Case Study · Marketplace · iOS
An online marketplace for independent artists
An experiential gallery that makes discovering and buying art as easy as ordering takeout.
Vango connects buyers directly to independent artists — because art should be accessible and affordable. Silicon Prime helped build the app that brings curated collections to the world.
Curated collections
Hand-picked work from independent artists.
Personal art stylist
Chat in-app to buy with confidence.
Buy & sell in-app
Tools for artists to manage it all.
The Client
Art should be accessible.
Vango Art is an experiential online gallery and marketplace that connects buyers directly to independent artists — bringing carefully curated collections to anyone with a phone, because art should be accessible and affordable.
The Challenge
Make discovering art easier than ever before.
Vango wanted an app that makes discovering art effortless — for the art novice and the art expert alike.
No other platform seemed to meet users' needs, and Vango believed buying and selling art should be simple. So they partnered with Silicon Prime to build the solution themselves.
The Process
We made discovering art as convenient as ordering takeout.
Working diligently with Vango, we built the features that take the worry out of buying art — and give artists the tools to run their whole practice from the app.
A personal art stylist
Chat directly in the app with a stylist who answers questions and minimizes purchasing worries.
Multi-angle preview
View pieces from multiple angles and zoom right in, so buyers can examine art before they commit.
Artist portfolio tools
Everything artists need to manage their full portfolio and sales — all on the platform.
Art should be simple to buy and sell — so we made it that way.
Approach & Lessons
Why we built it, and what a marketplace like this teaches you.
Vango came to us after concluding that no existing platform met their users' needs. That framed our first real decision — and the rest followed from it.
The decision: build, not rent
The obvious alternative was to list artists on an established marketplace or a hosted storefront and skip building an app at all. That gets you to market faster, but it hands the two things Vango cared about most — curation and the buyer-to-artist relationship — to someone else's ranking and layout rules. A custom app was the harder path, and it was the only one that let the experience — the stylist chat, the multi-angle viewer, the artist tooling — be the product rather than an afterthought bolted onto a generic catalog.
The non-obvious part: it's two products
A two-sided marketplace is easy to underestimate. The buyer app is only half the build — the artist side (uploading work, managing a portfolio, handling sales) is a full application in its own right, and the two have opposite priorities. Buyers want a calm, curated feed; artists want control and throughput. The lesson that repeats on projects like this: the seller experience is not a settings screen you add later — treat it as first-class from day one, or supply dries up and the beautiful buyer feed has nothing to show.
A constraint worth designing around
Selling physical art on iOS carries a rule that surprises many teams: physical goods must be sold through standard payment methods, not Apple's in-app purchase. Apple's own App Store Review Guidelines require it. That single line shapes your whole checkout — payment provider, receipts, refunds and seller payouts all live outside the App Store rails — so it belongs in the plan on day one, not in a review-rejection email later.
Where we'd weigh the trade-offs
A human art stylist is a genuinely differentiating feature — and it's also the hardest thing to scale, because it depends on people, not just code. It's a deliberate trade of margin and headcount for buyer confidence. Building it again today, we'd want to design from the start for where AI-assisted recommendation can carry the routine questions and human stylists are reserved for the moments that actually move a sale. That's a product-strategy call as much as an engineering one — and it's the kind of thing worth being honest about before you commit to it.
Reviewed June 2026. This write-up reflects Silicon Prime's own account of the engagement; details specific to Vango's product belong to Vango.
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