In 2013 Marc Elkiner had a great idea. He saw potential in turning the humble Photobooth into a multimillion-dollar enterprise.
Elkiner, who was born in Belgium, understood that all it needed was a new image and a solid infrastructure to take it from a lowly income earner into a money spinner.
“My business partner and I started the company with just $20,000USD. We never took external capital until much later, which I am proud of,” he says.
“We sold it in 2020. We started with a small idea and made it into a big success. Yes, it may be small compared to other industries, but no one had done that before in our industry.”
Elkiner had the credentials to make the business a success. He graduated Suma Cum Laude from Boston University and started his career at the esteemed luxury jeweler Harry Winston.
At 24, he was in charge of store openings and multimillion budgets across three continents.
He has also achieved an MBA from INSEAD (Institut Européen D’administration Des Affaires) the world’s leading and largest graduate business school.
Sharingbox was conceived when Sidney, his partner, was working on a project to try and encourage engineers to work for a meat processing company: “No one wanted to work there,” he recalls. “So we were trying to come up with something to make the company fun and interesting.
“He came across a photo booth machine and thought it could be a way to encourage people to put some cool images on the Internet.”
They decided to buy a machine from China: “When it arrived, it wasn’t great! But we used it, and it worked,” says Marc.
Their concept worked so well that Marc got an email from the leading hardware company in France – Leroy Merlin: “They asked for 25 machines to rent. We only had five. I thought it was a fishing expedition from a rival company. When we discovered it
was real, they then asked for 50.”
Leroy Merlin eventually needed 134 machines for their rollout. The deal was worth just over $345,000USD. Marc knew they would make it work.
He bought a truck and drove across Europe to make sure they could fulfill the order.
“This was the beginning of endless nights of assembling the units because we had no staff,” recalls Marc.
“We did everything on our own. But once we had all those machines, we made a very early decision to grow the business internationally versus keeping it local.”
This was the beginning of two pivotal moments for the company. The first was Marc realized they needed to change the machines] so they could fit in smaller vehicles. They then built it so anyone could move it, whatever they were driving.
Then came a revamp of the image of the photo booth – one which would change the game even further: “We had built it in a way that anybody could move it. And then we knew we wanted it to be good-looking as well. We wanted something that was sexy.”
Marc realized there was a lot of demand for weddings, but with their price point, they were too high. The solution? Creating a portable photo booth that looked good, as was reasonably priced, which anyone could put together:
“People would come to the office, get their machines, and then go to their weddings and assemble by themselves,” says Marc.
The second pivotal moment was the realization that they could create software which meant they could make the technology cloud-based: “I realized we didn’t need to use machine software,” he adds.
“We built it on a computer, exported it to the cloud, and downloaded it onto the unit. So we didn’t need to be physically with the unit anymore. And that changed everything because one person could build configurations for hundreds of events without being next to the machines. It changed the game for us.”
Now, thanks to his innovation, they could offer multiple different concepts and backgrounds to clients at their events.
When Marc came to the US with sharingbox, they had already established a solid reputation from their work in Europe with the likes of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
The company worked with Burberry and Ferragamo on their perfumes and were able to activate over 50 units in multiple branches of department store giant Macys.
He says: “I’m very proud that we became the. We’ve worked with everybody in the luxury sector. All those beautiful companies were comfortable using our products versus other producers because we had a design approach.
“It wasn’t bulky, big, or ugly, and it didn’t stand out. But at the same time, you could make it stand out. We could brand everything so it became a part of a client’s environment. That was a huge decision we didn’t know at the time.”
Marc’s forward-thinking revolutionized the face of Photo Booth marketing. From 2018 to 2019, they started to roll out yet another forward-thinking model – the idea of the concept: “Everything had become very price sensitive. In 2018 we had a terrible year.
“We were selling a lot and doing a $20 million turnover, but we had a very bad
bottom line.
“We re-engineered completely and changed our identity. We became content creators.”
Sharingbox began using the tagline ‘we create’ and started to sell concepts.
The company increased its revenue significantly in terms of gross margin: “It was a significant transformation and restructuring of the business when we started selling setups versus selling just units,” he adds.
Now Marc participates in multiple roundtables and is regularly asked to speak at photo booth events, namely the Photo Booth Expo in Las Vegas, the largest of its kind in the world.
“Every year, we deliver a presentation explaining what we’re doing. I have had many people write to me: ‘We’ve changed our work based on what you spoke about. We’re
doing better, we’ve cut our costs and we’re more profitable. As an industry leader, you want everybody to get better.”
