What type of business is lifetouch

For more than 80 years, Lifetouch has been the professional photography company of choice for schools and families.

Headquartered in Eden Prairie, MN. Lifetouch is also proud to be a part of the Shutterfly family of brands. For more information, please visit www. View source version on businesswire. Sections U. It had become the state's largest ESOP, and that meant paying out funds to former employees rather than pumping them back into growth. With 16, current and former employee owners, the payouts were sapping its ability to invest in the future.

The year-old company, suffering also from waning consumer interest in print photography, had to act or face possible annihilation. We had to make investments. Shutterfly, the winning bidder for Lifetouch, declined to make Meek, now a Shutterfly employee, available for this article. To Shutterfly, it was a big opportunity, in no small part because Lifetouch had 10 million customers. There was also potential to take all of those school-photo packages--strangely still paid for by cash or check, and available in print only--and upload them to the cloud, giving parents a wider range of options.

Parents could have the ability to reorder, or store the photos for a lifetime, and be introduced to Shutterfly's other products. The company's many, many owners were bought out of the ESOP, and some were able to convert their ownership to other types of qualified retirement plans, such as an IRA or a k.

Whether or not employees were ultimately happy about the switch isn't clear. Some, however, did express concern about the state of the company ahead of the acquisition on careers website Glassdoor. A number of anonymous reviews hinted at tumult in staffing and an atmosphere far different from the former "family" feeling of the company during its heyday. The dissolution of an ESOP is rare. Other studies have shown that employee-owners have better job stability than those at traditional firms, and employee-owners have more confidence in their financial futures.

ESOP companies tend to simply grow faster. It expanded services from picture rolls and seating charts to ID cards, images for school administrative systems and child safety. It also invented and patented film and digital camera and other equipment which enabled it to accurately and efficiently photograph and deliver more than 58 million images each year to every state and province in the United States and Canada. In , Lifetouch entered the church photography market by acquiring United Photographic Industries.

Enterprise School Photos, Max Ward-Delmar, and United Photographic In the mid-eighties, a successful acquisition strategy launched that eventually led to the acquisition of over regional and national school photography companies including the school photo business of Jostens and Herff Jones across the United States and Canada. Company is renamed Lifetouch Following the acquisition of Kinderfoto, it was decided that the combined company needed a name that reflected its expanding business and vision.

Acquisition doubles the size of the Company In , National School Studios purchased the studio business of Kinderfoto.