A Gallery For Instagram’s Stars: Meet CanvasPop LTD, A Flash Sales Site For Digital Art

Colleen Taylor

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch and TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked as a reporter for GigaOM, the Financial Times’ Mergermarket newswire, and the semiconductor industry newsletter Electronic News. Disclosure: Colleen holds a small amount of shares in AOL, which were awarded as part of her employment contract with TechCrunch. She personally... → Learn More

Tuesday, August 14th, 2012
canvaspop ltd

Sure, Instagram is full of cappuccino pictures and “me and my friends at the bar” snapshots, but some of app’s most popular users take some truly gorgeous photos that would fit right in on the wall of an art gallery. And that’s just what CanvasPop, the company that provides custom canvas printing services for digital data like Instagram photos and Facebook pictures, is aiming to provide with its new Limited, or “LTD,” site.

LTD is a flash sales site for curated digital and Instagram art from select high-profile artists and celebrities. LTD, which launched today with work from Cole Rise (he designed Instagram’s logo, and the service’s “Rise” filter is his namesake), will feature each artist for a few days and sell his or her work on a numbered print. Each print is accompanied by a gallery card that’s digitally signed by the artist. Prices will start at $49 for a 12″ X 12″ print.

CanvasPop takes care of all the sales, printing, shipping, and handling from its 20,000 square foot facility outside of Las Vegas, and will split the profits from each sale 50/50 with each artist, CanvasPop co-founder Adrian Salamunovic told me in an interview. The design of LTD and the flash sales aspect is meant to give the site a similar feel to a gallery exhibit, where there is also time pressure to make a buying decision. But because of its structure and the fact that it’s on the web, artists can take a much better cut of the proceeds through LTD than they would in a traditional gallery.

“An artist can make thousands of dollars with LTD, which can be very empowering,” Salamunovic said. Next on deck to exhibit on LTD are Lauren Randolph (aka Lauren Lemon) and Richard “Koci” Hernandez.

I think it’s a nice fit into the growing trend of bringing all the beautiful things we love to look at on the web into the physical realm — Sincerely and Minted are just a couple startups that have had some success in doing this. And anything that helps make the actual world around you more beautiful, while giving a nice cut of money to the artist behind the work, seems to be to be a win/win.


Company: CanvasPop
Website: canvaspop.com
Launch Date: November 1, 2009

CanvasPop is the most innovative provider of custom, high-quality canvas printing services. CanvasPop empowers photographers, digital artists, interior designers and everyday customers to print their images on high quality canvas. CanvasPop allows anyone to print any image, including Instagram, Facebook and iPhone pictures, at virtually any size regardless of the original resolution of the image. Our goal is to provide both consumers and professionals with the easiest way to print any image on canvas. CanvasPop has printing and distribution...

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