January 10th, 2014 will be remembered forever in the history of photo book services. On that day we were introduced to Groovebook, a revolutionary photo book company with a unique approach: transforming your photos stored on your smart devices into photo books and getting them to your doorstep every month for just $2.99 per month including free shipping.
To celebrate the anniversary of Groovebook’s grand debut, we decided to do a little recap of the relevant episode of ABC’s reality series, Shark Tank, and see how this idea came to fruition to such extent even a photo book giant had to make a deal out of it.
It took only one and a half minute for Brian and Julie of the Californian Whiteman family to successfully present their revolutionary product, Groovebook, to the sharks, telling them about getting 18k subscribers under just 8 months in 2013 and how the unique binding technique was invented using a household pan. The sharks admired the customer-friendly pricing ($2.99 per month with free shipping) and the fact that the books were profitable despite a low margin. But they feared that without raising the price a bit the company would go bankrupt very easily, considering the fact the couple heavily relied on their printing resources.
Despite the above concerns, 4 out of 5 sharks took the bait. Eventually Brian and Julie went with the offer of Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful): they got the desired $150k for 80% of the rights to licence Groovebook as a service to other companies.
And like they say, the rest of it is history…
Within 4 months from airing, Groovebook’s sales skyrocketed: Brian and Julie got 50k more subscribers in just 5 days, sold 3 million copies and, with the aid of Kevin O’Leary, their product was featured in Jimmy Kimmel Live! But the ultimate success came a year after Groovebook was introduced: in 2015, in accordance with Mr. Wonderful, the Whitemans joined forces with Shutterfly and struck a deal of $14.5 million, turning Groovebook into Shark Tank’s largest deal period.
Since then the Groovebook app has been downloaded over a million times and has successfully converted millions, if not billions, of smartphone/tablet photos into a neat monthly photo book. Regardless of the current ownership, Shutterfly kept Brian and Julie’s dream alive: creating a fun little photo book every month for an affordable price.
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