Snapbar

Snapbar offers creative solutions for virtual events by providing virtual photo booths, as well as modernizing traditional camera solutions such as corporate headshots.

They build things that help engage and connect brands and audiences with care and attention paid to authenticity and quality.

At a glance

Snapbar grew 1,000% in the three years leading to 2018, leasing a branded selfie station service to high-profile corporate events.

As a result of the pandemic, the company came to a halt. However, it also established a gift box enterprise while simultaneously intensifying efforts to enhance its online services.

Snapbar founders had been following remove.bg since the early days. The background-removal service became the foundation of the cloud-based service.

The pioneering business had a slow start but soon began to double and triple, growing 1,200% in its first five months. It currently flaunts an impressive clientele of 9,500 and active participation in as many as 10,000 events.

Clients as big as Disney, Yale, Facebook, Microsoft, and TED Talks use virtual photo booths from Snapbar for creative, branded photos of event attendees with fun elements such as stickers, overlays, and eye-catching backgrounds.

Snapbar offers creative solutions for virtual events by providing virtual photo booths, as well as modernizing traditional camera solutions such as corporate headshots.

They build things that help engage and connect brands and audiences with care and attention paid to authenticity and quality.

The Challenge

Thanks to the pandemic, the threat faced by Snapbar — previously a photobooth provider offering sleek, brandable photo booths for a variety of corporate events — was existential.

Between 2012 and 2018, the company grew from a part-time gig for co-founders Sam and Joe Eitzen into number 473 on the 2019 “Inc. 5,000” list of America’s fastest-growing private businesses.

Between 2015 and 2020, it had grown 1,450% with revenue of between $4-5m with 18 full-time and 30 part-time staff on its books.

“In March 2020,” Sam tells us, “we lost 100% of our business for the foreseeable future.”

Brilliantly, the Eitzen brothers bought themselves some time in a “drastic pivot” setting up a care and gift package company for corporates supplied by independent firms.

The company made $500,000 in three months and bought enough time for an engineer to create the second pivot - a virtual photo booth.

That’s where remove.bg came in.

The Work

Sam can’t remember where his brother, a long-term Photoshop user, read about the service, but he knows it was a long time ago, perhaps in a digital photography blog.

Nevertheless, remove.bg re-emerged as the ideal partner for Snapbar’s new venture: a pioneering online selfie station.

“Without remove.bg, I wouldn’t have started Snapbar’s virtual solutions,” says Sam, simply.

He knew his cloud-based service needed to produce creative, sometimes branded, user-generated content.
Just like the real-world equivalent, the virtual booths would need to have the possibility for overlays, watermarks, stickers, and fun backgrounds. remove.bg would replace the green screen Snapbar had been using.

Onboarding was easy. After making use of a free trial, Snapbar accessed remove.bg’s open API, starting with 5,000 credits for high-res background removal.

“Then we bought more and more!” said Sam.

There were actually some improvements in the cloud-based service, both for consumers and Snapbar.

The provider was able to offer a digital mosaic so “brands could connect with their audience and create digital art at the same time,” emerging as people create or upload content.

And without the need for a real-world presence, the company’s profit margin has doubled.

The Result

Even though companies quickly moved events online, no other company was ready to take advantage of the new opportunity for branded, creative, user-generated content.

Maybe that’s why Snapbar’s Virtual Booth had a slow start. In March and April, the company had just a couple of events wanting virtual photobooths. There were 10-15 by the end of May. June and July each saw a threefold increase in May’s figures. And volume doubled in August and again in September and October. The company now counts as many as 9500 clients.

Since the end of March 2020, Snapbar has provided eye-catching photos of virtual attendees for 10,000 events, creating a whole new digital market in the process.

And these aren’t small events. Thanks to the company’s reputation, Snapbar has been able to create virtual photo booths for Google, Microsoft, Facebook Yves Saint Laurent, Yale University, and Disney.

Use cases are quite varied. There are graduation ceremonies, virtual headshots, school commencements and yearbooks, and the main TED Talks.

If Sam has a concern about remove.bg, it’s that Snapbar might suddenly run out of remove.bg credits: there are usually between 100-150 live bookings taking place at any one time and people are removing dozens of backgrounds at once. They have sometimes hit 500 backgrounds removed in a minute.

“remove.bg is absolutely key. If it should go down, it would be game over for the event”, says Sam.

He has nothing but praise for remove.bg - and his customers feel the same.

“We have lots of repeat customers - some of them have rebooked us eight times. remove.bg is better than I could want it to be. If I didn’t have it, I don’t know what we would do.”

Sam has given remove.bg a perfect rating of 10/10 and expressed extreme satisfaction with how effectively the tool functions and its continuous improvement over the years.

In addition to being at the basis of their solution, remove.bg has also played a pivotal role in saving Snapbar approximately 200,000 minutes and 500,000 dollars by eliminating the need for expensive and time consuming green screen rent.