The article in this issue is part of our series of articles on businesses that are part of Dubai-based In5, an providing a platform for technology, media and design companies.
Have you ever bought something from the internet without having just a glance at the images of the item? Have you thought of ordering a takeaway without taking a look at how the food is like?
In the age of modern consumers it is likely that the occurrence of such events occurring are small. “We have seen that professional visual content makes a huge difference for businesses across a range of distinct verticals,” says Jacopo Trinca, cofounder of Dubai-based commercial photography company “Flashy. “53% of users of restaurant booking platform Tripadvisor won’t make a reservation if the restaurant does not have professional imagery. Amazon also stated in a recent report that more than 65% of online buyers value the product image quality more than any other information in the reviews or description.”
The figures that Trinca reveals represent a small part of the list that, as he has admitted, “goes on.” In the latter part of 2019 Trinca and partner in the company Aidan Christofferson recognized a related problem that was relevant to businesses operating located in UAE. “To put it simply, buying photography is hard,” says Christofferson. “You have thousands of different photographers offering different services, with varying service-level agreements, and inconsistent pricing and deliverables. At a time when content is so important and widely consumed, creating professional content at scale seemed so hard! So, we finally took the leap in July 2021, and have been growing Flashy ever since.”
The co-founders claim that they made the leap into business due to their “deep love for contemporary art and photography,” despite their professional backgrounds in tech and finance. Their passion for photography can be seen in the fact that only 7 percent of photographers who sign up on the Flashy platform are chosen. “We extensively consider photographers’ past experience and portfolios when considering them for the platform- every single photographer is individually vetted,” says Christofferson. “Since July, I’ve personally spoken to over 600 creatives across the GCC. These conversations have also given us great insight into how to better build our platform to address the problems experienced by both our customers and our photographers.”
As for its offerings, Flashy provides professional product/service photography to e-commerce companies as well as businesses that are in the F&B hospitality, events and real estate markets. The primary selling point of the company is the fact that the company provides its clients with the ability to schedule, shoot and receive professional-looking images in just 24 hours. “We help all sizes of customers- from restaurants who need the occasional menu shoot for food aggregators, and social media to realtors looking to capture thousands of units a year, and improve their conversion rates over their competitors!” says Christofferson. “If there’s a product to be captured, we can do it. We want our customers to forget about this content-capture process, and to focus on what matters most- their product.”
Flashy’s services are also applicable to different areas, such as drone-based photography, virtual tour as well as corporate portraits. “It’s also very exciting to see the opportunity for us to cater to more underserved sectors that are not yet maximizing their digital content exposure, such as car marketplaces, health and beauty booking platforms, and many homegrown regional brands selling on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon or Noon,” says Trinca. Their efforts have definitely been rewarded- in less than a year after the company’s launch, Flashy claims to have been able to achieve 170% months-on-month (MoM) growth as well as seeing monthly photoshoot volumes grow by 500% just in 2022. April 2022 was the month that Flashy experienced was a notable exception, with a 98% increase in revenue, as well as 75% more photography sessions when compared to March.
Christofferson credits the success of his company on the “speed, quality and consistency” of its offerings. However, there is an additional major contributor that has been the rise of real property in the UAE or, more accurately the post-pandemic resurgence. 70 percent of the recent growth is due to the services it provides in the residential real estate market. “This was definitely a gap in the market we discovered early on, and it’s something that we both noticed from a customer standpoint as well, as we moved into different flats in Dubai during our tenure in the city,” Trinca says. Trinca. “There are more than 800 real estate agents within the city and over 36,000 new homes were constructed by the year 2021. This market is predicted to expand by a compound annual rate of 12.36 percent until 2026 across the UAE and we’ve got big plans to continue to tackle this industry and streamline our services and enhancing our products by implementing a focused on the needs of our customers to this sector.
