Label Latte // Origin Story

Label Latte: The Gap Between Loving Art and Buying It

I take a lot of photos of art. I love a piece, I photograph it. Weeks later I scroll back through my camera roll and stop on the image. I remember the room. I remember the light. I do not remember the artist's name, the price, or the gallery that showed it.

That is the whole problem. That is where Label Latte started.

The Money Left on the Table

Walk through any art fair and watch what happens. A collector stands in front of a piece. She loves it. She does not buy it. Not that day. Maybe she is not ready. Maybe she wants to think. Maybe she is too shy to ask the gallerist a direct question, the way most people are too shy to ask a shop assistant the price of something they cannot afford yet.

The gallerist, meanwhile, is often not trained to communicate eloquently. Nobody asks for her email. Nobody follows up. The moment passes. The sale disappears with it.

This happens constantly. Across Asia. Across Europe. Anywhere people carry phones and take pictures of things they love and then forget them. I’ve had people email the fair, with a loose description of a work they saw 10 years ago, wanting to know if you know the artist…

What the Label Does

A Label Latte label sits next to the artwork. It looks like any other art label, until you tap it with your phone.

No app. No download. Just a tap.

The tap saves the work. Title, artist, price, the gallery's details, all of it. About an hour after you leave the exhibition, an email lands in your inbox. Every piece you tapped, sitting there, waiting.

You can act on it that night. You can sit on it for a month. Either way, the information exists somewhere better than a blurry photo you will never find again.

Why This Matters

The inbox is the one place people actually go back to. Not a photo library buried under three thousand other pictures. Not a note app. The inbox.

Give a collector that, and she can enquire when she is ready, without having to ask a stranger for a business card. Give a gallery that, and they get an enquiry from someone warm that would of otherwise walked off, just by tapping.

What I Want This to Become

Contactless payment took years to catch on. People tapped cards before they trusted them. I expect the same curve here. Slow, then normal.

Progressive galleries will move first. The ones who want their labels to say something about how they operate, not just what the work costs.

I want the tap to feel as natural as looking at the label in the first place. No interruption. Not to the viewing, not to the sale. If someone wants to buy the work on the spot, they should and can. The tap does not get in the way of that. It just gives them a data point to carry out of the room, something to keep for later, something better than a blurry photo they will never find again.

That is what Label Latte is for. A tap, an inbox, and a way back to the thing you loved.

Right now we are building the back end of the software, soon we’ll be testing it with galleries willing to run the experiment. Slow work for a non-technical founder.. I’m looking forward to solving a genuine problem.

Find out more here