It’s late fall. You’re walking through the park, the river is frozen solid, and your creative juices have decidedly ceased flowing along with it. You’re thinking about the upcoming holiday season and want to give your husband a special gift this year. After forcing yourself into a mildly creative state, you decide to build on your husband’s talents. You select a meaningful, recent film photo of his, blow it up to 20”x30”, and decide to DIY the frame - your dad helps you sand and stain the frame, fit and cut the panes of glass, and more. The framing process was more challenging than expected…
The above process was my own. We now have a beautiful film photo, lovingly framed as decor in our home - priceless! However, the time and cost required to frame the picture were significant. For anyone short on time or patience, creating their own frame simply would not be an option.
🎨 Framebridge is a service that allows customers to upload, mail in, or drop off their art or mementos, select the frame and mat, and have the work returned to them in a beautified form - as a framed object. 🖼
See below for a comparison of the steps in my DIY framing process versus the Framebridge process:
💥 Solving a Legit Problem
As illustrated by my DIY framing journey, framing a piece properly is difficult (to be honest, I’m not even sure I framed it properly…). Susan Tynan, the Framebridge founder, had a vision for a service to fix this difficult problem. Framebridge simplifies framing, and has probably expanded the market of would-be framers by making framing accessible.
Tynan’s background and path to Framebridge have been covered extensively elsewhere (listen to her How I Built This episode), so I won’t cover it here. I will cover what makes Framebridge special…
⚖️ Trust
Frames are difficult to DIY, and frame shops can be inconsistent, expensive, and inconvenient. Often, items being framed have significant sentimental or monetary value, so the customer needs to trust the framer can get the job done right.
Framebridge provides a consistent experience, takes accountability for items that get lost in the mail, and elevates heirlooms. The company is so trusted that the term “Framebridge” is becoming a “proprietary eponym,” or a general word that is or was a proprietary brand name or service mark like “Kleenex”or “Google.”
🤩 Delightful Experiences
Framebridge was founded in 2014 and the company opened its first physical store in 2019. Between 2014 and 2019, the company’s entire business was run through its website - users could upload images or mail in objects to have framed.
As a customer, I’ve experienced the digital and in-person Framebridge workflows. The in-person experience was delightful and creative. I felt like an interior designer in the store, guided by a representative to customize the picture’s mat, frame, and towards visualizing the picture’s end state - via Framebridge’s “sneak peek” visualization tool.
🪩 Virality & Personalization
When you walk into someone’s house, you notice their photos and wall decor right away. Framebridge has access to a marketing treasure trove of customer photos, ideas, and creativity. They run a fantastic “Things you can Framebridge” segment that inspires people to preserve and elevate important objects.
I have a “room key collection” of over 100 room keys from various hotels. My family has asked me for years what I planned to do with these room keys. I was thinking of melting them into some sort of piece of art, or tchotchke for my desk. Then, I stumbled upon this gem while researching Framebridge: (!!!!!)
Framebridge also recently launched a collaboration with Penguin Random House, “Penguin Print House.” The collaboration offers framed, limited edition prints from popular children’s books. To further enhance and personalize artwork and objects, Framebridge offers a variety of mats, brass plates, and story pockets.
🧭 Logistics
Per Susan Tynan’s interview on the Second Life podcast, she worked on a new mail routing service with the US Postal Service during her first job at Accenture.
To quote Steve Jobs:
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
One can only imagine that the experience working with USPS helped Tynan build Framebridge into what it is today. Framebridge has built a deep moat around its framing logistics process. This is vital to the company’s defensibility. It frames objects at a production studio in Kentucky, and ships its masterpieces directly back to customers, or to one of its stores for pickup. Given its logistics and supply chain prowess, Framebridge is well-positioned to expand within the framing market, or into framing-adjacent markets.
🔮 Future Directions
More Frames - Framebridge provides affordable framing services by constraining its range of frame options. By limiting the variety of frame types and sizes it needs to have in stock, the company is able to accommodate most customers’ needs while not breaking the bank to accommodate every type of frame. As the company grows, I anticipate it will continue to expand the types of frames it offers.
In Person FTW - Google Trends shows interest over time for the search term “Framebridge” actually declining from a peak in December 2018. Though the picture paints a less interesting story, I think Framebridge’s physical stores and logistics network will unlock the company’s future. Today, Framebridge only has stores on the East Coast. When and if the company expands West, customer awareness will increase along with this expansion.
Data - Framebridge has surely amassed a war chest of data on what people frame, and how they want it framed. This information likely helps the company identify gaps in the market. There are limitless ways this information can be used. I suspect partnerships like the Penguin Random House one are a byproduct of paying attention to the data on what people are framing (artwork for nurseries and children’s rooms, perhaps).
👎🏽 Downsides
🐌 Can be Slow - Experiences vary, but the Framebridge process can be slow relative to consumers’ expectations of how long receiving an order should take. That said, each item is custom, and sent to Framebridge’s factory, and the company seems to set clear expectations regarding their delivery timelines.
I find Framebridge compelling because it is solving a real problem. The company combines creativity, partnerships, logistics optimization, and brand trust to enable people to frame more things. Physical objects in our digital age are important. Art and sentimental objects enliven our spaces. Our homes and the way they’re organized and decorated can impact our moods and emotions.
Framebridge operates at the magical intersection of arts, culture, and efficiency. Real economic paradigm shifts can come from playing at this intersection - think Reddit influencing the stock market.
In 2020, Framebridge was acquired by Graham Holdings Co., the family office of the late Katharine Graham, formerly the publisher and owner of the Washington Post (if you want to learn more about Graham, I suggest watching The Post). Not much seems to have changed for Framebridge since the acquisition aside from the company’s aggressive expansion of brick and mortar locations.
I’ll leave you with my latest Framebridge: Cumulus by Alma Thomas. My husband and I discovered and fell in love with Thomas’ artwork while exploring the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. over the summer. The Phillips Collection had a stunning exhibit featuring Thomas’ work at the time. We’ve yet to hang it, but I’m excited to put this piece on our wall!
