VSCO’s Oakland headquarters now has its own open studio and an art gallery, but the startup closed its New York office in 2016, offering most employees the opportunity to relocate to Oakland, though few accepted. Moving Sciences’ technology still curates photo recommendations, categorizing images by attributes, such as emotion rather than subject matter. "Right now.every single person now is focused on our member experience," Flory says, "delivering the best experience possible that people are willing to subscribe to." In 2015 they raised another $35 million and acquired two businesses: Moving Sciences, a visual technology company, and Artifact Uprising, a website for creating and ordering photos and photo albums.
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They opened a headquarters and an “open studio” in New York with professional photography equipment free to use for non-commercial projects. “You can replicate technology-and filters, frankly-but you can’t replicate identity.”įlush with cash, Flory and Lutze rapidly expanded, doubling VSCO’s headcount to 100 employees and upgrading to a 24,000-square-foot headquarters in Oakland. “A lot of people come to VSCO to create content and share content and participate in the community and there’s an identity there,” Natarajan says.
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In 2014, Vas Natarajan, an Accel partner, met with Flory at Prizefighter on the same day he reached out via email, and soon after, Accel led VSCO’s Series A round of $40 million. Flory was ambivalent about raising outside capital and refused to meet with interested investors unless they trekked to Prizefighter, a dive bar around the corner from VSCO’s office in Emeryville, California. The app revenue was enough for Flory and Lutze to bootstrap VSCO for the first three years. “Our mission is to help everybody fall in love with their own creativity.” “We just wanted to give people this place to create, show in-progress work, try stuff that they normally wouldn’t be able to do,” says Lutze, 40. They soon launched VSCO Grid, an in-app social network where users could follow each other but purposefully did not include popularity metrics, such as the number of followers, or allow comments on posts.
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After VSCO Cam hit 1 million downloads in its first week, they stopped working on desktop products and focused on mobile.Ī year later, VSCO Cam was released on Android and made free with in-app purchases, but filters cost anywhere from 99 cents each to $20 per pack. Within 48 hours of being online, they had made nearly $250,000.įlory and Lutze launched a 99-cent iPhone app the following April to promote the desktop product. Each filter pack cost $119 and drastically reduced editing time, a boon for professionals like wedding photographers who edit hundreds of photos at a time. They founded Visual Supply Company in March 2011, launching a simple website in November to sell filters for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. “We wanted to do something that built a relationship with creatives…in which we were building something of value that they would be willing to pay for.” I think I was just annoying him,” Flory recalls. “I literally would bombard him with a new business idea like every week. Four years later, Flory hired Lutze again for his and his wife’s wedding photography site. In 2006, Flory, a commercial photographer in the Bay Area, reached out to Seattle-based Lutze after noticing his Web design for emo-punk band Jimmy Eat World-both are fans-and hired him to design a site for his father’s construction business. L utze and Flory originally set out to build a product for creative professionals such as themselves. “If you back up five to seven years ago, that didn’t seem so obvious.” “They were very, very early in the belief that there’s no reason to go buy a camera because phones are so good at taking photos that this will be the device the next generation uses,” says Ryan Sweeney, an Accel general partner. For $19.99 a year, members get 130 exclusive filters, GIF- and video-editing capabilities, as well as tools like skin-tone warming and picture borders. It debuted a subscription model in 2017 has since accrued 2 million paid users, mostly under 25.
Since VSCO launched its first mobile app in 2012, it has amassed 150 million-plus Android and iPhone downloads. Flory, the company’s chief executive officer, and Lutze, the “chief experience officer,” each own an estimated 21% of the startup, a $115 million stake. The Oakland startup has raised $90 million from Accel, Glynn Capital and others at an estimated $550 million valuation. VSCO’s revenue has exploded, doubling in 2018 to $50 million. Six years later, 200 million Instagram posts have been tagged with #vscocam.
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