FilmMug: Reimagining Iconic Film Stocks in Mug Form

Over the past year, I've fallen back in love with photography, specifically film photography. I love the analog nature of the medium, and find the entire experience to be incredibly mindful. In an age of instant gratification, I find the forced intention and necessary patience required to shoot film to be incredibly valuable.

As both an avid coffee drinker, and mug collector, the thought of a film photography mug popped into my head one morning. I went to google to start looking at what options might be available and was surprisingly underwhelmed. It was right then when it dawned on me. The shape of a roll of film and the shape of a mug are remarkably similar. I quickly drafted a proof of concept using my favorite film stock, and had a sample ordered that night. The results far exceeded my expectations.

After a couple of busy college years away from e-commerce, I saw this as the perfect low-risk opportunity to jump back in and build something creative from scratch.

I knew I had just struck gold, but there was still a lot of work to be done before I could launch the product. I quickly searched for domains and stumbled across filmmug.com for only $11. I quickly got to work developing a simple brand identity and website.

At this point, I was feeling very confident, but I still had to figure out one critical aspect. There are hundreds of different film stocks on the market. Although Portra 400 is popular, I knew I couldn't offer only one design. I've been shooting film for almost a year at this point, but I'm still unsure what the most popular film stocks are, and which I should end up creating.

I tried researching online but it wasn't providing much luck. That's when I stumbled across an eBay listing from a film lab in New Jersey. They were selling 300 empty film rolls for just $15. I knew this was the answer I was looking for.

I sorted the random sample of rolls into a physical bar graph, and chose the 6 most popular rolls. Not only did this provide me with a distribution of film stock popularity, but it also gave me the necessary reference to aid in my design. After a day spent in Adobe Photoshop, this was the result:

With the product designs finalized and samples in hand, it was time to shift focus to marketing. I opted to leverage Meta ads, as I figured other platforms like Snapchat and TikTok wouldn't match my target demographic as closely as Facebook or Instagram. I knew this was a niche product with a very specific audience, which made targeting relatively straightforward. I tested a few different approaches, including interests in photography publications, photography students, and specific gear, but none performed as well as simply targeting people interested in film photography.

When designing my creatives, I felt the product spoke for itself. I didn’t see a need to overcomplicate things. To save money and time, I created all the videos and images myself.

As expected, the product instantly resonated with film photography fans. My ads were receiving lots of engagement, and many were tagging friends, or even sharing it to their story. My website was starting to receive a healthy amount of traffic, however my conversion rate was very low. In order to combat this, I completely reworked my product page. The changes were subtle, but the results were significant. Through these changes, I was able to increase my conversion rate by 4.5%, resulting in a noticeable boost in daily orders.

Although my market research was successful and sales closely aligned with my makeshift bar graph, I began receiving a steady stream of messages from customers requesting additional designs. I started a running list of these requests and gradually added new options to the website while continuing to scale my ads.

As orders began shipping out, I started receiving messages and photos from happy customers. It was incredibly rewarding to see my product out in the real world and to know that so many people connected with the idea.

Unfortunately, I soon received a message that would change everything. I knew this day might come, but I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. The General Manager of International Sales at ILFORD emailed me, requesting that all products featuring the ILFORD brand be taken down immediately.

I attempted to negotiate a licensing agreement, but it was ultimately unsuccessful. I had no choice but to remove my most popular design from the website.

I understood this as an obvious risk when starting FilmMug. I knew it wouldn’t last forever, and that without proper licensing, I would eventually be forced to take products down. I started the website as a passion project, a way to step back into e-commerce after a couple of years away. I never intended to scale it to massive numbers. Instead, I used it as a creative outlet, a way to experiment, and a chance to share a fun, unique concept with a niche audience.

Ultimately, I decided this was a good point to call it quits. Both to avoid the risk of more serious legal action and to free myself up to pursue a project I was truly passionate about building and scaling.