Capturing Buyer Fun - and Then Reselling It

Using the customer to sell to the customer. Lower cost of goods sold and advertising means nice margins for the seller. And for the buyer, well, hey, it was fun. Can't put a price on that - or can you?  JL

Courtney Rubin reports in the New York Times:

The photo booth, that fixture of one-off events like weddings and parties, is taking up residence at lifestyle brands, as companies like Urban Decay and Topshop realize some of the best advertising they can get are branded photos of customers having a good time. “There’s been a lot of talking about the death of brick and mortar and how e-commerce is tak(ing) over the world. We encourage the idea that shopping can be entertainment and a social phenomenon.”

When the eyeglass purveyor Warby Parker was still in its infancy and did not yet have brick-and-mortar stores, customers would visit the offices to try on frames. Dave Gilboa, a founder, noticed they often posted options to social media for friends to weigh in.

So when the company opened its first store on Greene Street in SoHo in 2013, it decided to make the picture-taking (and sharing) easier by installing a permanent photo booth that tweets and emails digital images.

The brand gets a social media boost and the equivalent of user-generated ads: Images are emblazoned with “Warby Parker” and set against a background of colorful illustrations by the artist Alia Penner, who designed the company’s first television commercial.

“There’s been a lot of people talking about the death of brick and mortar and how e-commerce is going to take over the world,” Mr. Gilboa said recently. “We wanted to offer something that wasn’t available through e-commerce, to really encourage the idea that shopping can be entertainment and that it’s a social phenomenon.”

Photo

From left, Ariel Martinez, strikes a pose with his sons, Jariel and Darren, in the photo booth at Warby Parker's SoHo store. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Warby Parker now has photo booths in half its 12 stores, including one in Miami, where the photo is taken from the ceiling against a background designed to make it look as if customers are on a pool raft. About 10 percent of customers use the kiosks, according to company figures, with “hundreds of photos being posted to social media,” Mr. Gilboa said.

The photo booth, that fixture of one-off events like weddings and parties, is now taking up permanent residence at fashion and lifestyle brands, as companies like Urban Decay and Topshop realize that some of the best advertising they can get are well-lighted branded photos of customers having a good time.

Celebrities are doing the same: In the last two years, Neil Patrick Harris and Kelly Ripa have installed booths in their houses with “perfect lighting and perfect exposure,” said Mark van S, founder of Brooklyn’s MVS Studio Inc. (At Ms. Ripa’s house, a network allows the pictures to be dropped into a slide show that appears on all the screens in her house.)

“People take better pictures of themselves than photographers, because you don’t have that same level of insecurity,” Mr. van S said. “It’s a very cost-effective way to do marketing, especially when this stuff is going out to social.”

The financial arrangements are complicated: Some booths are rentals; others are bought. Features and pricing vary widely.

The kiosks, which are often free for customers, allow companies to collect information like email addresses or Twitter handles, and to let customers opt in to receive updates.

“As long as the process doesn’t take forever, people are pretty open if they’re going to get a takeaway that they enjoy,” said Aaron Fisher-Cohen, a founder of the Bosco, a photo booth company that says it has pioneered the GIF (looping moving image) booth.

Mr. Fisher-Cohen’s company, named both for his cat and the first successful photo booth company, founded in 1890, has installed permanent booths at Soho House New York, Paintbox nail studio and in the SoHo store of the sustainable clothing brand Reformation. “Booth” actually is a misnomer for some of the Bosco’s products; it’s sometimes an iPad with an app, not enclosed by walls.

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The eyeglass purveyor Warby Parker makes picture-taking (and sharing) easier for their customers, with a permanent photo booth. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

For fashion brands, the booth has in no way replaced the dressing-room selfie, which tends to be solitary. The booth “is very social. It’s usually more than one person,” said Yael Aflalo, a founder of Reformation. Ms. Aflalo declined to share figures about use, but said that she hopes eventually to have the technology to tie it to purchasing habits.

The photographer Seamus Ryan, founder of Booth Nation in London, calls his cubes “a full-on fashion shoot in a box, all the glamorous aspects without the inconvenience of a photographer.”

Mr. Ryan, whose clients include Chanel and Louis Vuitton, put a booth — with a wind machine and “beauty lighting” — in Topshop in Oxford Circus three years ago. It was so successful that he’s since added two more.

He learned the appeal of photo booths and perfected their lighting while shooting an ad campaign for a feminine hygiene product eight years ago. Tasked with getting portraits of 100 women genuinely laughing, he figured one way to do it would be to mock up a booth in his studio off Columbia Road in London and open

it to the public. “It was a hit,” he said.

For the health food company Juice Generation, which last month installed a booth in its financial district store in Manhattan, the photos are the basis for what the founder, Eric Helms, called “a kind of modern loyalty program.” Instead of offering cards that are stamped with each purchase, three Juice Generation employees who monitor the company’s social media invite people who post a lot of photos to come in on their birthdays with friends for free drinks and other surprises. Ditto for customers who live it up in their portraits. “We always reach out to people break-dancing or doing back flips,” Mr. Helms said. “The crazier, the better.”

One problem is that there’s no way to guarantee the company’s products ever make it into the pictures — ironic if you consider that Mr. Helms’s original idea was that the booth be exclusively for pictures of drinks, not people.

On Saturdays after SoulCycle, Audree Morrison, a Pilates teacher, and her boyfriend, Fred Pisapia, like to goof around with the photos while they’re waiting for their drinks to be made. “One time I was yawning, another time I kissed him,” Ms. Morrison said. “The people at the counter are always like, ‘Now you have to go do it with your drinks in your hand.’ ”

At the dance-cardio boutique gym AKT InMotion, which will open a studio at 1182 Broadway this month, the photo booth will also be used to build loyalty with gifts to those who post frequently.

Last year, the company ran social-media-based challenges like “Wring in the New Year,” where clients were encouraged to capture how soaked their clothes were from the sweat they had worked up, but “it’s always tough to find someone to take a picture for you,” said the founder, Anna Kaiser. “This way it will be with flattering lighting and without worrying about the angle.”