Reflecting on 2024: How your feedback helped shape our future
2024 has been a year of transformation for us. It marked the culmination of an ambitious effort to merge five industry-leading companies—ImageQuix, PhotoLynx, Skylab, Fotomerchant, and Simplephoto—into a single, unified entity, Captura. This bold step forward aims to provide high volume photography studios with a seamless, innovative, and reliable platform tailored to their evolving needs.
But our unification hasn’t just involved combining tools. It has also involved starting work on a foundation for innovation that enables studios to grow their businesses with confidence while simplifying workflows.
Let’s deep-dive into everything we have been working on, the triumphs we have achieved, the lessons we have learned, and what we envision the future of Captura and high volume photography will look like.
Dedicated teams, delivering wins!
By combining our strengths, we’ve been able to focus on delivering enhanced, streamlined features. It’s been a challenging journey and remains a long-term effort, but over the past 12 months, we’ve successfully introduced several standout advancements.
Feature highlights: Innovations that matter
1. Dynamic My Design print products
Studios can now create custom imagery per job (e.g., school logos) that automatically fills in your print products, making personalized products across organizations a breeze.
2. The Shop: Next-Gen e-commerce
We’ve run the numbers. Over 80% of orders are placed on mobile devices, so we’ve designed our new shopping cart to be mobile first. No more making a different ID card per school, pull their logo in dynamically instead! Optimized with features like Quick Buy mode, customizable themes, and multi-gallery support, these updates have reduced cart abandonment rates and boosted conversions by up to 15%.
3. AI-powered editing
With automated tools for background removal, glare reduction, and retouching, we’ve revolutionized editing workflows, enabling studios to get their images online faster and saving them up to 90% of post-production time. Automated image service upsells, like retouching, not only enhance the customer experience but also boost average order values, allowing studios to achieve scalability without increasing labor.
4. APIs and processing power
Blueprint’s robust APIs have opened doors for seamless integrations. Additionally, during the 2024 Fall season, we increased processing capacity by 500%. We’re excited to see what we can all achieve in future seasons with this increased processing power.
5. Enhanced security
With significant strides toward SOC-2 compliance, we’ve made data security a priority. Your data—and your customers’—are safer than ever.
Challenges met with progress
With all the positives of a merger, there are also challenges, and ours was no different. Bringing together five companies with distinct systems, strengths and cultures meant facing issues from scalability, database synchronization, and a finalized seamless integration. But when these tricky lemons were discovered, our dedicated team got busy making some spectacular lemonade.
During our peak season, we observed minor delays in managing large bulk orders. Instead of shying away, we tackled this issue head-on, informed by your feedback. Your feedback has driven our working product and feature roadmap, from integrating user-friendly features to optimizing technical performance. Every update is a step toward making Captura a seamless partner in your success.
We are also looking at our support model. Current improvements have already reduced resolution times by 70%, and we are revamping our platform to handle more during peak times and reduce errors.
A customer-centric future
This is only the beginning. At Captura, we’re not just building a platform; we’re building partnerships. Your feedback, needs, and wants matter to us. Reviewing our year and your successes and pain points is vital to our future. Our goal is to give you more time for what matters—capturing moments, growing your business, and serving your customers.
With this being such a busy year, keep an eye out as we start our upcoming detailed reviews of everything else we have been hard at work on.
The journey to unification isn’t over, but 2024 was a pivotal year. Together, we’re forging a path to a future where Captura is synonymous with excellence, reliability, and innovation in high volume photography.
As we enter our Captura era together, let’s make more memories, more revenue, and win you back more time.
