Hi, my name is Donatas Juskus and I am the founder of Artnetbook.com. I would like to share some thoughts with you on how Artnetbook.com came into life and why I decided to accomplish this very hard task in my life.

Our family has been running art management business in Lithuania for 20 years now. I myself grew up with artworks surrounding me and became a part of our art gallery since I was 12. Our gallery deals with the most famous modernist classics artworks in the region that have already acquired a museum value. I started doing some small things in our art gallery since I was 12. Now I am 32. I think I can say now that today I know more or less everything about art galleries, exhibitions, art management, art gallery business processes, including even the slightest nuances of art gallery business. I enjoy what I do and I am very happy that GOD gave me this opportunity to be a part of the art world. Now I have two children: daughter Nora aged 3 and son Leonardo aged 1 year, who I believe will take over our family business in 15-20 years and proceed with this fantastic career that my father has started long time ago. My family and kids also live in the artistic environment full of fantastic valuable paintings. I believe they have already started to get something out of it by now.

Our gallery’s main focus and objective lie in our engagement in high culture and arranging the best shows in the country. I myself became an art collector very naturally. As an art dealer, a president of Vilnius Independent Art Galleries Association and a member of Culture Council of Vilnius City Municipality, I think that, at a certain point, everyone on Earth has to be interested in arts that have always been a drive for cultural development of all societies in the world. Everything began when I as a national art dealer, art gallery owner and art collector, began to think about expanding my horizons beyond the Baltic State region to more developed art markets and art arenas in Europe. I started travelling a lot, visiting main art fairs in Europe. I also got into yachting that opened my eyes in terms of cultural diversities of the world. By being more and more away from the gallery I found myself in a situation that I could hardly control. I felt I could hardly manage our well-developed and beloved art gallery business.

Since that moment of truth, I decided to learn more about art gallery online software offered in the art market. To my biggest surprise, I found only a couple applications of art software that did not suffice for my purposes at all. Being an art dealer myself I knew every inch of art gallery business and surprisingly I did not find any of the solutions that could allow me to travel freely and still keep my hands on our family business. Yes, I came to understand that this is the challenge and the opportunity lying right in front of me. I decided to develop and design a totally new approach towards management of the art galleries, and I wanted everything to be online! I made the architecture of the software myself and was developing it for almost a year. Then, I found a good project manager, a very young and talented designer as well as young and very professional programmers that formed our team of Artnetbook.com. An entire year of very hard work day and night, a number of people, friends from all over the world acting as consultants assisting us to solve the most sophisticated issues of the business processes transformed into online platforms, architecture, functionality, usability of the software that we were trying to implement the way that even the old generation people, like my parents, who are now 70 years old, would be happy using because of the one-click methodology, user-friendly approach of the system, and immediate understanding of the structure that is designed even for those who have never worked in the art business. This has been our main objective and I am very proud and happy to say today that many people believe we achieved that goal and it has exceeded our expectations after all.

Sincerity, long working hours and professionalism is the combination of the keys we used and I truly believe it is the key to success. All the software in the market that we came across offered vague and obscure examples with poor design and tricky sophisticated navigation for the users. It offered us the answer to which direction Artnetbook.com should be heading for the next upcoming years.

We are very thankful to our video makers – OMG video company, that made our video catchy and funny to watch. Highly valuable dream team of nice programmer guys from Wisemonks that are helping us each second to cope with the most demanding programming tasks. I cannot even imagine where Artnetbook.com would have ended up without our friend and developer of the best flash charts in the global market – amcharts.com. Because of Amcharts.com we received an excellent opportunity to give our Artnetbook.com clients exquisite link to a unique reporting and charting modules that we are very proud of! I think I said too much so far, however, I am very happy to say and to know the fact that together with Artnetbook.com more and more people - whether art galleries, artists, or just simple art lovers, art shops’ owners or whomsoever - can get a fantastic touch of running art galleries with a smile on their face. We hear them saying that it is fast to start, very easy to run and fun to use. That was everything I wanted to tell from my heart about our incredible and much-loved innovative web-based solution for managing art galleries and artists’ collections – Artnetbook.com!