Imagekind, the art site that describes itself as “a hybrid art gallery, photo-sharing service and a print-on-demand service” has been acquired by CafePress for $15-$20 million in cash and stock, according to VentureBeat.
The site, which was launched two years ago, allows artists to upload and sell framed prints of their pieces, and also allows users to purchase one-off prints of their own images. The company’s blog post on the deal says that the site is home to over 50,000 artists, who will now gain increased exposure from CafePress’s 6.5 million members. ImageKind will continue to operate from its existing website and brand.
In January 2007 we heard rumors that Amazon was looking to acquire the company, but a deal never materialized. Instead, the company wound up raising $2.6 Million in funding in February of that year.
Cook also reports that Zazzle, one of CafePress’s largest competitors, was looking to acquire Imagekind as it moves to launch its own custom framing service. Another major player in this space is Art.com.
Go Cafepress.com. Great quality and products. Wonder if they are going to get rid of the imagekind brand?
This is great news! I love Imagekind. With the power of CafePress, they will be even better
web 2 at its peak….
Cha-Ching !
I never even heard of ImageKind. Yeah I know that’s sad. Sorry.
As an artist, I use both sites. Imagekind provides high-quality art reproductions. CafePress is for coffee cups, tshirts, etc. Two totally different audiences.
I hope I can link my two accounts.
Awesome, I love those services!
Congratulations Cafe Press!
Imagekind is print on demand and it’s really high quality. As an artist I use their site to sell my stuff. It’s much higher quality than other stuff out there. A good move for cafe press – now they are not just about tshirts and coffee mugs.
I wonder how much was cash and how much was stock. Guess that’s a secret.
this is a great step in the development of the art industry and I am extremely glad that I am in on it!
Better things ahead for everyone!
thank you!
Walter
This is really exciting news. I think ImageKind and CafePress make a good couple. ImageKind has the high quality art, CafePress has all sorts of different things you can print onto. It should give consumers a lot of choice to make custom products, and really make them their own.
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Kyle Mulka
Co-Founder, ScrapWalls
http://www.scrapwalls.com
Cafe Press is a pretty big company already but this was a sweet move. Imagekind has more of that cool “etsy” thing about it. They bring a high value brand and product and that Cafe Press (and Zazzle) don’t seem to enjoy. This seems like one of those obvious fits.
Great purchase! This field is really intriguing, reminds me of a similar site ugallery.com
This will be interesting to say the least- one must wonder if this in any way had anything to do with the recent ceiling on shop size and then one must wonder how the affiliate network will proceed. Food for thought.
Londie Benson is featured on the frontpage of http://www.imagekind.com and her work is nothing more than silly frog cartoons. And I don’t mean in a clever way. They look like something from a childs book. But they have her on the frontpage? Then look at http://www.deviantart.com and you will find nothing but page after page of featured art that is nothing more than work from a how to draw anime book. Those sites don’t represent professional artists. That is why I like http://www.artnet.com and http://www.myartspace.com. At least they feature high caliber art. I also like http://www.nyaxe.com which is ran by the people who create myartspace.
Do you want to be surrounded by hordes of untalented artists with site staff who don’t know anything about contemporary art or do you want to be around artists who have shown at Art Basel and in exclusive NYC galleries with site staff who obviously have an eye on the art world? The numbers look great for Imagekind but professionalism is lacking. Same goes for deviantart.
It would be nice to have more products on cafepress
Well, we see how well this went. Cafepress just royally screwed it’s designers (and customers) in an unethical move.
Recently CafePress began competing with the artists for whom it acts as printer and shipper.
CafePress rents web shops to its artists. The artist creates a website page and manually loads the desired blank products. The artist imports his image onto each product, arranges the products on the page, describes the products, titles the products and tags the images.
Initially, the artist would set a markup and received the markup for each product sold.
However, recently CafePress began competing with its artists, using the artists’ own images. CafePress created a marketplace where a customer can search a keyword. That search brings up artist products. When the customer buys from the marketplace CafePress pays the artist 10% of the price CafePress set. Both the customer and the artist lose money. If the artist’s shop sells a t-shirt for $21, the artist makes $3.01. If the marketplace sells the same shirt for $25, the artist gets $2.50. The customer pays $4 more, and the artist gets $0.51 less.
CafePress tells artists to “promote your own shop,” but CafePress buys Google adwords using the very image tags the artist provided.
CafePress justifies this bait and switch of service terms by telling artists they can opt out if they don’t like the new terms; however, many have spent as much as 7 or 8 years creating as much as 88000 images.
In spite of their sweat-equity, many shopkeepers (content providers) are building shops at other print-on-demand companies and then closing their CafePress shops due to the broken faith and trust, the financial hardship CafePress has delivered into so many lives, and the huge amount of time and dedicated effort all lost in the momentum of their own businesses. Would you keep your AMOCO station franchise if AMOCO built a company store across the street from you?