News
Glossy Finish to become national franchise covering amateur sporting events
In August of last year we posted an interview with stock industry veteran, Haim Ariav. The former Chief Creative Officer at A21/Superstock had left that post six months earlier and was working on a new venture, Glossy Finish, a business providing photographic services at amateur sporting events. At that time, the business was still in start-up mode and Ariav was naturally reluctant to go into too much detail about it. Twelve months later, Ariav has successfully executed the first phase of his plan, and he gladly reveals his plans to franchise the business.
The conception of Glossy Finish had two parts; an on-line portal where family members could find and order images of their relatives in sporting events taken by professional photographers, and an on-site service that would allow customers to purchase prints at the very event in question. To handle the latter part of the service, Ariav has put together a 32 foot trailer with its own generator to power software and hardware to serve as a mobile kiosk and. Sporting event participants and spectators can search for images of themselves or their family members on one of 16 flat screens in he trailer and order prints which the lab can output in minutes.
For a big sporting event, operating the trailer takes a team of nine photographers, two graphic designers the three customer service people. Ariav and his team have already covered a summer’s worth of tournaments in northeastern Florida, where he resides. With the one trailer, Glossy Finnish is cash-flow positive and should break $500K in revenue this year. Ariav’s long-range plan, however, is to use the first trailer as proof the model works and then take the business national by franchising the concept. Ariav says the web-site will support the franchisees.
Web-site: Glossy Finish
Posted in: News, Photographers
