In 2013, Rachel O’Neill and her husband, Ryan, started their Sarasota, Fla., based company Loftipop as an Etsy shop. Today, they conceive, design and print their décor products in a 2,500 sq. ft. warehouse to ship across the country and through Amazon.
“I looked at Etsy and I saw people selling art prints and thought it was cool,” O’Neill says. “I told Ryan we could do it. We both brainstorm ideas and then he runs with them and designs.”
O’Neill did her homework before deciding which printer to choose for the art prints. “When we were researching, we noticed that Epson was the top of the line. Now, we love using their printers for our art prints,” she says. “I don’t think we’d ever switch to anything else. When our StylusPro 7890 finally died, we stayed with Epson and bought a SureColor P6000.”
A printer is often the first big purchase for a small business, and O’Neill feels that Epson has played a part in the success and growth of Loftipop. “The printer helped us launch our business and to this day the art prints are still a big part of our business, and they always will be, even though we’re doing other things,” she says. “We’ve always had great results and no major issues with them.”
The right printer needs the right media to create the perfect art print, so O’Neill uses LexJet Premium Archival Matte for its longevity. It is an acid-free paper and achieves 200-year archivability when partnered with the Epson inks.
In the beginning, O’Neill thought Loftipop would be a fun side project and never expected it to blossom into a full-time business. “We just opened a shop and put a couple of designs up. They started selling and it went from there,” she says. “We thought it would be cool to have a little side business, but we didn’t imagine where it’d go.”
Once they were comfortable with aqueous printing, they brought in a dye-sublimation printer so they could offer home décor and coffee mugs. O’Neill says it works great having both aqueous and dye-sub printers because they have been able to grow their product offering.
“The art prints launched our business,” she says. “We started doing the prints then expanded to other products, everyone has wall art and drinks out of a coffee mug.”
Growing from an Etsy shop to an e-commerce company didn’t happen overnight and it wasn’t easy, but O’Neill says that they are grateful that they could grow it into what it is today and look forward to continued growth. “We did it in a very safe way. We didn’t quit our jobs to start it,” she says. “We still worked full time for a good three years. We worked on it after our regular jobs and on the weekends.”
Right now, it’s just her and Ryan and a third employee. She says it can get a little hectic during the holidays, but they make it work. “There is work that you have to put into growing a business,” O’Neill says. “But for us, we really enjoy, it’s fun for us.”
In November, they will celebrate their 7th anniversary and are adding new designs and offerings all the time, but it’s the prints that started it all. The right designs, the right printer, the right paper all create the products people want and have taken Loftipop from a small Etsy shop to an Amazon Prime reseller. O’Neill is excited to see what they’ve built. “Now, we’re happy, we love what we do, and we love working for ourselves.”
The first thing anyone asks when it comes to new machines being released into the printer world is: “What’s new?” So we’ll start there. If you are moving up from a prior generation of Epson, the “new” depends on what model you are moving up from, of course, but for this review’s sake, we will stick to comparing the old Stylus Pro 7890, 7900, 9890, 9900 models to the new