eau de toilette ("Andy Warhol ... pour l'homme") and a Beanie Baby-esque bear sporting a wild, white, Warhol wig.
And those matchbooks? Those aren't matchbooks. On the surface you'll find a Warhol camouflage design and the words "they'll never see you coming." Inside, you'll find a condom.
Anything goes at The Warhol Store, located in a small pocket of the North Side museum. But then again, anything went at the Factory, Warhol's famous New York studio. So the museum is simply being true to Warhol in selling funky and fabulous things, says the museum's brand manager, Rick Armstrong, who oversees product development for the museum's exclusive line of merchandise.
What's more, since Warhol was a "shopaholic," as Armstrong says, the museum views the selling of his images as completely appropriate.
"Andy definitely created a brand for himself," Armstrong says. "He would have loved Internet shopping."
And the Internet is another place to find Warhol paraphernalia. At www.warhol.org, the museum peddles its own products as well as those of other companies. They include T-shirts with "Famous," "Super Star" and "Bad" splashed across the front, men's ties with Warhol's Mickey Mouse and dollar sign designs, and, of course, the condoms.
"They're fully functional," notes Paul Matarrese, manager of the museum shop.
At the shop, which people can enter without paying museum admission, patrons can find most of what's sold on the Web site, along with items that do not feature Warhol images but are related to pop art. Despite all the unusual items, the best-selling product is books - the museum has 500 titles available.
The Warhol differs from most museums in that it sells its exclusive merchandise worldwide. Items from The Warhol Store can be found as far away as Tokyo, where the city's largest department store sells shirts with a Warhol self-portrait on the front and the museum's name plus "Pittsburgh, USA" on the back.
More than a dozen other Japanese stores sell Warhol Store items, as does a Los Angeles surf shop. And when the museum exports traveling exhibits to places ranging from Australia to Minneapolis, Warhol merchandise goes with them, further spreading the name of the museum and the city where it is located.
"People go crazy for Warhol," Armstrong says. "Sometimes they don't even know it's Warhol, they just know its a beautiful image."
To sell Warhol merchandise, companies must become licensees of The Andy Warhol Foundation in New York, which holds the copyrights to much of the artist's work. The foundation must approve a product before it is sold by a licensee.
Martin Cribbs, licensing director for the Foundation, says there are about 40 licensees. The museum became one in October, 1998, when it wanted to create Warhol products related to the special exhibition "In Your Face."
The museum rarely creates products that feature Warhol's more well-known images, like the Marilyn Monroes or Campbell's Soup cans. The fees to use these famous images can be high, since the foundation in some cases shares the copyrights with family foundations and companies.
But the museum doesn't necessarily want to use those well-worn images.
"It's not just about Marilyn and soup cans," Armstrong says. "There are also beautiful early images that people don't associate with Warhol."
Also, the foundation is pleased whenever licensees use the lesser-known images, Cribbs says, because it helps to convey the breadth of Warhol's work. And Cribbs says licensees' interest in using the more obscure images - especially for fashion items - is growing.
"Certainly the museum has created more awareness of Warhol and has given our licensees the opportunity to see other Warhol images," he says.
As for business at The Warhol Store, it appears to be growing. The museum declined to provide exact figures but reported total sales were up 10 percent in 1999 over the previous year and clothing sales had doubled in that same period. The Web site gets about 5,000 hits a week.
And Armstrong doesn't foresee a decline in people's interest.
"The demand for these products just seems to be growing all the time," he says.
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