CanvasPic Turns Pics into Canvases
by Jarrett Streebin
Javier Muñoz is one of our early customers and we wanted to share the story of his app and how EasyPost has helped.
I've always had a fascination with fine art, photography and print design. I consider myself an artist and designer. I love to paint as a hobby and I usually stretch my own canvases to save money and to create my own custom sizes. As with most hobbies, I realized I couldn't make a consistent living off of it. That's when I began my career in the graphic arts. I transitioned easily into graphic design and began specializing in print and logo design. Eventually, I began helping many friends and clients start their business by designing logos and marketing materials for them on a freelance basis.
One of my freelance clients was starting an educational software company and hired me to do his logo. He eventually hired me on full time as the company's in-house Graphic Designer. When Apple iOS devices started coming into the class room, our company started creating iOS apps for the education market and sold them to school districts nationwide. After over a decade of working with this company, I began to ponder the freedoms of starting my own business in the graphics arts realm with all the valuable knowledge I had gained.
About two years ago, a vendor I worked with mentioned they were selling one of their large format printers. I saw this as an opportunity to bring together my loves of creativity, printing and technology. My first idea was to photograph my art and sell them on canvas. From there I was printing all kinds of imagery on canvas for unique wall art. The test prints were impressive. Soon I was playing around with pics I had taken with my iPhone.
The quality was really good, especially with the newer iPhone models. I realized camera phone technology was only going to get better and that many people, including myself, rarely used any other camera to capture everyday events. After posting pics of my printed canvases on Facebook, I had a tremendous response from friends and friends of friends wanting me to make canvas prints of their pictures. I realized that I was going to need an easy way to get their pictures and stay organized with their order information including canvas size and delivery address. This is when my wife suggested the obvious: "Why don't you just build an app that does all that for you?"
Over the next few weeks I drew up how each screen would look using Adobe Illustrator. Once the logic and flow of the app was complete, I showed them to the lead developer of a mobile software company I know, Ruben Nieves. I wanted his opinion and advice on the app.
Ruben is an experienced iOS developer, and was immediately on board with the idea and started giving me some feedback while developing the app. He quickly realized that shipping was not going to be a simple task. We didn't want to be stuck at the computer creating and printing shipping labels for every order and manually transferring address information to a form online. After some research, Ruben found out about EasyPost, which made shipping really easy and painless. With every order that comes in, EasyPost automatically grabs the delivery address information and generates a paid postage label for every order. All that needs to be done is to print it and stick it to the package. It could not be easier.