PhotoBox is 15 years old! Since the year 2000 you’ve shared your everyday moments and the life changing days with us. Together we’ve celebrated 32 million birthdays and tens of millions of memories. To mark the occasion, we wanted to look back with you over the past 15 years and forward to some of things to come in the very near future.
The beginning...
On a family trip in 1999, Graham Hobson had the realisation that there was no easy way to get his hands on all of the fantastic photos he was taking of his kids on his new digital camera (he’s always been a techie!) Graham teamed up with long time colleague and friend Mark Chapman, and together, they came up with the idea for PhotoBox. It was a crazy idea, especially when you consider that Graham already had a successful financial IT career, not to mention that digital cameras were still not mainstream and broadband was hardly available.
Mark and Graham got the ball rolling with their very first order of £2.74! The two founders were doing everything; marketing, web design and even printing, packaging and posting every single order (they even got their family’s help when it got really busy).
It's getting serious...
In 2003, Graham and Mark took another leap of faith by moving into their first “proper” factory in Park Royal. It was a huge moment for PhotoBox and has let us build what we are today. We now have a production space of 55,000 sq ft in Willen Field Road.
Beyond photo prints...
PhotoBox was founded on the idea of printing photos online and up until 2004, that’s what we did, and we’d like to think we did a pretty good job too! It was in 2004 that we went beyond the photo print and created our very first photo book, a 26-page spiral book (did you have one?).
A new chapter...
2006 was a big year for us, we merged with a likeminded Paris based company called Photoways and in a moment, our numbers nearly doubled from 60 employees to 100 and we quickly became very well acquainted with the Eurostar!
PhotoBox goes international...
Although we’ve always been happy to send our products anywhere in the world, in 2007 we went truly international when we launched a PhotoBox website in Germany. Since then, we’ve made PhotoBox available in 20 countries.
From the Earth to the Moon...
Each year, we print your photos by the million, but can you believe that since 2007 we’ve printed enough photos to go from the earth, to the moon… and back again!
The PhotoBox community...
In 2008 we launched our blog and got with the times by joining Facebook. Over the past 7 years, we’ve grown to a community of over 500,000 fans on Facebook. Come and join us if you haven’t already!
From humble beginnings...
We launched with the fundamental idea of bringing people closer to their photos. We started with photo prints and from there, we’ve grown to over 600 products, from calendars and photo mugs to canvases a photo books, all the way to our smartphone cases, photo cushions and our brand new Polaroid Style Prints.
1 billion… with a B
In 2010 we hit a huge milestone, we reached 1 billion photos of our customers stored on our servers. That may not seem like many now that we’re closer to 8 billion, but let us tell you, at the time it was a real milestone!
World’s largest photo book...
For our 10th Birthday, we celebrated in style by creating the world’s largest photo book exhibition at the Truman Gallery, crammed with more than 30,000 customer photos from our “Around the World in 80 Days” photo challenge. With 14ft x 20ft pages, it was nearly the size of a double decker bus!
Getting mobile...
In 2011 we made the giant leap and launched our very first iPhone app! Just a few years later and we’ve made multiple iPhone, iPad and Android apps to make creating products even easier.
Face Britain...
In 2011 we were delighted to power the fantastic Face Britain project. Face Britain was a unique project created by The Prince's Foundation for Children & the Arts to celebrate HM the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, the London Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games through the creativity of the country's youth. With over 230,000 self-portraits, we helped create a giant picture of the Queen on Buckingham Palace!
Hello, Moonpig!
One of the biggest things to happen to us in 2011 was that we got an adopted sister; we joined forces with the wonderful Moonpig to create the PhotoBox Group. This was the start of big things for us and now we are just one of six brands within our family.
The importance of a good telephone manner…
Customer service has always been at the heart of what we do, one of the founding principles of PhotoBox was to create a service that we would be happy to recommend to our own family and friends. In 2012 we were recognised by the ICMI and included in their top 50 Call Centre list, one of our biggest customer service achievements so far.
Small screen debut...
We got bold and tried our luck with TV adverts. Our very first ad went live towards the end of 2012 in the UK and we’ve never looked back. We now have TV ads in 9 countries and we’re constantly working to do more!
Stop it. You’re making us blush!
In 2013 we won “Best E-Retailer” & “Best Social Pioneers” in the Top 50 Companies for Customer Service, as well as the A&B Digital Partnership Award.
Our photo book is 10...
In 2014 our photo books turned 10 (they grow up so fast!) and we launched a special 2014 edition to celebrate. It was meant as a one off, but it was so popular, we’ve got a few more in the pipeline… watch this space 2015.
It's no small matter...
On our busiest day in 2014, we produced so many mugs that if you stacked them one on top of the other they would be 6x the height of The Shard!
National Gallery...
Towards the end of 2014 we were making over 11,000 canvases a day! Did you know that it’s enough to fill the National Gallery 5 times a day?
A new home in Southwark...
In 2015 we moved house. Paddington had been our home since 2008 and when we moved in we had 32 team members there. By the end of 2014 we were up to a whopping 85, as you can imagine, it was getting cosy…
We moved into a lovely, fully refurbished, 19,000 sq ft space in Southwark with our fantastic Sticky9, PaperShaker and Moonpig teams.
And to finish off…
This has all been made possible by you.