If, how and why?

For many visitors, taking a final, leisurely stroll through the shop is a natural part of any museum visit. For museum professionals, however, the topic of the shop is a particularly tricky one: on the one hand, the shop is accepted as a natural service and its importance as probably the last impression on visitors before they go home is recognised. On the other hand, they see every day how challenging it really is to run a profitable shop, especially in museums with fewer visitors. Thinking of the shop as a profit centre often influences the range of products, which then leads, for example, to museum collections being offered as fakes that make for good souvenirs or to products that no longer have any recognizable connection whatsoever with the institution behind them. We would like to take a practical approach to the question of which tasks a museum shop can/should fulfil today and how it can be run and designed in order to 1) be profitable, and 2) act as a service that promotes visitor satisfaction and, at the same time, reflects the grandeur, content and style of the museum.