Aussie photography company Eastmon Online is no stranger to innovation.
Since launching in a backyard shed in 1961, the business has gone from black and white to colour; from film to digital; and, in recent months, from e-tail to f-tail.
Facebook retail, that is.
Winkiwoo, the company’s new application, is flat-out clever. It takes your Facebook snaps or status updates and albumifies ‘em.
Winkiwoo general manager Brendon Watson said of the new venture: “It is a huge opportunity for the company that started as a fledgling photo printing business more than fifty years ago in regional NSW.”
“We are bringing photo printing to an online generation that uses social media for so much of their photo sharing.”
“We are taking e-retailing to a new extreme, and think that social retailing or f-retailing is a space that could be enormous for some industries and audiences.”
Facebook changing the face of photography?
“[Facebook], with over 800 million users and the largest depository of images in the world, seemed an obvious application,” Watson said.
“The potential for global exposure… has never been greater.”
“And we are doing it at a price everyone can afford.”
Winkiwoo’s introductory offer is seriously wallet friendly. We’re talking $1 for a 20 page soft cover 20X15cm book (RRP$15).
Since soft launching just four months ago, Winkiwoo has received a whopping 111,000+ ‘likes’, exceeding even Watson’s expectations.
“We have always taken social media very seriously even with our other online businesses, but without a doubt Winkiwoo has had… fast growth in a short amount of time.”
But does Watson expect competitors to catch on anytime soon?
“It’s the start and, as yet, we have not seen a lot of printing companies embrace social media.”
“Some will embrace it and others will be run over by it.”
Which is just fine by Winkiwoo. While other snaptastic types remain ‘Meh’ about social media, the company is understandably enthused about their own efforts.
“There is no other application on Facebook that easily extracts photos from your Facebook page, and the Facebook pages of… your Facebook friends and allows you to print them professionally through a simple web interface.”
Slurp your happy snaps
Winkiwoo has invested loads in app software that ‘slurps’ photos, status and comments from Facebook pages with appropriate permissions, turning them into a range of Photo Books and Status Books with hard and soft covers.
According to Watson, one of the biggest challenges was “building an infrastructure and hosting platform that would scale quickly as demand and growth continues to build.”
However, the company was quick to big-up Facebook for its support throughout.
“Our contact with Facebook in Australia has been great. They have been very helpful.”
