Co-founders of CanvasPop are Nazim Ahmed, left, and Adrian Salamunovic. Blair Gable for The Globe and Mail

When DNA 11 started up in 2005, the company hoped to capitalize on the Internet’s power to deliver on-demand custom products.

In that respect, the Ottawa-based startup succeeded. Indeed, its product line might even be a little too custom: Users send in a DNA sample in the form of a cheek swab, and the company creates artwork based on a visualization of that sample. The product is unique, relatively expensive and very, very niche.

Now, the minds behind DNA 11 have launched another business, hoping to better manage the line between customization and mass appeal. This time, the input is photos and digital artwork instead of DNA samples and fingerprints, and the output is large canvas prints. The goal is to turn that photo on your iPhone into a portrait on your wall.

Launched less than a month ago, CanvasPop is built almost entirely on DNA 11’s existing resources, says Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of both companies.

The business model is also similar, based on the premise that customers will pay for products they can be sure nobody else has.

“We knew early on that on-demand era was coming,” says Mr. Salamunovic, a serial entrepreneur who started his first Web development company at age 16. “More and more companies were looking to customize everything from blue jeans to M&Ms.”

CanvasPop allows customers to upload photos or digital artwork to the site and select the size and style of the canvas they wish to have made. Whereas DNA portraits cost between $200 and about $1,200, the canvas business is tailored toward a lower end of the market, with prices starting at about $40 and topping out at around $540.

There’s no shortage of players already in the market into which CanvasPop is wading. T-shirt makers have been in the online custom printing business for years, and there’s no shortage of companies – both physical and virtual – that will turn images into canvases.

However the company is trying to differentiate itself in two ways. The first is its heavy emphasis on design along with custom sizing. CanvasPop offers customers a variety of styles and options, such as splitting an image into a triptych.

Users can also select a number of filters to apply to the image – a stylistic process that will look familiar to anyone who has used photo manipulation software such as Adobe’s Photoshop.

“In canvas print there really is no design leader,” Mr. Salamunovic says. “There’s no Apple Computer Corp. of this industry.”

But where CanvasPop hopes to really stand out is in the type of images it will process. Traditional printers usually won’t work with images below a certain resolution, since those images have to be enlarged significantly to create the canvas.

However Mr. Salamunovic says the company will accept even very small images. CanvasPop hopes to make that process work by letting users apply filters to the image that will reduce the need for high resolution.

The idea is that a small image may not translate well to a canvas on its own, but if filtered to look like a pencil sketch or an oil painting, for example, it may retain an artistic quality.

That gamble – being able to turn low-resolution photos into wall-worthy art – is at the heart of where CanvasPop hopes to find its market.

The site is actively targeting the massive wealth of photos on the world’s smart phones and on social networking sites such as Facebook, the Web’s largest photo repository. Indeed, much of CanvasPop’s focus in the near future is on making it as easy as possible for users of those platforms to turn their images into artwork.

So far, CanvasPop appears to have at least achieved a less-niche audience than its sister company. Mr. Salamunovic said in three weeks the site is already generating more sales than DNA 11. In fact it was old DNA 11 clients who prompted CanvasPop’s creation, after several customers asked for a similar service for photos.

“Customers have a wealth of knowledge,” Mr. Salamunovic said. “If three people ask for something, chances are 3,000 more want it.”

DNAWellnessinfo.com Resource:  http://bit.ly/fuN9X

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