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The Bosco: The Photobooth Company Making A Mint From Party Pictures [VIDEO]

This article is more than 9 years old.

What do Rihanna, Beyoncé and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon have in common? They have all had their picture snapped by The Bosco, a photobooth startup that produces shareable GIFs - looping moving images - from the pictures it prints. This Brooklyn-based company has developed party pictures into a legitimate business, generating $3.5 million in 2013 revenue from 800 events.

"In the early days we’d be lucky if it were three or four events a week, now it’s three or four events a night," says filmmaker and Bosco cofounder, Aaron Fisher-Cohen, 30. The company builds its booths in its Bushwick loft office then rents them out for a starting price of $2,950 for the night. That provides party planners with a booth that prints four pictures in a row and generates a shareable GIF of the pictures. Add ons, like putting an extra logo at the bottom of a photo, costs the customer an additional $600 or so.

A filmmaker and photographer, Fisher-Cohen had been interested in working on a photobooth when he met cofounder Nick Fehr through a mutual friend. Fehr, who had run a small photobooth company while at UCLA, was working as a freelance Web developer in New York. After a fateful encounter outside a Brooklyn sandwich shop in late 2011, the duo wrote a business plan to create a GIF photo booth.

The pair raised a small family-and-friends round to start up in 2012. They lent booths for free and utilized connections to get their booths in parties, while their shareable GIFs spread the word online.

“Every event we do gets us out there more," explains Fisher-Cohen. "If 300 people share their photo on Facebook, that’s 10,000 people finding out about us.”

The company has grown gradually to operate across the U.S. from its New York and LA hubs; it is on course to do more than 1,000 events this year.

"A lot of our income is large-scale events," says Fisher-Cohen. "At Coachella we did three green screen video booths with green screen treadmills, and you could share hi-def videos, and that was something that had never been done in live setting." The Bosco charges far more for these customized projects, from $40,000 to $120,000 and above. Smaller booths also go on tour with artists - Carrie Underwood, Lady Gaga, Demi Lovato and Wiz Khalifa are all customers.

"We haven’t thought about raising more because we operate at such a high margin we’re able to finance projects and grow the way we want ourselves," says cofounder Nick Fehr, 26. "We’re projecting to do over $7 million in revenue in 2014."

Their largest expenses are paying their 25 full-time employees, plus 60 people who work events.

The Bosco also has permanent booths in hotels, stores and clubs in New York, plus booths in DKNY in London; these venues buy the booth and pay a monthly service fee. Elsewhere overseas, The Bosco has organized booths in the U.K., Japan and even three at the Olympic village in the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Russia. (Bosco were also at the Nanjing Youth Olympic Games in China.)

Of course, they aren't the only snap-happy photobooth startup out there; Photomadic and MVS Studio are among the companies providing similar services for parties, music tours and other events.

As for The Bosco, they will soon be expanding into smaller booths, an iPad app and NC17, a film company that will make commercials.

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