Framebridge, the Startup that Changed the Way Americans Think About Custom Framing

Framebridge, a direct-to-consumer (D2C) custom framing company, today announced a $30 million Series C funding led by T. Rowe Price with continued support from existing investors.

T. Rowe has backed many of the world’s leading online-offline D2C brands, and recognizes that Framebridge’s innovation and design are transforming the custom framing industry. The round allows the company to continue to invest in growth, expand its manufacturing capabilities, and drive innovation in its products and delivery channels.

Right from the start

I’ve known founder and CEO, Susan Tynan, for a long time, most notably while she was running Livingsocial’s “At Home” business. At its peak, that vertical generated approximately $100M in annual sales, much of which came from custom framing deals. This background, coupled with a miserable experience Susan had framing four standard-sized posters from a family vacation — it cost her about $1,600 and took several weeks to complete — convinced her to launch Framebridge.

Revolution was the first firm to back the company, investing initially in the summer of 2014, just as Susan was launching the business. We invested knowing that custom framing was a $5 billion fragmented industry with only one major player: the big-box craft store, Michael’s. The majority of the market was offline at a time when other major retail categories were moving online.

We believed Susan’s vision that the customer experience could be significantly better, that there was room to offer better pricing with a streamlined production process, and that an online-offline experience could grow the market well beyond its $5 billion core.

That initial vision has endured. Many companies pivot strategies or change focus over time. Not Framebridge. Susan and her team have executed on her original idea of turning a sleepy industry into an innovative one. Since then, the company has added a world-class roster of additional investors and board members including NEA, Swan & Legend, Beth Kaplan (Rent the Runway, Limited Brands), Tim O’Shaughnessy (cofounder of LivingSocial), and Gordon Segal (founder of Crate & Barrel). We have invested in every subsequent financing and today, Revolution Ventures is the company’s largest institutional shareholder.

How to transform an industry

Framebridge has forever changed the custom framing industry. They have maintained craftsmanship while bringing scale and consistency to a category historically characterized by inefficient, one-off production, and exorbitant prices.

As the company has grown, the complementary benefits of centralized production and scale have increased gross margins and new technological innovations have driven greater differentiation and sky-high customer satisfaction (NPS) scores.

But perhaps the greatest measure of happy customers is their strong repeat purchase behavior — Framebridge customers come back to frame more and more items, more and more often. What was once episodic is proving to be habitual. And customers keep telling their friends, with word-of-mouth driving down marketing costs as a percentage of sales.

Making and taking market share

If you’ve ever custom framed an item, you know the company is fixing a consumer problem. By making quality custom framing easier, less expensive, and more accessible, Framebridge is taking market share from the incumbents. In addition, the company is expanding the market by introducing new customers to the category and creating new opportunities to frame.

Today, 30% of Framebridge customers are custom framing for the first time. Nearly half of the company’s customers are millennials, a segment that has been notoriously difficult for traditional framing shops to attract.

And they’re framing items they wouldn’t have otherwise: customers have indicated that 65% of the items framed with Framebridge are things they would not have taken to a traditional custom framer. A ticket stub, a swatch from a wedding dress, or a lock of hair from a first haircut can be transformed into a physical manifestation of an important memory. In doing so, Framebridge continues to deepen its relationship with the consumer — providing much more than “just a frame.”

It’s all part of a larger consumer trend

What Framebridge has done for the custom framing industry falls into the same bucket as what Warby Parker did for prescription glasses, Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club for shaving, Glossier for makeup, Parachute for home goods, and the numerous other D2C startups that have found ways to bypass the middleman using technology to create brands with personality that millennials relate to.

The success of these brands requires execution across a number of disciplines including marketing, design, technology, manufacturing, and, most importantly, consumer experience. Susan’s strong execution across these disciplines has laid the foundation for Framebridge. Supercharged by T. Rowe’s new investment, we look forward to seeing the company continue to transform the way consumers preserve their memories, inspiration, and art as we carry on this journey with the Framebridge team.