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Photos become oil paintings, and "God painting" break through the world

Photos become oil paintings, and "God painting" break through the world

By Mohandas YorkPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
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On December 22, 2009, the second Wuhan Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge came to an end. 23-year-old Chen Moran and his "920 Divine Painting" project won the best project award.

After graduating from the Wuhan University of Technology, majoring in multimedia, Chen gave up a stable job with a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan to start a business. His shop, located at the entrance of Wuhan's Hua Shi Cultural Street, has two floors of nearly 100 square meters, and the walls are covered with vivid paintings made from photographs. Chen said that the average handmade oil painting is about 2,000 yuan; Through his software, it only takes two hours to turn a photo into an oil painting, and a 36-inch oil painting is only 580 yuan. He has found a low-cost oil painting production process, and business opportunities are in it.

Chen is grateful to his partner Wang Cheng, 41, for having access to the venture. Wang's classmate, Zhu Songchun, teaches at the University of California. In 2007, he developed a digital art production system that allows oil paintings to retain the composition of photographs, the charm of characters, and the texture of hand-painted oil paintings. Zhu set up a company in Wuhan, inviting Wang Chengtan, an old classmate, to be the general manager and promote the technology.

At the beginning of 2008, Wang Chengtan saw statistics in a newspaper that Wuhan had 100,000 sets of wedding photography every year, with an annual output value of about 1.2 billion yuan. This set of numbers lets Wang Chengtan find the direction, and if the wedding photos are in oil painting, will be more personalized. He decided to promote the product through the city's wedding studio. In the meantime, met at the studio to receive photography training from Chen Moran, and the two people hit it off. Wuhan's large and small wedding studio thousands can join hands with them should be a good sales channel. However, this is not the case. After a year's efforts, Chen Moran and Wang Chengtan, despite the development of nearly one thousand studio franchisees, but based on the cost accounting of the wedding studio itself, oil painting photos can only enter the set of 8,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan, can spend so much money according to wedding photos of the new few. Studios charge high prices to customers, as much as 2,000 to 3,000 yuan for a 36-inch oil painting. In the end, the profit for them is very low, only a few tens of yuan for each painting.

After a year of trying, Chen Moran and Wang Chengtan reached a consensus that relying on wedding photography stores to promote products, the market recognition is too slow, must open their physical stores, and open a physical store, only relying on oil painting this single project is far from enough. In March last year, on China Division culture street, two people together more than 100,000, rented a street mouth 100 square meters of the shop, a shop called "920 God painting dream factory" opened, "920" homophonic "love you". In addition to the main promotion of photos in the oil painting business, there are photo development, photo T-shirt, photo cartoon figure, gift frame, photo art wall designs, and other services, that can meet the needs of different customers. They have a clear division of labor, Chen is in charge of photography, and Wang Cheng is in charge of sales.

To open up awareness, they tried every low-cost marketing method. Chen posted on the forums of various major websites, "deleted and continued to post, only to post promptly." The products in the store are mainly aimed at the wedding crowd and the home decoration crowd. Whenever there is a large home decoration exhibition, Chen Moran also prints some picture albums and distributes them to the exhibition door. Multi-pronged, the "920 God painting dream factory" store finally defended the cloud open to see the month, last September, the total monthly sales of the store exceeded 18,000 yuan and realized a profit.

Chen and Wang's vision is to turn 920 DreamWorks into a national franchise that specializes in photo-processing technology. Currently, they are summarizing and standardizing the management and operation of their store's operation of their stores and will open the recruitment process for franchisees once the time is right. If the franchise is mature, Chen and Wang plan to re-sell the software and promote it through job training and entrepreneurship

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Mohandas York

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