"Simplicity is our key marketing value," explains Felix Brunner, Managing Director of the start-up business, which is based in Zurich's Technopark. "Everything is kept simple at topimages.com. There is a single price, with a flat-rate license for use, and images are downloaded as soon as they are bought. The whole process should also be accessible to new customers in less than five minutes." Coupled with this are the company's fresh approach and its discernible love of innovation.
"We feel that an image agency ought to maximize its quality and customer service, not the size of its image archive or of its own business. In addition, many customers see it as advantageous to source their images from a rather more exclusive database." Ultimately, another advantage of topimages.com is its independence. ImagePoint, the company behind topimages.com, is an independent business, a Swiss image agency which has been operating in the German-speaking world for five years. It is owned fully by the group of founding partners headed by Felix Brunner.
Each image at topimages.com costs the same price, USD 170. This figure covers the download and the photographer's rights. The license is comparable to a royalty-free license and, with a few restrictions, permits the customer to use the image repeatedly over an indefinite period of time. "In our opinion, this is the lowest fair price at which a professional photographer would be sufficiently motivated to sell his images with some degree of exclusivity,"
As Brunner explains, topimages.com's services are aimed primarily at the needs of creative artists. Therefore, the following values are important:
- The respectability of the source
- Sensible keywords for the images
- Individual support, when needed
- Quick, smart search functions, e.g. specially developed research via visual criteria such as color or similarity.
As a start-up, topimages.com is carefully endeavoring to exploit what it perceives as its rivals' weaknesses on the global image agency market. Simplicity and innovation are values rarely found amongst the large conglomerates with their different brands, inter-dependences and complicated product portfolios. topimages.com, on the other hand, offers a straightforward approach, quick processing and a carefully selected archive. The customer will find what he wants within minutes, get the image material straight away and then be back at his creative work in next to no time. Therefore, topimages.com has created a concept which can be implemented uncompromisingly only by a new, independent image agency which isn't burdened by baggage.
