Meet our Sponsor - an interview with Oliver Miller

I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to EA Festival’s main sponsor for 2024: Bishop & Miller, the auction house in East Anglia with show rooms in Stowmarket and Holt. I was introduced to Bishop & Miller’s founder, Oliver Miller, by a patron of the festival who was wowed by Oliver’s passion and entrepreneurial vision. As my interview with him shows, Oliver is shaking things up in the auction industry, explaining why the company is one of the fastest growing and most innovative businesses of its kind in the region. 

JOANNE OOI: How did you get into auctions in the first place? 

OLIVER MILLER: Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved antiques, objects and history. My father was a fine art photographer, so I was always looking at things and going to museums, auction house previews and antiques fairs. I started bidding at auctions when I was around 10 years old. 

JO: But why auctions instead of, say, art galleries or antique stores? 

OM: Auction houses have more mystery to them. There are treasures lurking in boxes that are tucked under the table and things like that - Indiana Jones stuff. You're trawling around things and objects and there's loads of quirky characters in the business. So as a kid, I was like, wow, this is amazing. 

When I was 24, I joined Bonhams, as a porter. (Before that, I was a forklift driver.) I was there for five years, two to three of those at the Bury St. Edmunds office. I was going out on the road doing valuing and that sort of thing, but it wasn’t really for me and I could feel that it wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t involved enough. I wanted to control an auction – have a vision and set out what I wanted it to look like.  

If it's your own auction house, you can literally say, I want to have an auction and I want it to have this feel or that feel – or a specific theme. Then, you can fill it up and make it look amazing, not just pile things on because of the numbers but go for quality. And then you've got to really think about your buyers. What are they going to want and how are you going to position yourself? There's so much to it. I absolutely love it. 

JO: How are you different from other auction houses? What are your killer apps, so to speak? 

OM: We don’t follow a rigid cookie cutter approach. A standard sort of auction house will have a monthly auction and, say, four “fine” sales. That's all they do. 

We've got certain sales in the calendar. But that doesn't mean we can't do other stuff. We've got a sale coming called The Explorer, which is all about travel, cartography and that sort of thing. Our sales are formed when we speak to clients and find out what they have and what their needs are. Other auction houses are, “That's our calendar. Those are our sales. End of.”

You can spark an idea with a client. They may have ten things on a subject. “Well, why don't we form an auction around it?” It's not like it used to be where you'd have a fine art auction and it would start with silver then go to porcelain, then paintings, then furniture, then rugs. That’s like every fine art sale under the sun. But why do that? I'm not interested in that. 

We give the client exactly what they need. When they give us an item, we're not just putting it in the next auction. We may hold something back because the correct sale for that item is coming up later in the year and that will maximize the money for the client. So we're not looking at a short-sighted let's-sell-it-quick approach. 

We always try and embrace technology as quickly as we can. One of the most attractive things about selling through us is that buyers know how much shipping and insurance cost before they bid and can price it into their purchase from the beginning.The problem that buyers have is, once you purchase something from an auction house, how do you get it? There are plenty of couriers but you have no idea what it's going to cost – or the time scale. Our technology is based on Amazon’s check-out experience, where everything is included with a click of a button. You literally click a button to pay and then click a button for postage and, the next thing you know, a package arrives on your doorstep with your auction lot in it. And that is really unique. It sounds so basic but no one does it except us. 

If you take a look around [our showroom], you'll see QR codes on everything. It makes it so easy for people to wander around, just scan a barcode, then put in their bid and walk off again. It sounds like we’re just skipping a bit of paper but it's so important in the world we live in now.

JO: What’s your vision for B&M? 

OM: My thinking has never actually changed. It's always been doing formed auctions that are interesting. The challenge was building our reputation so we could act on that thinking. When we started, we were held back by tradition because we couldn’t go hell for leather [on that idea] like we do now, saying “do this, try this, do that.” We had to follow tradition and slowly start branching off here and there with the auctions we really wanted to create and, now, we can do what we like because our reputation is there. Now, people understand what we're trying to do and they love the fact that we’re different.

For me, an auction house nowadays is interior design meets lifestyle meets retail, all with the buzz of an auction. We have an auction that is coming up in April called The Collector. This is a concept that we’ve been trialing for about a year. It’s an auction with more antiques. And based on what people want in their homes. We're not just putting a bunch of mahogany chests of drawers into it. Every object in it has to have something special. What you used to do was, try to appeal to a buyer to buy multiple lots. Now we're trying to appeal to buyers to buy one lot and fall in love with that one lot. 

JO: Who’s “Bishop”? 

OM: When it was time to register the company, I needed a company name, so I called it Bishop & Miller, with Bishop being my grandmother’s maiden name. It was a temporary name until I realised, hang on a minute, that name is great. My grandmother is the one who really got me interested in ancient art when I was a kid because she used to go to Greece, Rhodes and Rome, and she loves Cycladic art, that sort of thing. As a child, I was spellbound by it. I still collect ancient art because it’s fascinating.