CanvasHQ a Marriage Between Manufacturing and E-Commerce

Fort Smith has a well-earned reputation as the manufacturing capital of Arkansas. But if you ask Storm Nolan, founder of CanvasHQ, his hometown should jostle for a new title — epicenter of e-commerce.

Nolan has done his part since 2009 with CanvasHQ, an online store that creates framed canvas wall pieces out of photographs uploaded by customers.

So far so good.

CanvasHQ has developed a clientele in the most populated, wealthy parts of the United States — California, New York, Texas and Florida. And since Fort Smith is centrally located, CanvasHQ can ship to most parts of the country within three days, something Nolan said his competitors can’t do.

With customer service and product quality plugged into the equation, Nolan said he has all the ingredients he needs for a successful Web-based business.

“Almost all our money is coming in from out of state,” he said. “It’s a lot more than it was, but a lot less than what we think it can be.”

Nolan has good reasons for optimism.

The proliferation and increasing quality of phone and digital cameras means more and more photographs will be taken, he said. And since CanvasHQ deals only in custom orders, there’s no danger that an online giant like Amazon.com will offer the same product for less, thereby gutting his business.

Nolan said the company is producing up to 4,800 canvases per year, and that more than a third of its business is with photographers who order “private label” prints with their name, not CanvasHQ’s, on the back.

On the manufacturing end, the company relies on hand-built wooden frames, a canvas stretcher and an eight-ink printer with durable solvent ink. The five-man operation is housed in a 1,000-SF room.

On the technology side, CanvasHQ uses a powerful website — it took a year to build — that allows customers to easily upload photographs, customize the print’s size and shape, and purchase the order.

In terms of customer service, CanvasHQ offers next-day and flat-rate shipping, free image touchups and a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee. If the company continues to grow, Nolan said he would hire more employees to maintain the current level of service customers have come to expect.

The website, the heart and soul of any Internet company, was engineered by Josh Copeland, who has been with Nolan for eight years.

“Without the website, the business doesn’t exist,” Copeland said.

Since its creation, CanvasHQ has been integrated into the social media universe, meaning that with permission, CanvasHQ can pull photographs directly from a customer’s Facebook page and turn them into framed canvas prints.

The idea for CanvasHQ was born out of necessity in 2009, said Nolan, a partner in Fort Smith-based CSK Hotels.

“One of our hotels needed artwork,” he explained. “We said, ‘You know what? We can figure that out.’”

Nolan and Copeland secured the necessary equipment with the idea that once the prints were made for the hotel, a new company would be formed around custom canvas art.

Central to the effort to make CanvasHQ a viable business was Anna Breier, a jack-of-all-trades who handles customer service, shipping, graphics and anything else the company needs to maintain its edge in the marketplace.

As a team, Nolan, Copeland and Breier created something that customers appreciated, and those costumers were quick to tell friends and strangers.

“They are wowed by our product,” Nolan said. “They went online and wrote reviews and that’s where a lot of our business came from.”