If 2017 is any indication, VideoBlocks is growing — fast.
Earlier this year, the startup could be found in Reston in an office space so small — with 90 people in 7,500 sq. ft. — that if one person got the flu, nearly 15 employees would end up calling in sick in a week's time. Now, they're in a much larger, expansive space, with at least 100 employees in a 22,000 sq. ft. space in Arlington's Courthouse neighborhood.
So, it makes sense that the startup would end up rebranding and restructuring itself today under a more flexible brand name: Storyblocks.
The new company organization will keep VideoBlocks, its stock video service, and AudioBlocks, its stock audio service, under their respective brand names, but each service will be found under the Storyblocks umbrella of services.
"The big reason to introduce a new brand is that we see the face of content creators changing," said TJ Leonard, CEO of Storyblocks, in an interview. "It's not your typical creative professional, and so we wanted to make sure we had a library and a brand that was broad enough to allow for these new emerging artists to come in and participate."
Plans for a new office space have been in the works since the end of 2016, as DC Inno reported in December, and Leonard said the move just made sense. They needed more space, and they wanted to be closer to the D.C. metro area tech community without creating a ridiculous commute for their Northern Virginia employees.
"It came down to a few things," Leonard said. "For about 80 percent of the company, their commute was shortened, and for the 20 percent that have a bit further to go, they don't have to cross the river to get into D.C."
With the new rebrand, Leonard and his team are eyeing a variety of new content platforms. Along with the announcement of the restructuring, they unveiled their much-anticipated stock image search platform today, with about 10 million new photos in their library. Much like the rest of their offerings, Storyblocks' image search will allow creatives to upload their images to be made available for purchase as stock images, and the company will compensate the artist per download.
"It was the natural rhythm of things. It all pointed to this summer and fall."
Storyblocks announced the new service back in April when they started taking submissions from artists for new content.
"For a long time, photo has been the larger market, but for a long time, we've always said 'it's not the right fit for us,'" Leonard said. "Traditionally, if you think about a production house, quite often the people who buy videos and the people who buy stills were on different coasts. People were buying audio and video in L.A. and people buying stills in New York."
"Once you get into digital marketers, the overlap is much stronger. The same goes for small businesses."
In 2018, Storyblocks plans to add around 20-30 employees. On top of the new office search and planning a rebrand, that's a lot on one CEO's plate. Leonard said he got a lot of questions from investors about why he was doing this all at once — Why not just take it one step at a time?
His response? "It was the natural rhythm of things. It all pointed to this summer and fall."
Moving forward, the company is eyeing an expansion of its enterprise services, where they now have 70 customers such as Vistaprint Digital, that allows companies to embed Storyblocks' library into their existing platforms. Someone using Vistaprint will automatically be able to use Storyblocks' library from within Vistaprint's site building program, for example. And, at the same time, Storyblocks is eyeing new content platforms like fonts or templates.
"Now that we have this Storyblocks master brand, it's much easier for us to stand up and launch new content verticals," Leonard said.
