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.
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).
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?).
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!
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.
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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
I began using PhotoBox roughly 7 years ago when I wanted to somehow showcase my photos from my first safari. I knew I didn’t want the photos to just simply remain on my computer but also didn’t want to print each out individually as I probably wouldn’t look through them again. So I looked online and saw the idea of a photo book.
As this was going to be a holiday of a lifetime, I wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing. So I tentatively started out with a small photo book of a family event and was blown away with the quality. Since then I have ordered a photo book after every holiday I’ve been on and the quality has never diminished. I also now create a photo book each year for each of my nephews to show them growing up, it’s become a bit of a birthday ritual now. On the rare occasion I have had an issue with an order I have found that the customer service I have received has been excellent and PhotoBox has always managed to solve the problem quickly and without a fuss.
Each year I now also order calendars, diaries and greetings cards and these have always been of an amazing quality, to the point that I have not had it in me to throw the old diary or calendar away at the end of the year. I’m building up quite a collection now.
I found PhotoBox around 7 years ago when I started to get more into photography. From the start I have always received fab customer service and quality products. In my eyes the measure of a company is not that they never get anything wrong, but when they do get it wrong the way they deal with it wonderfully, this is one of their greatest strengths. My favourite product must be photo books, I really love to do a yearly photo book with PhotoBox so we get all those fabulous memories printed and can get them out to look at them when we like. Thank you PhotoBox!
A friend who is also an avid photographer told me about PhotoBox years ago and that was the beginning of a lot of orders! My favourite product is the canvases, which now adorn walls all over our house and have also been made to give as presents. The obsession with canvases has been passed on to my daughter now too, who also loves taking photos and was so proud when I printed one of her pictures onto a canvas for her - it has pride of place on her bedroom wall. All the canvases tell a story of a holiday, a special place or event and make a great lasting memory which we see every day.
PhotoBox is fantastic! I love it how over the years I have been using them their product range has slowly increased to some fantastic new ideas. With the world of digital photography, it is so easy to forget about and lose photos on memory cards but with a photo book the memories can all stay together forever more. We try to do a photo book every holiday and the quality of the photo books from PhotoBox have never let me down. I also love the new acrylic wall arts that they now do; the one I just got of our wedding looks fab.
Taking photos is without doubt one of the most important things to me. I can easily take around 10 a day of my children! I was conscious though of slipping into the habit of just leaving them on laptop so instead I am very strict about photo books and I adore them! They document everything! I love the fact that they are totally unique to you, backgrounds, layouts, and extra icons here and there. Family etc. aside they are my most prized possession! Friends/family ask to be updated on the photo books when they come to visit!
I have hundreds of photos of my little girl and every year I get loads of photos printed from PhotoBox so we can have a whole photo album for each year. I started when she was born and I plan on doing this until she turns 18 so I can keep a visual record of her growing up. Couldn't do it without PhotoBox.
I started using PhotoBox nearly 10 years ago with a photo book of my brother-in-laws wedding. Now I have a collection of over 40 photo books, of different styles and I still get at least 1 every year to display my family memories in, I love them and am often complemented on them when I show them to family and friends.
Every year my hubby gives our daughter and myself a photo book from you as a gift; he gives it to us every year on the day that our Christmas decorations go up and in it are all the treasured pics from the previous Christmas - he has done this right from our daughters first Christmas and it never fails to be special!
As a stay at home mum, I'm always looking to reclaim a piece of "me"... Photography is the perfect outlet. I take photos all the time, of all the things we do, the places we visit and those snapshots of time. My husband jokes the camera is my extra limb.
Each year I make a 100 page photo book, and the whole extended family gather and pore over it... The photo books have their own shelf on the bookcase!!!
Creating them is the perfect way to celebrate the past year, whilst the rain pores down on a bleak January weekend.
