Polaroids in the digital age

Published Jul 3, 2015

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In today’s digital world, many of us spend our days snapping away with our smartphone cameras, capturing our daily activities, our interesting meals and selfies.

We upload the best of these on several social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and the rest of the pictures are either deleted to free up space or stay buried in our external hard drives.

Unlike in days gone by when each photograph was printed and either put in a photo album or framed, many of those taken today rarely see the light of day.

But this need not be the case anymore. Nifty250, the brainchild of Cape Town duo, Lucas Adams and Talya Goldberg, provides a platform that preserves life’s special memories the old-fashioned way.

The site links to your Instagram account and allows you to select and print your images in retro polaroid style in just a few clicks from anywhere in South Africa.

The online photographic ordering site was established last year by Adams, a product design graduate, and Goldberg, a business science marketing graduate.

The business operates from Woodstock and is staffed by a team of four, including Adams and Goldberg.

“Goldberg and I had zero experience or knowledge of the printing world, and therefore also had no preconceived ideas about how one would go about setting up a print studio,” Adams says.

“That said, in product manufacture, you devise a system for producing and assembling goods and a way of creating a good flow process that can be systematically tweaked as things improve.

“If I had to water down Nifty250, that would be the description I would use.

“The business thus far is an ongoing experiment that is consistently tweaked to improve its original idea of printing and shipping your Instagram photos.

“The key to anything is to get started and don’t wait until you ‘know’, by then it will be too late.

“I still feel like we know so little about actual print production, but I have faith in the feedback we get from our customers who keep coming back,” Adams says.

“Our customer is anybody and everybody with a love for photography.

“From retro-loving hipsters to traditional old schoolers, they all have a unanimous love for seeing their images in print.

“We are a fun loving, highly transparent company that is easy to engage with,” Adams says.

Nifty250 regularly comes up with a number of social media photographic campaigns and events as a way of interacting with their customers.

This year they partnered with adidas for their colour contest.

Every week, instagrammers from across the country are encouraged to upload pictures on Instagram where the chosen colour theme of the week is the main feature in the photograph.

The competition’s hashtag #NiftyColourProject is currently generating a lot of traffic and displays some creative photography.

“Think of social media as a voice you use to communicate with your audience. If the voice doesn’t match the product or service you’re trying to sell, it’s not going to sell. It is fair to say that the largest portion of our customer base is a younger crowd of influencers, famestagrammers and ordinary people, and we enjoy communicating with them all in their own digital language,” Adams says.

“Our core product is based around a social media network that attracts an audience that is so diverse it’s impossible to pin down exactly what makes them all tick. To say social media has helped is an understatement, it has been a cornerstone as much as getting our print quality right has been.”

Adams says one of the biggest ongoing challenges is that the company does not have any “technical” founders to decipher the developer jargon that gets thrown around when all he wants are his designs to be coded and implemented.

“It’s a problem, but within this hurdle is yet again another lesson: outsourcing works – pay the professionals and don’t look for budget deals in digital, ever,” he says

Besides using social media as the main medium of promoting their business, Adams says they take pride in how they treat their customers.

“I can’t find enough words to emphasise how important customer service is to any business or service. If I’m a customer, chances are I am likely to find the same product you are offering at another online store or shop; the deciding factor is really how you as a business make me feel, and how you treat me after I make a purchase,” he explains.

Adams says running your own business is about hard work and determination, and that dedication plays a major role in one’s success as a young entrepreneur.

“Most importantly, it’s about the people you meet and team up with along the way that ultimately influences your future.

“It may be somewhat of an overused description, but there is no magic bullet recipe for getting your idea or concept off the ground in such a way that it starts generating revenue in a manner you had hoped.

“All there is between that moment and the one when you’re doodling your logo on some examination paper are many long hours and late nights figuring stuff out that you really are qualified to do.”

* Nifty250 offers two printing format options: a classic 90x105mm polaroid-style print or a 45x180mm booth-style strip of four mini images each.

Clients should receive their pictures within six working days.

* For more information, visit www.nifty250.co.za or the company’s blog, www.theniftyblog.co.za for updates and competitions.

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