A frantic search for a unique photo gift for his sister lead Jared Gibbons and two friends to create a company that provides them.
“My friends and I had printed Instagram photos, but it was a difficult,” he recalls. “Plus, square images were hard to come by. With the standard photo print size of four by six inches, two inches had to be cut off. I wanted to send some four-inch-by-four-inch family photos to my sister as a special gift for her next do-it-yourself project. After much googling, however, I couldn’t find a simple printing option that offered quality square prints that size.”
Seizing an opportunity, Gibbons and his friends, who live in Columbus, established
Snapstagram. The company specializes in quality square prints. “We currently offer two products – classic prints and our Printbox,” he explains. “Our four-by-four classic prints come in rolls of 12 and are printed on luster-finish, archival-quality photo paper. Our Printbox is a museum-quality eight-by-eight canvas print of a photo placed inside a wooden box frame.”
Snapstagram partners with a local Columbus printing lab that has decades of experience, he says. “They still use many of the old-school printing techniques that make our photos stand out from the rest.”
The company only prints photos from
Instagram. In the first nine months of its existence, Snapstagram sent more than 60,000 prints all over the world. Gibbons personally packages and ships all orders.
A few months ago, the company launched a funding campaign through Kickstarter to raise $3,000. After 30 days, they had raised well over $14,000 with nearly 1,000 backers. According to Gibbons, they were riding the wave of Instagram’s popularity. “Instagram was approaching its second year in existance, and the popularity of the app was increasing exponentially,” he explains. “We were offering Instagram users a simple way to get quality prints of their photos.”
The company consists of Gibbons, his two founding partners and one employee. “We have some competitors, but they mostly focus on fun things like calendars, books and iPhone cases,” he notes. He adds that the company is looking at other platforms from which to print and has some “signficant new things” coming in 2013.
Source: Jarod Gibbons, Snapstagram
Writer: Lynne Meyer