Photo by Terex

Christmas time is here. Year 2009 has reached its end. For Pixmac the year 2009 was a huge succes in microstock! And Vitezslav Valka, CEO of the company is glad to explain the most interesting and challenging parts of the story.

First of all: People

Well, I’m a guy that cares about life satisfaction more than money. And I must say that Pixmac gives me more positive energy than any other company before. We have really a great set of people at Pixmac. Various specialities and various nationalities is what gives me a lesson every day. I’m really happy to have those ladies and gentlemen on board, because without that we can’t meet my first requirement for a successful company: A great customer support.

All that is impossible without this bunch of people: Lucie Navratilova, Michal Prynych, Martin Talavasek, Martin Vlcko, Ondrej Valka & Ondrej Raska.

It’s always about relationship. In personal life same as in business. And at Pixmac, we’re doing our best to have same quality of relationship with customers as we have inside the company. We’re open and positive. Hopefully you feel that too.

Second: New features

We’ve started with reselling of Fotolia photos in 2008 along with our collection. That was our first non-conventional idea in microstock. But as we’re trying to be better every day, we weren’t satisfied with one advantage only. So we’ve added Celebrity content. Actually it was first introduction of traditional celebrity photos to microstock pricing. That was late 2008. In the year 2009, we’ve solved a few more thoughts from our wildest microstock dreams. Let’s look into the backstage of Pixmac. We’re proud of:

• One Stop Shopping – the easiest way to purchase photo online
• 10 million photos for one money – the greatest number in the industry
• Dreamstime – joined the collection
• Image Source – first traditional agency at Pixmac
• Yuri Arcurs – joined Pixmac collection

Third: New countries and challenges

But it’s not about features only. In this international world, not everybody speaks English and it’s not just PayPal and Credit Card what rules the world of payments. The world is sliced to many small parts and cultures. And that’s our biggest challenge at Pixmac. To learn those cultures and to serve them in the right way as a local friend. I must say, it’s difficult job. About ten times more difficult, that what I thought in the beginning. But, we made it! We’re successful in finding new territories.

We’ve started with English site in September 2008 at www.pixmac.com and then our beloved Czech version came in beginning of 2009. Right after that we’ve started all the other versions such as Finnish, Russian, Spanish, Brasilian, German, Dutch, Polish and Austrian. We’ve also experimented with French and Italian languages as we’re playing with UK English site. Some of those languages have also their own Twitter account: Finnish, British English and American. Well, that’s a lot of work for the first year. But we made it together with all the great people in the team:

• Merja Leppinen – lady that introduced Corbis to Finland
• Ania Menzel – loving mother from Poland
• Andrej Iurlov – photographer that lives in Prague is doing Russian Pixmac
• Cathy Mason – has left FedEx to join Pixmac US
• Fernando Cortes – our guy in Argentina
• Daniel Wiedemann – skilled microstocker that does Brasilian Pixmac
• Istvan Loerincz – Austrian Territory Manager speaks Hungarian & German
• Kiran Birring – our fresh & skilled representative in United Kingdom
• Frenk Kaufmann and his lady – Dutch version captains

Well and that’s just the beginning. Because we’re already working on few more territories to explore.

Contests & giveaways

We did a lot of contests over the internet and in the offline world. And also a lot of giveaways. Some of them on our site, some  via Twitter and Facebook. And you may bet on us, that we’re going to make it in 2010 too! Watch twitter.com/pixmac and join our Facebook page, because only there you can be informed about what’s happening inside Pixmac.

Prizes

As a proof of our quality assurance we’ve received Internet Effectiveness Awards 09: The Prize For Innovation and we also were silver at WebExpo 2009. And that’s not all. We’re now working on TRUSTe seal on our site and Verisign certification to become a trusted partner to anyone.

Future

For the future we already have few features in the oven. Oh, do you feel the Christmas spirit? Ok, there are some secrets that may be told only in Christmas time. The first one is iSyndica. We’re going to fully support the great service that helps photographers every day. We’re going to enhance all the scripts we have on site, either jQuery or HTML/CSS. All that is fast, but may be even faster. And we know how to do it. And we’re going to support visual similarity search with a great university help.

Thank you!

And for those that are still reading this blog post there is a one last message: “Thank you for being with us, you’re certainly one of those great people that is interested in Pixmac and that helps us become one of the greatest stock photo agency out there.” Thank you and I wish you peaceful Christmas and successful year 2010!

IEA 2009 ceremony

Pixmac has been operating in the market since September 2008. The key advantage is the maximal simplicity and low prices of photos which you can use both in the advertisements and news. Even with this recent beginning, Pixmac has approached the tenth position among the world of microstock photo agencies. And we keep growing.

Our ongoing aim is to spread our great service onto the expanding global market.Its no secret, its our goal! Simultaneously, we are increasing the volume of photos and decreasing the time needed find them by the user. Cross your fingers!

Internet Effectiveness Awards