It would be easy to add prints. Plenty of marketplaces do — list the original, then offer a run of giclée prints alongside it, and suddenly one piece of art can be "sold" hundreds of times. It would probably grow revenue. We've deliberately built Obramaestra without that option, and it's worth explaining why, because it shapes almost everything else about how the platform works.
Scarcity isn't a marketing angle here — it's the product
A print run turns an artwork into a SKU. What a collector on Obramaestra is actually buying is the object itself — the one the artist's hand actually touched, that exists in exactly one place at a time. That's a different transaction than buying a print, even a very good one, and conflating the two would make every listing on the platform mean something slightly less specific than it currently does.
What this means in practice
- Every listing you see is a single physical work, not one option among an edition.
- Once it sells, it's marked sold and comes off the market permanently — there's no "request a print" fallback for the collector who missed it.
- There's no ambiguity in a listing about whether you're buying "the" piece or "a" copy of it. There's only ever one answer.
It's also a bet on artists, not just collectors
A platform full of prints competes on price and reach — whoever can produce and ship the most copies fastest. A platform of only originals competes on something else entirely: whose work is actually worth owning outright. That's a harder, slower thing to build a marketplace around, but it's the one that keeps the incentive pointed at the artist making better work, rather than at optimizing a print supply chain.
"Buy from a Pinoy artist, not a print shop" only means something if it's true of every single listing on the site.
If you're an artist who also sells prints elsewhere, that's completely fine — Obramaestra just isn't where that side of the business lives. What's here is the original, and only the original.