Building the next generation of art gallery technology

The tools galleries were relying on had barely changed in twenty years. Teams spent hours every day manually updating records, chasing down information that should have been instant, and wrestling with systems so painful that many had given up entirely, reverting to spreadsheets and notepads just to get through the week.

We interviewed hundreds of hardworking professionals in galleries across the world, who told us things like:

"I avoid using my database as much as possible. It's just so painful."

And we thought: this doesn't have to be this way.

Before writing a single line of code, we spent thousands of hours in gallery offices, sitting next to directors, associates and assistants, learning their workflows, watching where things broke down, and understanding what they actually needed from a system.

What we found was that the problem wasn't just bad software. It was that nobody had built gallery software from the ground up with selling in mind. Every system we looked at had been designed to store and archive. None of them had been built to help galleries find the right buyer, follow up at the right moment, or use the years of relationship data sitting in their inboxes and spreadsheets.

So we built First Thursday. A platform that thinks with your data, not just stores it.

We believe gallerists should spend their time building relationships with collectors, not knee-deep in admin. And we believe the art market, one of the most relationship-driven industries in the world, deserves software that understands that.