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This article Part of our ongoing series on companies owned by Dubai-based in5, a technology and healthcare support platforma. Design startups.
Have you ever purchased something online without seeing a picture of the product? Or have you ever decided to order takeout without first seeing what the food was like?
For the modern consumer, the chances of this happening are slim to none. “We’ve seen professional visual content have a huge impact on businesses across a variety of different verticals,” said Jacopo Trinca, co-founder of Dubai-based commercial photography startup Flashy. “If a restaurant doesn’t have professional imagery, 53% of users of restaurant booking platform Tripadvisor will not make a reservation. Amazon also said in a recent report that more than 65% of online buyers value product image quality more than any other information in reviews or descriptions.”
The statistics shared by Trinca are just a few of a list that he admits “is still going on.” But towards the end of 2019, Trinca and his co-founder Aidan Christofferson realized a pertinent issue for businesses in the UAE. “Put simply, buying photography is hard,” Christopherson said. “There are thousands of different photographers offering different services, with varying service level agreements, and inconsistent pricing and delivery of content. In an age where content is so important and widely consumed, creating professional content at scale seems incredibly difficult! So, We finally took the leap in July 2021 and have been growing Flashy ever since.”
The co-founders say that despite their professional backgrounds in finance and technology, they decided to pursue entrepreneurship due to their shared “love of contemporary art and photography.” Their dedication to photography is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that only 7% of photographers who applied to the Flashy platform were selected. “When considering photographers for the platform, we look broadly at the photographer’s past experience and portfolio—each photographer is individually vetted,” Kristofferson explains. “Since July, I have personally spoken with over 600 creatives across the GCC. These conversations have also given us insights into how we can better build our platform to solve the problems our clients and photographers are experiencing. .”
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Flashy co-founders Aidan Christofferson and Jacopo Trinca
In terms of its products, Flashy provides professional product/service photography to e-commerce businesses as well as businesses in the catering, hospitality, events and real estate industries. Its main selling point is that the startup offers customers the option to book, shoot and receive market-ready images within 24 hours. “We help clients of all sizes – from restaurants that need the occasional menu shot for food aggregators and social media, to real estate agents looking to capture thousands of units per year and increase their conversion rates to outperform their competitors!” Christopher Sen said. “If there’s a product that needs to be captured, we can do it. We want customers to forget about this content capture process and focus on what matters most – their product.”
Flashy’s services also extend to other areas such as drone photography, virtual tours and corporate portraits. “It’s also very exciting to see the opportunity for us to cater to more underserved industries that have yet to take full advantage of digital content exposure, such as the automotive market, health and beauty booking platforms, and the many local regional brands selling on e-commerce platforms. It’s like Amazon or Noon,” Trinca added. Their efforts have certainly paid off – in less than a year since launch, Flashy claims to have achieved 170% month-on-month (MoM) growth, while recording a 500% increase in monthly shots in 2022 alone. Especially in April 2022, compared with March, revenue increased by 98% and shooting volume increased by 75%.
Christopherson attributes his startup’s success to the “speed, quality and consistency” of its service. But there is another major factor: the growth of UAE real estate, or rather, the post-pandemic recovery. 70% of Flashy’s recent growth has been achieved through services provided to the real estate industry. “This was definitely a gap in the market that we identified early on and we also noticed from a customer perspective when we moved into different apartments in Dubai during our time in Dubai,” Trinca said. “There are more than 800 real estate agencies in the city, and more than 36,000 new properties will be built in 2021. The UAE real estate industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12.36% by 2026, so we have ambitious plans to continue to conquer this area, while simplifying our services and improving our offerings with an extremely customer-centric approach to this vertical.”
Christofferson and Trinca have raised $400,000 in pre-seed funding by the end of 2021 and are currently looking to expand into Saudi Arabia and the rest of the GCC. Plans to raise $2 million in seed funding are also in the works. When asked about what’s next for Flashy, the co-founders didn’t shy away from expressing their ambitions. “World domination,” the two said. “We’re just kidding! Our goal now is to follow in the footsteps of other high-growth startups like Anghami and SWVL and show that UAE startups can compete on the world stage.”
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