Imagekind joins Cafepress
Today is a great day for our entire Imagekind family. I’m thrilled to announce to all of you that Imagekind has been acquired by CafePress, the recognized leader of user-generated commerce. We are excited to join forces with CafePress to leverage the strengths and resources of both companies as we continue to grow. We also want to let you know that we will continue to operate the business under our existing Imagekind website and brand.
Since launching Imagekind almost two years ago, the Imagekind team has been focused on creating the largest user-generated art marketplace. We believed the world was ready for a new way to shop for art, that there were millions of artists on this planet that needed a better way to showcase their work, and that customers wanted an easier way to find and create unique custom-framed art and photographs. Today on Imagekind, consumers can choose art from over 50,000 artists from around the globe within a single online shopping experience. Thanks to all of you, our vision has been realized.
What’s next?
With this announcement, we have effectively gone from a quickly growing online marketplace to the market leader. Your work will now be visible to a continually growing number of CafePress members (more than 6.5 million worldwide). This will undoubtedly offer you greater awareness than ever before and, ultimately, greater art sales.
In the coming months, we will continue to innovate by expanding our technology in ways we hope you find interesting and useful. At the same time, the dedicated team at Imagekind will stay laser focused on continuing to offer the industry’s “gold standard” for giclee printing and museum-quality framing, while continuing to serve all your needs from hosting your galleries to order fulfillment.
I’m proud of how Imagekind has disrupted the world of art by returning control of the global marketplace to you, the artists who showcase and sell your work on our site. I hope you’re as excited as all of us at the possibility of explosive growth and I’d like to personally invite you to continue to work together with us to build something truly special.
With you, we look forward to continuing to build the BEST user-generated art marketplace in the world. I’ll be sharing more as we move through the coming months.
Kind regards,
Kevin Saliba
CEO, Imagekind.com
Sounds great, I think this is a good thing for IK.
This is interesting news to say the least, I’m both a contributor and affiliate of both CP and IK so when I heard the news I was a little unsure what would happen with both aspects of my life with these companys. I’m hoping it works out similar to the way it has been (but maybe more sales? *wink wink*)… Is IK going to continue their affiliate program at SAS?
Lucky for the owner of IK perhaps with a cool 15 million under his belt, not sure yet about the rest of us.
this is truly a momentous occasion and an exciting time for everyone – may we all keep our focus on continued growth since there is a long way to go yet and much more artwork to create!!
thank you for all of your hard work!!!
Walter
From all of us at EBSQ, congratulations!
It was really exciting to hear this news this morning. I guess it kind of further validates these types of businesses. I can’t wait to see how ImageKind and the main CafePress company work together to create even better things.
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Kyle Mulka
Co-Founder, ScrapWalls
http://www.scrapwalls.com
Congrats on the deal IK. I hope Walter’s right……only time will tell
I have a shop at CafePress and a gallery at ImageKind. I have sampled products from both and while I have the highest praise for the quality of the products from ImageKind, I have not always been satisfied with the quality of products from CafePress. Their quality control seems to be completely absent at times.
I would hope that the acquisition of ImageKind by CafePress would result in an improvement of quality control at CP. My fear is that the acquisition we’ll instead drag IK down to CP’s level. May I be proven wrong.
Sounds good. I hope now Imagekind will be able to make some new marketing ad helpers – like the widgets that Amazon as come out with. Or maybe a clickable slide show widget that can be embedded on websites and blogs.
I hope this drives more traffic to IK…CP certainly knows how to generate traffic, and IK needs a lot more….and I also really, really hope that the IK affiliate program stays with SAS which is so much more user friendly than CJ…
I sure hope Imagekind keeps it’s way of printing and standards. I am not crazy about CP.
Best wishes.
Brilliant!