Collage.com shuts down

Collage.com, the highly-regarded consumer photo gifting site, shut down abruptly last week. The abrupt closure was the subject of quite a bit of cocktail-party talk at the Visual 1st conference, which was going on when the news was made public. The timing seemed curious, as the lucrative fourth quarter is just around the corner. According to the Collage.com profile on Crunchbase, the site’s revenues were nearly $40 million prior to its acquisition.

The reasons for the Collage.com closure are not known and the parent company, Foreground, has not responded to requests for comment. Two other businesses that were part of the portfolio – custom photo product provider Design Aglow, and Cole’s Classroom – have also disappeared from Foreground’s list of portfolio brands. Táve, a SaaS company offering platforms for managing creative event-based businesses, remains.

The reasons for the abrupt closure are open to conjecture. The most reasonable scenario is, faced with the prospect of operating a SaaS photographer-marketing platform (ShootProof) and a consumer-facing photo gifting site (Collage.com), private-equity-backed Foreground management chose ShootProof as a better long-term growth opportunity. It’s also likely Collage.com’s product-building platform will be incorporated into the ShootProof platform.

Collage was purchased by Foreground, the owner of the professional photography platform Shootproof in May, 2021. At the time, details weren’t disclosed but Foreground stated in a press release ShootProof and Collage were said to “together generate over 40 million site visits per year, and both entities have yielded significant market research on photographers and photo consumers.” Foreground is backed by Providence Strategic Growth, a growth equity firm focusing on middle-market software and technology-enabled service companies.