The Opportunity
Every collection holds an experience waiting to be built.
Museums, university collections, historical societies, archives, festivals, and organizations of every kind hold objects and stories with real audience value — often far more than their current programming can express. The barrier is rarely the content. It’s production capacity: specialized research, narrative design, and digital build all in one place.
Flintwise Studio is that one place. We design narrative-driven digital exhibitions and interactive experiences — from research through launch. Your audience gets an experience worth their time; your organization gets a public-facing asset that works for programming, fundraising, and engagement goals alike.
What to Expect
A finished, publicly accessible digital experience — research to launch — with no need for in-house specialists or web developers.
Every experience is
Research-grounded
Built on primary sources, collection records, and subject-matter context. Not surface-level descriptions.
Narrative-driven
Structured as a story with an arc, not a database with pictures. Visitors leave having understood something, not just seen it.
Web-native
Designed for screens from the start. Responsive, accessible, embeddable in your existing website or hostable on a standalone URL.
Grant-ready
Exhibition structure and documentation designed with funder reporting in mind, including audience engagement data.
Multilingual-capable
English and Chinese editions available today; additional languages on request.
Subjects
What we build experiences for.
The production pipeline is subject-agnostic — if it has objects, documents, or a story, we can build the experience:
Art collections
From single-artist retrospectives to thematic group shows
Local & community history
Neighborhoods, migrations, institutions, oral histories
Science & natural history
Specimens, instruments, expedition records
Archives & documents
Letters, photographs, maps, manuscripts
Institutional & corporate heritage
Anniversaries, milestones, founder stories
Festivals & cultural programs
A lasting digital companion to a physical event
Tiers
Three tiers. Pick what fits your budget and goals.
| Essentials | Standard | Full | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Objects | 8–12 | 12–20 | 15–25 |
| Research & writing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Web exhibition (hosted or embeddable) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multilingual edition (e.g., EN + ZH) | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Object deep-dives (long-form entries) | — | 3–5 objects | All objects |
| Social media content kit | — | Optional add-on | Included |
| Embedded Socratic AI guide | — | — | Included |
| Grant impact report template | — | — | ✓ |
| Reference price range | $4,000–7,000 | $8,000–15,000 | $18,000–30,000 |
| Timeline | 4–6 weeks | 6–10 weeks | 10–16 weeks |
Starting ranges. Final quote depends on collection size, existing documentation, and custom requirements. Not sure where to start? We offer a collection assessment ($800–1,500) to scope what’s possible.
Process
How we work — four phases.
Scoping Week 1
You share your collection records or a shortlist of candidate objects. We review, propose a thematic direction and object selection, and align on scope, tier, and timeline.
Research & Writing Weeks 2–5
Subject research — provenance, historical context, visual analysis — and exhibition texts: introductory essay, object labels, and (for Standard/Full) in-depth entries. For multilingual editions, each language version is written in parallel, not translated after the fact, so it reads naturally on its own terms.
Design & Build Weeks 4–8, overlapping
The web exhibition is designed and built. You see a working prototype mid-phase for feedback. We handle all front-end development; your team only needs to provide an embed location on your site (or we host it).
Launch & Handoff Final week
Final review, QA, launch. You receive all exhibition texts as editable documents, the web exhibition code, and (for Full tier) a grant impact report template with exhibition metrics.
Pricing in Context
A comparable physical exhibition costs $30,000–100,000+ and takes 6–18 months. Assembling separate freelance researchers, writers, translators, and developers would cost roughly the same as our rates but require your team to manage four contractors.
We deliver the full pipeline — research, narrative writing, and web production — as one integrated team, with a fixed scope and a fixed timeline.
Why Us
Our founding expertise is in cross-cultural narratives and Asian material culture — arguably the hardest kind of story to tell well, where a single object can require research across languages, centuries, and continents. Our inaugural exhibition, The Exported China, applies that discipline to Chinese export porcelain using open-access collections from major US museums.
That’s the standard we bring to every subject: if we can make a 300-year-old porcelain bowl speak to a first-time viewer, we can do it for your collection too.
Who This Is For
A strong fit if you are:
- A museum, university gallery, or historical society with collections underrepresented in your public programming
- A library, archive, or cultural nonprofit with a story-rich collection and a digital engagement mandate
- A festival, cultural program, or civic institution that needs a lasting digital companion to a physical event
- An organization marking an anniversary or milestone with a heritage exhibition
- Planning programming for grant applications, community engagement, or DEAI initiatives