COMPETITION: 250gram | Worth its Weight in Instagrams

250gram is a new tech start-up that allows you to print your favourite selection of Instagrams on polaroid-styled paper. Named after the 250gsm high quality paper they use to print on, the idea has been readily welcomed by the city’s Instagramming community. If you’re a savvy Instagrammer with a good eye for capturing cool things or fun moments, read on to find out how to win one of five vouchers for 20 Instagram prints from 250gram.

Image: mrcapetown.co.za

Gradually over the last decade, the world happily began accepting digital cameras over the classic 35 mm film. Our family albums halted progression, forever stuck at the awkward years and abandoned to gather dust on some obscure shelf back at home. As with the swift replacement of floppy disks and projector slides with CDs and USBs, so it seems that social media has sneakily over-ridden the need for printing photographs. Undeniably, snap-happy smartphone users are ushering in an entirely new era of photography – so much so that in 2013, ‘selfie’ was made the official Oxford dictionary’s word-of-the-year. Now all you need to do is upload an image on your favourite social platform and wait to see how many ‘likes’ you will get. It’s much more about marketing yourself and much less about selecting memories.

So is the printed photograph passé? Well, not necessarily. Print is timeless – there will always be people who prefer paper over pixel. Perhaps realising this, in January 2014, a team of creatives may well have set out on the first step to bring print back into popular use. Hello, 250gram.

This Cape Town-based tech start-up lets you print your favourite Instagrams on polaroid-styled paper. When you consider that there are currently 150 million active users on Instagram — 680 000 of which are found in South Africa — that’s a fair starting target market. 250gram works as follows — you log in on their website using your Instagram account details. From there, you choose the photos you want printed and then have them couriered to your door in fun packaging. Fittingly, the high-quality prints come in a Polaroid format, which hark back to the +VSCO Cam/ Afterlight favoured filters that have made Instagram so popular. At R4 a shot (with a minimum of 20 prints) and a courier fee of R35, 250gram is selling an upmarket product in a quirky and relatively accessible way. Elementary my dear boy, but brilliant.

The company’s success probably stems from the fact that the concept has been done so right. Following closely in the digital footsteps of companies such as Yuppiechef, 250gram has prioritised a strong online presence and an engaging customer service. Cleverly, 250gram have also spotted the desire for social photography and instant printing, offering their second service called #SocialPrinting, specifically aimed at catering to brands and companies. Yup, ‘hashtag location-based printing’ is a thing now. While the risk of a tech start-up like this is that it may be short-lived — Instagram could lose millions of users just like Facebook has in recent years — the truth is that 250gram is feeding into a need that has arisen in the social media era: reality.

Check them out at here.

Words by Gosia Podgórska
Images sourced: mrcapetown.co.za, durbanzone.co.za, instagram.com/250gram_