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

Imagekind member John Rocco officially released his latest children’s book, titled “Wolf! Wolf!”, on March 1st in bookstores across the country. He then promptly threw a party for his adoring young fans at Pomme, a children’s store in NYC, on March 2nd.

John is a fantastic illustrator who has worked on many children’s books, and twice won top prize at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators New York Showcase, most recently for this painting from his next book “Moonpowder”. “Wolf! Wolf!” is the first book he has both authored and illustrated, and everyone here at Imagekind wishes him the best success.

You can find John’s latest happenings on his blog. To get info on his book related appearances and, of course, buy the book, see John’s website. Naturally, you can always find beautiful one of a kind prints in his Imagekind gallery.

Imagekind turned a little over 6 months old in March, so we thought it might be a good time to show you some of the metrics we’ve garnered over this last half year. These graphs represent unique visitor traffic and orders. We think it’s a good picture of a startup doing something right.

Take a good idea that people need, execute it well, spread the word, and over time it will take off. We know everything will continue climbing from here, because we’ve got a lot of new developments coming out very soon which are a culmination of 6 months of happily received feedback from our artists and buyers.

We’ll keep listening and moving fast to make Imagekind the best place to buy, sell, and create art – period. We think we’ll see the metrics above get blown away over the next 6 months.

Most of the great features on Imagekind have come from you. Now we’re looking for more great ideas. The best ideas submitted this week to the Imagekind blog will get featured on the next newsletter and on the homepage for one week. Just post your comments to this blog posting. We’ll publish them all and announce the winner!

Empty Easel updated their review on Imagekind this last Thursday. In this update Dan at Empty Easel and Travis Young from Imagekind talk about subjects such as:

What’s the difference between dpi and ppi?

How does Imagekind ensure they produce the highest quality fine art prints?

How does one scale up an image and what on earth is Genuine Fractals?

And our most popular question; what sells more on Imagekind – museum art or member art?

For answers to these, and much more, check it all out here.