Dave Naffziger's Blog

Every year my wife sends photo cards to our family and friends for the holidays. She carefully sorts through our photos from the year and selects several that she shares on the cards. She shuns the cards on photographic paper and instead selects heavy stock folded cards. The final product is usually great, however we’ve definitely been disappointed by print quality from time to time.

This year she used Tiny Prints (after a great experience with their birth announcements). Everything about the card was just better than the ones we had ordered in the past. But, the single biggest, unexpected awesomeness was the photo touch up they did on the cover photo of the card.

See the before and after below (yes, one version is scanned from the card). Sophie had a slight, but noticeable pimple to the right of her mouth in the original photo. It wasn’t something that we had thought to touch up, but we absolutely noticed that it had been removed when we got the actual card.

The amazing thing is that this is what Tiny Prints does. See co-founder Ed Han’s description from their ‘Our Story’ page:

Since our first year together, we’ve reviewed every order, edited every photo and obsessed over every typo and etiquette mistake on every card that has passed through our hands. After years of extreme perfectionism, our customers expect this level of attentive detail, and every member of our staff is proud to provide it.

I don’t think I could have been convinced in 2003 that there was a market for another online photo card company. Ofoto, Shutterfly and Snapfish seemed to have that market pretty locked up. However, there was clearly a high end to the market that had been overlooked and Tiny Prints has grown aggressively since. They initially launched with a focus on birth announcements, and have steadily expanded to a whole range of cards, calendars, photo books and even corporate cards (no save the date magnets though).

At this point, I can’t imagine we’d order cards from anywhere else. There aren’t too many businesses that fall into that category.