Let the bestsellers pay for the long shots

20x200 sells art prints in the format its name describes: the smallest size of each piece costs $20 in an edition of 200, with larger sizes in smaller and pricier editions. Jen Bekman launched it in 2007 alongside her New York gallery, betting that many people who liked art had never bought any because galleries made them nervous. By 2010 the site had sold tens of thousands of prints, and Bekman told Fast Company that year that the popular work should pay for the uncertain work.

The mechanism is familiar from publishing and film. A few titles sell far beyond expectations, and their margins carry a list where most titles lose money or break even. At 20x200, prints by an established name such as William Wegman, whose dog photographs have a large following, sell quickly. That revenue lets the site release work by artists nobody has heard of, and pieces that will please only part of the audience.

The line matters because success usually pushes the other way. When something sells, the obvious move is to make more of it, and every sales report says so. A shop that follows its bestsellers ends up with a catalog that looks like its bestsellers, and the audience it attracts expects nothing else. The distinctiveness that brought the first customers wears away, and so does the chance of finding the next hit, since hits rarely resemble the last one.

Bekman’s framing makes the risk deliberate. Setting aside part of what the popular editions earn for work that may not sell turns a vague ambition into a budget. It also gives the business a way to explain its odd choices to customers, who are more willing to accept something strange in the lineup when it reads as part of what the site is for.

The approach has conditions. It needs a real surplus, which a young company often lacks; a business still trying to break even cannot subsidize anything. It also needs each risky attempt to be cheap enough that several failures can be absorbed by one success. A print edition fits that well, since the cost of a run is small next to the upside. A hardware company cannot copy the model when each product line costs millions to develop.

It needs discipline about what counts as a risk worth backing, too. “Risk-taking” can become a label for projects the founder likes and the market does not, funded indefinitely by the parts of the business that work. Publishers deal with this by keeping score on which risky titles went on to earn and which found no readers at all. Over time that record shows whether the risks are building something or quietly spending the surplus.

When those conditions hold, the idea is a sound way to keep a successful business from narrowing. The winners pay for the search for the next winners, and the business stays a place where new things can appear.