Pixlee Lets Retailers Market Using Real Customers’ Photos

Selfies or vacation photos are apparently a big business. Seriously.

Pixlee, a San Francisco-based startup, allows retailers or brands to market directly to customers by using their own photos through curating them from social media or having the customer directly submit them for use, which the company says leads to a more authentic and engaging shopping experience for consumers.

Pixlee was founded in July of 2012 by Kyle Wong, Awad Sayeed, Miraj Mohsin and Jeff Chen, all entrepreneurs in their early 20s at the time. The company was initially founded out of Wong’s dorm room at Stanford University, and was then accepted to the StartX Business Incubator in 2012.

The company, which now has about 30 employees in offices in San Francisco and New York (and is eyeing another office in Toronto), helps brands and retailers find customer photos and videos in real-time across the internet and social media, and then reaches out directly to those customers to ask their permission to be featured on the brand or product’s website or ad campaign.

Wong said the idea for Pixlee came from the “gap” of the demand for digital content growing exponentially, but the budgets for brands needing to fill that gap not following suit.

“Professional photography is very expensive, and it was a great way to connect with the customer in a way that’s very cost-efficient,” Wong said. “… The content demand is growing exponentially, and the budgets are not, and that gap is a really hard gap to fill if you’re not going to spend any more money. And customer-generated content is a great way to do that.”

Pixlee, which now works with about 150 brands, including Gaiam, Kenneth Cole, Levi’s and numerous professional sports teams, received $1.5 million in seed funding from venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz, XSeed Capital, and Rothenberg Ventures after finishing the StartX incubator. In 2015, Pixlee closed another funding round for $4 million that included investors such as GS Shop and You & Mr Jones Brandtech Ventures.

The fast-growing company has also won a number of awards, including Digiday’s Signal Award for “Best Content Curation Platform,” SXSW “Most Disruptive Retail Technology” Audience Choice Award and San Francisco Business Time’s Best Places to Work, while Wong and Sayeed were featured in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list of marketing and advertising entrepreneurs in 2015, both at the age of 24 at the time.

Wong said Pixlee’s queries to consumers on behalf of brands or retailers asking them for permission to use their photos online or in ad campaigns are typically about 75 percent successful and noted that the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League was Pixlee’s first client.

“The 49ers and a lot of initial use cases where very focused on community. They wanted to showcase the fans, showcase the customer,” Wong said.

But what most consumers tend to appreciate about Pixlee, at least according to Wong, is the “authenticity” associated with the use of their photos in a brand’s ad campaign or on its website. Instead of featuring some glamorous or highly stylized model in a traditionally well-lit (and costly) photo shoot in some impossibly glamorous location, brands are now starting to realize the value of their own customers touting their products on social media.

For example, Converse might have more traction posting a picture of a customer wearing its shoes in a normal, everyday setting and looking satisfied with the product than a “stylized” picture of a celebrity or athlete wearing the same shoes and trying to sell the product.

Pixlee said that, so far, brands that have used it in their ad campaigns have seen a 21-percent increase in traffic from social media, a doubling of their conversion rates and a 6 percent increase in average order value.

“Sometimes you’d be surprised at the photos that lead to the sale,” Wong said. “Everyone is so focused on lifestyle images, but sometimes when you think about at the very bottom of the funnel, you want to think about what’s the texture of this photo? You don’t actually need the highly Photoshopped or really good looking content. You actually just want authenticity.”