Artifact Uprising started by printing photo book albums. The Denver company now offers prints, cards and other photo items.
Jenna Walker, Artifact Uprising co-founder and CEO
Two weeks after wedding-photographer sisters Jenna Walker and Katie Thurmes launched Artifact Uprising, 48,000 people checked out their creative take on hardcover photo book albums. A week later, someone asked “What’s your exit plan?”
“What do you mean exit? We just started our business,” Walker remembers thinking.
That was two years ago last October. The fast-growing photo album site has kept the sisters and Walker’s husband, Matty, quite busy. In the first 18 months, it turned into a “multi-million dollar company seeing triple digit growth,” the .
This week, Artifact Uprising , the Visual Supply Co. in Oakland. VSCO targets creative types and photographers and offers photo apps and software.
Neither side will say how much VSCO paid, but VSCO last May. It currently employs more than 100 people.
The funding, “opened up the world of expansion for VSCO,” said Stephanie Ichinose, VSCO’s vice president of communications. “The what-if discussions finally became opportunities they could realize.”
Walker said she’d started to talk to venture capital firms to raise money and hadn’t considered selling. But VSCO’s founders who she’d met earlier approached her. Talks became serious in the third week of November.
“We were bootstrapped and profitable. We didn’t need cash to survive; but what was the right path? We had a very, very long meeting between all of founders and we realized this was a legitimate option and the company we get to build to be one of the greatest artistic companies is so compelling. I finally had clarity,” she said.
Walker remains as CEO and the team of 14 employees is committed to staying in Denver. For now, they are housed at Galvanize.
“To me, the business was never for sale and the reason being is that we know we’re not done building. We are really just at the beginning,” Walker said.
