Storehouse will shut down services July 15, entire team will migrate to Square

Storehouse, an aesthetically pleasing and exceedingly well-designed mobile app for sharing multimedia stories, announced today that it will be sunsetting services for its users on July 15. Furthermore, CEO Mark Kawano tells me that the entire team at the app, currently four employees, will be moving to Square.

Kawano was hush hush on specifics regarding the move to Square or whether the company has acquired any of Storehouse’s IP. He only detailed that the team was “excited to join a team of amazing designers and engineers building the future of payments and commerce.”

The app for building photo/video stories gathered early notoriety after winning an Apple Design Award and the 2014 Crunchie for Best Mobile App.

After initially beginning as an iPad-only experience when Storehouse launched in 2013, the app has since extended to find a home on the iPhone, Android and the Apple TV.

The app gathered the ire of some of its most vocal users when it stripped public social networking features from it and rebranded the app as one for sharing memories with your close circles of friends and family. Ultimately, the major move toward rethinking Storehouse’s experience and flow wasn’t quite enough to keep the app afloat.

“After the 2.0 changes, while things got better, they kind of stayed at the same rate,” Kawano said. “While some numbers were 2x better and others were 10x better, the reality is we had to be 100x better.”

Existing Storehouse users can log-in through the iPhone app or website during this time and request an archive of their stories, which they should receive in about 24 hours once everything has been processed.

“While it’s not necessarily the outcome we were hoping for with the service when we first started, we hope that [users] will still able to value it and were inspired by the connections and stories they were able to tell,” Kawano told me. “Hopefully that inspiration in everything that they’ve learned from others and the ways that they can communicate will continue to live on for them as well.”