Artmajeur is an online art gallery that features work from over 50,000 artists. With almost 2 million works in their collection and over 150,000 original pieces sold, the site has proved to be a valuable platform for artists that want to showcase their work and connect with potential buyers online. A few weeks back, the Artmajeur team started working with Peecho to provide a brand new print on demand feature for their users. We spoke with project leader Samuel Charmetant to find out more about this wonderful artist community.Samuel, can you tells us how Artmajeur came about?

I founded Artmajeur with my partner Yann Sarazin back in the year 2000. Artmajeur started out as a system that helped artists manage their own sites. By 2004, several thousand artists were using the service with more interest in the portal itself than the artist website features. So, that year, we redeveloped the site as a full scale online art gallery for artists to display and sell their work online.

In late 2012, having gathered enough user feedback and feature requests, we decided to rebuild the whole platform to offer more advanced options, integrate social media in the core of our system and deliver an excellent user experience. We are now halfway closer to our goal, we need another 6 months to release most of the new features and fine-tune the browsing experience. Today, our mission is to offer artists the best possible way to present and market their work. We want to create a place where art lovers can browse through and collect their favorite works of art. Our service aims to be exhaustive, ultra affordable, unrestricted (no censorship) and unlimited.

What kind of art can be found on your site?

Mostly contemporary paintings, photography, sculpture and digital art. We also have a growing number of artisans and performance artists joining the site. Our community is quite diverse. Sixty percent of the artists come from Europe and North America but you can find art from 235 different countries.

Most artists on Artmajeur are art students publishing their first works, people who enjoy producing art on the side and full-time professional artists. Aside from offering them a channel to sell their work, we enable them to connect with their audience - and that, I think, is what they value most.

Why offer print on demand?

POD is very important for our artists. It allows them to sell reproductions of otherwise very expensive original artworks and offer their work to a wider public. POD also enables them to sell reproductions of original works that have already been sold. So, in short, print on demand is a very interesting revenue source.

At the moment, only a limited number of artists have activated the service - about 20,000 images are available. Once we reach about 100K images, we will deploy a Fine Prints section on Artmajeur and market it to both artists and the general public.