Bespoke Pictures request for images

Before I begin I want to say thank you to Azz who I contacted beforehand for giving me permission to post this.

My name is Chris and I have a start-up company called Bespoke Pictures. It gives everyone the opportunity to earn money from their beautiful photographic or artistic images by uploading them for people to buy in print and framed or non-framed stretch canvas. Here's a brief description of how it works:

1 - You upload your image
2 - Name it and give a short description if you wish
3 - Choose how much you want to sell a copy of the image for (we call this the base price)
4 - That's it! We do the rest.

I know there are web sites out there that let you sell art online etc. The difference with us is you do not sell your original artwork or photograph. You only ever need to upload an image and that is it. We use the image that you upload to manufacture the prints and canvas pictures that we sell so you never need to mail out your paintings or print out and post your photos yourself. You don't need to worry about customer enquiries - You just upload your images for free and earn money from every one that is sold. We take care of selling, manufacturing and delivering copies of your images to our customers.

You choose how much you want to sell your image for. We will never charge you for uploading your images and we do NOT take commission from your base price. How does Bespoke Pictures make money? We sell the paper / canvas and frames that your image is printed on by adding on our own costs to your baseprice. This is all paid by our customers and I believe we can get a good stream of orders from various individuals and corporations.

Once your image has been added to our library, our customer's can then buy it. Our buying process allows our customers to choose the size of their picture, whether they want a border as well as the format of their picture from simple prints to canvas. Our e-Commerce system even lets them change the picture in to a triptych and select various frame sizes and colours.

All this happens live on the screen so customers can see what their final picture will look like before they buy it. Once they buy it, your account is instantly credited.

That's not all. If you have your own web site or online portfolio then once you have uploaded an image you then have access to our custom buttons. This allows you to sell your image through your own web site using our e-Commerce system. It works in exactly the same way, allowing your web site visitors to buy your art with Bespoke Pictures taking care of the manufacturing and distribution. Suddenly your web site is a shop! It's incredibly simple to integrate the button on to your own web site (only a single line of code!). This line of code can be added not just to your web site but also to blogs, facebook pages, anywhere infact!

We've just launched and are building up our image library before we "turn on" the shop side of it so it's an ideal time to get in there early.

I have a shoe-string budget and have built the eCommerce system and web site myself (my background is in IT). It's all but finished and I have saved a little bit of money to advertise it. It really is a "little bit" and will be used once there are enough images on there for people to browse through as I think people will be put off from buying from a near empty shop.

This post is quite long and I won't go in to any more detail, but if anyone wants to take a look the web address is www.bespokepictures.com

Again, thanks to the mods for giving me the chance to tell people about my idea. If it comes off, I hope to be able to give something back to the forum in the way of competition prizes or taking out ads etc.

If anyone has any questions please post them. I will check back here regulary and do my best to answer them.

Hi Chris, I would like to wish you all the best on your new venture.

Most people will have know idea of what sort of price to attach to a picture, including me. Is there a ball park figure that one can use as a guide? Say £2.50 - £3.50?

Regards, Ken

Thanks Ken for your question.

The minimum price is set at just over £3 (whatever the equivilent of $5 is). When we are up and running you will be able to see what other people are charging but at this moment in time I am guessing the average on the site will be about £6-£7.

I've put up a link to a price guide which appears after you submit an image. I'm guessing if your image is a panoramic or it's content is unique then you can probably charge a little bit more.

This is a nice idea! might well join in!

xx

I have signed up and ready to support you ... let me know when you go live .

We would like to start advertising and turn on the shop in the next 4-6 weeks. It may be earlier or later depending on the response we get but the plan is once we get 200 images we're going live.

And thanks for the kind comments, it's very much appreciated

Looks great like a great idea

I don't want to pour cold water on this and good luck. but you say
"The difference with us is you do not sell your original artwork or photograph"

How exactly is your business different from say photo4me.com or redbubble or a few others around where you upload images, set your pricing and the site/business takes care of the printing and shipping?

For instance on photo4me I can upload an image, state a minimum that I want to make from that image and they then price up accordingly to take into account production/shipping etc.

How are you planning on advertising the business, do you have an existing customer base waiting for images etc etc.

Considering you would appear to be entering the market pretty late, then what is the single reason you would give me for using you rather than an already well established outfit?

Hi Andy, great questions.

Photo4me and Redbubble are similar to our own site in many ways but there are a few things that we can do that sets us apart from them.

Redbubble don't seem to provide canvas prints and both sites sell pictures in set sizes. At Bespoke Pictures, your image is analysed on upload and automatically given a quality score by our server.

When a customer picks your image, a slider appears where they can choose their own size and are not restricted to certain dimensions. The quality score will trigger a warning on screen if the custom increases the size to such an extent that print quality will suffer. Our customers can get a picture sized to their requirements (hence "Bespoke" Pictures). We want to include a crop function soon so they choose sizes outside of the image dimension ratio which is planned for the future.

The biggest plus for any artist uploading to the site, and I believe we are unique in this area, is our custom buttons. Anyone with their own web site or online portfolio (picture gallery / blog / facebook page) can add a single line of code that will enable their own visitors to buy their picture using our eCommerce system. At the minute, if you sell something on a site such as Redbubble or Photo4me and you have your own art / photo site you need to link to the page on that site to sell your item. This may result in potential customers from browsing that site and choosing another image resulting in a lost sale.

With us, they add the button and their web site visitors can buy their image and the whole process is more seamless. This means artists and photographers can essentially have their own eCommerce site without all the admin and technical expertise that is required to start and maintain it. We anticipate that more sales will be done through people's individual sites and blogs than directly on our web site.

We will also be selling offline too. Every image that is uploaded a tick box appears asking for permission for us to sell their image off the site. I can't say more about this at the moment but we believe we can get a good (and constant) stream of orders through our own B2B sales team.

Thanks for the speedy response.

I will give you a couple of likes and dislikes just for your info.

Like
the idea of the button on photographers sites which go direct to the ecommerce system. Would like to see that one in action and would you be charging or taking a commission for that?

the customable sizing.
Offline sales - but that brings up other questions such as how that would affect pricing to the customer.

dislikes.
Only canvas or gloss prints - very limited doing just that I would think, especially if you are also only going to offer those in offline sales.

Newbie in an already crowded market


Not much else off hand as your site is not up and running properly but before I would even consider putting anything up with you I would want more details on pricing, quality, returns etc etc i.e. if I want to make minimum 40 quid on a 30x20 canvas then what would be the price to the customer etc.

Also if you are going to be offering other types and styles of prints such as mattes, framed prints etc etc

I use photo4me because I know their quality and they have a decent range of print types available and are quick and pretty efficient.
Redbubble because they are well known and offer the cards etc
and a couple of others for various reasons.

I am not trying to be discouraging, in fact I wish you all the luck in the world but you are going into a pretty crowded market and apart from the coding for individuals sites I cannot see what your USP is which would make me use you.

tks

P.S. Redbubble do actually offer canvas prints, I have sold a few on there. They do small, medium, large and extra large dependent on the file size/resolution