Old-world charm a rich vein to tap for new use

Guidance on copyright helps create better museum products, says heritage body's chief

Products inspired by museum collections across China saw a boom in sales last year and the market has enormous potential to tap, insiders said at a recent conference.

Data from the conference, held in Beijing a week ago, on the authorization of the use of museums' intellectual property show that the sales of artifact-inspired products surpassed 4 billion yuan ($561.96 million) in 2018.

Museums' online shops on Tmall, an arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, received 1.6 billion visits in 2018. This amounted to one and a half times the trips people made to brick-and-mortar museums across the country in that year, according to a report.

The report, released in August by the Institute of Cultural Economy at Tsinghua University and Tmall, focuses on new trends in cultural consumption.

Of the online visitors, 100 million are from the generation born in the 1990s.

As of June, more than 20 museums including the Palace Museum and the Summer Palace had opened flagship stores on Alibaba-run e-commerce platforms, attracting a combined following of more than 10 million consumers. Approximately half of them are from the post-1990 generation.

The British Museum is the first foreign museum to open a store on Tmall, which was launched in July 2018. Within 16 days of opening, all of its products on the site were sold out, Chinese media reported.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York soon followed suit and established a presence on Tmall.

The Winter Palace in Russia, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands and the RMN, the French organization of national museums, are on the way, Chinese media reported.

Behind the Tmall fever was an upswing in online sales of creative cultural products in China.

Over the past two years, the sales of cultural products on Tmall alone increased by three times. Museums' stores on the platform reported an increase of six times during the period, according to the report.

To better regulate the market and promote creations inspired by museum collections, the National Cultural Heritage Administration rolled out guidance on the authorization of museum resources' copyrights, trademarks and brands in May.

"The move will help to activate a large pool of sleeping cultural heritage resources and provide inspiration for creations," said Liu Yuzhu, head of the NCHA, at the conference.

China is home to more than 5,300 museums. As of last year, more than 40,000 kinds of museum-inspired products had been created, according to the conference.

Before, museums had to rely on themselves in developing products. The authorization policy will enable more cooperation with markets, cultural companies and innovators, using their resources in design and marketing to create high-quality creative products, Liu said.

Practicability and uniqueness need to be considered when a museum-inspired cultural product is designed, Roderick Buchanan, the commercial director at the British Museum is quoted as saying on the website of Consumption Daily, a Beijing-based newspaper.

The products will be more popular if they can be used, rather than just as souvenirs, Buchanan added.

Being different is another key point. Every museum has its own advantages so it can offer creative products with distinguished designs and experiences, Buchanan noted.

Expansion of the IP authorization can help expand museums' products and culture beyond their buildings, Buchanan said.

(China Daily 09/26/2019 page17)