Digital scrapbooking is a big business. Companies from Apple to Shutterfly have been offering consumers a way to create pretty digital photobooks and scrapbooks from various pictures and other digital memories (and making a good amount of money in the process). Today, a well-known brick and mortar craft store, Michaels, is buying Chicago-based digital scrapbooking startup ScrapHD. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
ScrapHD allows consumers to create digital scrapbooks online that can be printed wither at home or have bound into a professional, coffee-book style book. The site also offered the ability to create greetings cards and posters from photos. Now users will be able to use the service to print. Now users will soon be able to send their prints for pickup at their nearest Michaels store.
Michaels says the scrapbook business is a $2 billion market, with the U.S. digital photo book market growing by nearly 60 percent over the past five years. The ScrapHD website will be closed during the transition, and will re-launch on Michaels.com with free content and paid memberships for access to premium content.
The fact that brick and mortar stores are trying to get into digital scrapbooking through acquisitions could be good news for smaller online scrapbooking sites, like Scrapblog, as the digital scrapbooking space is quite competitive with Flickr, Apple, Shutterfly all offering similar technologies to put user photos on digital books.