Polaroid Fotobar, Delray Beach, Fla.
Polaroid Fotobar, a new retail concept from Polaroid, has opened its first location, in Delray Beach, Fla. The 2,000-sq.-ft. store is designed to allow consumers to take the images from their smartphones and tablet devices and easily turn them into “museum-quality” art that can be framed and hung on a wall or displayed on a desk.
Polaroid Fotobar has a modern, streamlined look, with sleek lines. The Delray Beach location will serve as a prototype for nine additional cites due to open this year, including locations in New York, Las Vegas, and Boston.
Customers can upload photos from their device to one of the store's many workstations, where they can enhance the images with special filters, adjust the brightness, and make other adjustments. Once the images are uploaded and adjusted, customers can choose from a wide variety of materials and framing options. Images can be framed, matted, and/or printed directly onto a variety of unique substrates including canvas, metal, acrylic, wood and bamboo.
The store also contains a space called “The Studio”: a multi-purpose room that will host classes and parties, and also serves as a professional portrait studio.
“There are currently around 1.5 billion pictures taken every single day and that number continues to grow in tandem with the popularity and quality of camera phones,” Warren Struhl, founder and CEO of Fotobar, said in a statement back in January. “Unfortunately, even the very best of those pictures rarely ever escape the camera phone with which they were taken to be put on display around our homes and offices. Why? Because turning those pictures into something tangible, creative and permanent is neither easy nor fun. Polaroid Fotobar stores are going to change all of that.”