COME SAIL AWAY

COME PhotoSails takes billboard advertising out to sea. SAIL AWAY

PhotoSails (www. photosails.com) was an invention born of necessity. In the late 1990s, Aaron By Richard Romano

Kiss ran a sailboat chartering company in Ft. Lauderdale, and one of his promotional strategies was handing out pamphlets on the beach. These

PhotoSails founder Aaron Kiss

ended up littering the beaches, so the city passed an ordinance banning the handing out of print pamphlets.

“I needed a way to get to the people without littering or causing problems with the city,” Kiss said. “So we decided to paint up a sail with my logo, my slogan and my phone number and started sailing up and down the beaches. I increased my income by 400% in six months and put five other boats out of business.”

The effectiveness of sailboat advertising thus proven, Kiss started working with other local businesses.

“I had some friends who owned their own businesses and asked me if I could make a sail for them,” he said. “They couldn’t really afford what I wanted to do, so I made a giant 600-square-foot Velcro sail with stick-on letters and numbers, and I would write messages and put logos on it. When people wanted to hire me for a day of sailing, I’d charge them my charter rate.”

Things were moving along swimmingly until there came a turning point.

“One day my phone rang and it was Anheuser-Busch and they asked me if I could put photographs on sailboat sails,” he said. “I said yes, and they took out a contract for four months, which turned into two years.”

And thus was born PhotoSails.

This is how the PhotoSails model works: Someone wants to buy a boat, so they go through the company selling the boat—at the time of PhotoSails’ founding in 1999, Kiss had a relationship with Hunter. Once Kiss secured a contract with an advertiser, Project1_Layout 1 4/8/2020 5:01 PM Page 1

such as Anheuser-Busch, he would turn to the location manager for Hunter and decide what size boat the client wanted,

Why Shop Condé Systems?

• DYE-SUB TRANSFER SYSTEMS • DYE-SUB INK, PAPER & SUPPLIES • HEAT TRANSFER SYSTEMS • LASER & INK JET TRANSFER PAPERS • HEAT PRESSES • BLANK IMPRINTABLE PRODUCTS • PRODUCTION SOFTWARE • EDUCATIONAL VIDEOS • LEGENDARY TECHNICAL SUPPORT

Find out how producing photo quality gifts & awards can help your business be more profitable... call Condé today!

) 800-826-6332 8 www.conde.com

depending on their budget or other requirements.

“I would go to the Hunter local management and they

would contract me a brand-new boat,” Kiss said.

Boats are not minor investments, and a fair number of the people who want to buy a boat can’t really afford one.

“Hunter had a buyer’s incentive program,” Kiss said. “They would call the people that were considering buying the boat that we wanted to use and ask them simply, ‘Are you not buying the boat because of the price of the boat or financial issues?’ They would always say ‘yes,’ and Hunter would turn to them and say, ‘Well, we have a guy that would like to use the boat for three months and we have figured out a way to drop the price $30,000, $40,000, even $50,000. Are you interested?’”

So in exchange for having a big ad on the sail, owners could substantially reduce the cost of the boat.

Early on, PhotoSails worked with Hunter exclusively.

“They really are the Honda of boats; they’re very reliable, they’re not expensive, as far as sailboats go, they’re easy to work on, and they have a mast system that really worked for the type of sales we were building,” Kiss said. “That has snowballed into thousands of people all over the world who, whether they have Hunters or not, want to get paid to sail their own sailboats around, which is, trust me, the best job in the world.”

Printing on sails, as you can well imagine, is not an easy process.

“You can’t just take a sail and stick it through a printer,” he said.

Kiss prefers to keep a lid on his specific production process, “but I can tell you this. We use a process that laminates four layers of cloth together that allows us to use CMYK color separation and digital imaging, using EFI VUTEks and some other of the major printers, that allow us to do double-sided imaging.”

PhotoSails has a patent on a process for making opaque sails.

“We are the owner of opaque sails—that way, no sunlight penetrates through, and even in backlit situations, you would never know what’s on the other side of the sail.”

The challenge is that the

substrate that it is printed on has to not just look aesthetically pleasing, but actually function as a sail.

“We can’t just take a vinyl, stick it through a printer, and expect to make a flat object into an airfoil,” Kiss said. “It just doesn’t work. We actually tried it, and it just doesn’t sail well at all, and it doesn’t look good.”

A lot of the work is done in software, and they have adapted their CAD programs to create three-dimensional airfoils in multiple pieces. They then use what they call variablemolding tables to consolidate the pieces together.

“It creates a proper airfoil that allows sailboats to sail as well as, if not better than, the sail technology that’s out there today,” Kiss said.

It’s the opaqueness of the PhotoSails sail that is the important element of the process. Most sailboat sails are translucent—when you see them out on the water on a sunny day, the sun shines through and lights them up, and it’s a rather beautiful sight—the kind of effect that makes someone want to buy a boat in the first place. However, when you have paid advertising on both sides of a sail, the sun can’t shine through; it would be the sail equivalent of showthrough. The only way to accomplish this on a translucent sail is to mirror the image on both sides of the sail precisely using multiple pieces of sail cloth.

“It’s a nightmare process and one side is backwards,” Kiss said. “If you miss the mirroring perfectly, then it looks like it’s blurry.”

PhotoSails has grown consistently from year-to-year, although sail-based advertising does require a fairly significant advertising budget.

“Almost all of our clients are Fortune 500 companies,” Kiss said. “This is not for Billy Bob’s Pizza Shack. This isn’t a bus wrap or a park bench or something like that. This is something that is dealing with half a million- and million-dollar yachts.”

The boat doesn’t even need to leave the dock—which presents an interesting way to get around sign codes regulating

advertising signage.

“We’ve been doing a beach program called Beach Billboards,” Kiss said. “Coca-Cola wanted to have their signage on a beach, but that’s highly regulated. We were putting our signs on sailboat rentals, and people were walking by them every day and looking at them. And the rental people loved it because they’re getting a free set of sails and getting subsidized by Coca-Cola for putting the sail up. So they’re making money without the boat even going out.”

PhotoSails billboards have Read More… Find article at PrintingNews. com/21126895