Why I Built REGISTR

Years ago I was working at a gallery in East Hampton. We had a Picasso for sale, priced at eight and a half million dollars, and a serious buyer asked me to send over the details: the full provenance, the exhibition history, the paperwork. I went to the director to get it. She opened the notes app on her phone, found the note, and shared it with me.

That was the file. Eight and a half million dollars of art history, in an iPhone note, next to the grocery list.

I was floored, and then I realized it was normal. Everywhere I had worked, and in every collection I had cataloged since, the records lived somewhere like that: a note, an email thread, a spreadsheet with half the columns empty, a binder in a closet. Serious money and real history, held together by nothing. I knew there had to be a better way, so I went looking for it.

What I found

I tried the options. Some were built for museums and insurers, heavy and expensive and nothing a private collector would open twice. Some were art-only, with no place for the chair, the watch, the first edition, the car, which is most of what my clients actually own. Some were simple but stopped at the one thing that mattered most: when a piece was sold or gifted, the record stayed behind, and the next owner started from zero. Every one of them lacked something, and the something was different each time.

Meanwhile every cataloging job I took on for Basher Fine Art ended the same way: a spreadsheet, a folder of photographs and scans, and a client who kept it up for a month. The system was the problem. So I built one.

What REGISTR is

REGISTR is a collection management platform for private collectors. Three things it does are the reason it exists.

One record per piece, with everything in it. Photographs, documents, provenance, condition, location, what it cost and what it is worth now, with the value history kept rather than overwritten. The whole file for a piece lives in one place instead of six.

Any collection, not just art. Art, design, watches, cars, wine, jewelry, heirlooms, sneakers, books. A collection is everything you chose to keep, and the record should hold all of it to the same standard.

The record travels with the piece. When something is sold or gifted, the record transfers to the new owner with its history intact. Provenance stops being something each owner has to reconstruct and becomes something the piece carries with it. That is the feature I wanted most in East Hampton, and the one nothing else offered.

What it means for clients

Every collection I catalog now lives in REGISTR, and every piece that sells through Basher Fine Art goes to its buyer with its record attached. For a client, it means the question that started all this, "can you send me the details?", takes a minute to answer, properly, from anywhere. For the pieces themselves, it means their history finally has somewhere to live that is not a phone.

You can see it at registrapp.com. And if you have a collection that is still in a spreadsheet, or a note, get in touch.