Interview with Bryan Zmijewski, Lucky Oliver

There’s a new player in the online stock photography market: Lucky Oliver. Lucky Oliver offers photographers and illustrators a venue to sell their work while netting royalties of 60% (and sometimes more) on each sale. For customers, it offers afffordable prices, quality images, and a tagging system that improves search results.

Bryan Zmijewski, the “chief instigator” at Lucky Oliver, was nice enough to spend some time talking to us about his company and how the stock photo and wireless picture frame industries may find common opportunities in the future.

Disclosure: Lucky Oliver is a business partner of Frame Media, the sponsor of this website.

What is Lucky Oliver?
Lucky Oliver is a community-based stock photo site. We’re working with photographers and illustrators to help them sell their photos and illustrations to small business, marketers, and consumers.

When did you start the business?
We went live in June 2006 and transitioned the site to a buyer focus in December 2006. We’ve been focusing now on trying to market the site and get our images out there to a larger audience.

What does the name mean?
Like every company, you’ve got a limited pool of domains, and we were looking for something that was very personal and kind of matched our persona of being more conversational. The overall theme of our site is focus on people and education. “Lucky” is the upside of that, finding the good information and the good photos. The “Oliver” is the personal part, just being the average joe looking for information.

A lot of stock photo companies out there already. Why start another?
I’ve been a designer for 10 years and I’ve had a consulting firm that’s helped a number of start-ups and finding good imagery is still very difficult. It’s not a process that’s been figured out.

We figured there’s a lot of opportunity to create something new in this industry. The two parts of that are:

1. Working with a group of people and coming up with a collective vision of what you’re trying to do, it creates a different pool of images.
2. And two, technology wise, we’ve used the [existing] tools for a long period of time and they’ve never been adequate. We have a baseline toolset right now that we’re building off of to keep expanding the service so that designers and small businesses will have more tools to work with. The technology aspect of the site will increasingly be a larger part of what we’re doing.
Read the rest of this entry »