We started working on what would become Walls360 six years ago in San Francisco, when we installed large-format custom wall graphics in an exhibition of video game art at the Hotel des Arts, and we moved our growing team to Las Vegas in August 2011. Today, we are absolutely honored to confirm an investment from the Vegas Tech Fund, and the addition of Mark Rowland, CEO of Roceteer, to the Walls360 Board.
I am thrilled to join the board of a company that focuses on team culture, customer experience, amazing products, and is growing exponentially. The entire team at ROCETEER is excited to be working with Walls360!
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I’ve known Mark Rowland for almost 20 years ranging from experienced accountant through to successful entrepreneur and visionary mentor. Mark’s experience will be a valuable addition to the Walls360 Board bringing his enthusiasm and passion for supporting the development of high growth startups.
Adrian Bunter, Venture Advisory, Sydney
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I absolutely love the Walls360 product. It immediately makes you say “wow”. I believe there is a huge opportunity here as the team continues to scale out their business with more direct to consumer offerings and great b2b partnerships.
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The Walls360 team have shown true grit to get to this inflection point but their vision has reached well beyond it. Now customers can reap the benefit.
Vivian Stewart, Callafin Pty Limited
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The Walls360 team are mensches. Since they’ve arrived in Vegas, they’ve been generously donating to schools, non-profits & budding startups with their promotional needs. Their products are visually stunning and a cost effective way to impermanently decorate your home, office or event space. Get some!
George Moncrief, Vegas Tech Fund
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Las Vegas was the perfect location for Walls360. Startup dollars go further in Las Vegas, and we have connected with some absolutely amazing new partners and projects since Walls360 moved here in 2011.
APEX mural at Walls360, Las Vegas
Graphic arts company Walls 360 moved from San Francisco to Las Vegas for Sin City’s arts and culture scene. If you’re doing a double-take, that’s not a misprint. Sure, Walls 360’s founders liked Southern Nevada’s lack of income tax, cheap real estate, low-cost shipping and big available workforce. But it was downtown’s monthly First Friday arts festival that really did the trick. Co-founder John Doffing read about it in an article by a tech writer who noted the growing arts scene centered on e-tailer Zappos.com, which plans to move into City Hall in 2013. “We went to First Friday and checked things out. We’re an artist-centered company, and there’s this incredible community of artists in this city that we didn’t know about,” said Doffing, who ran startups in Silicon Valley for more than 15 years before opening Walls 360 here six weeks ago. “We visited galleries and started interviewing folks, and it pushed us over the edge as far as telling us this was the place for us to go.” Walls 360 is one of about 10 businesses that relocated to or expanded in Las Vegas from July to September, the first quarter in the Nevada Development Authority’s fiscal year. That handful of companies spurred $84.1 million in capital investment in the area, a huge jump from just $3 million in the first quarter of 2009.
Las Vegas Review Journal, October 2011
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Co-founders Tavia Campbell and John Doffing have actually been at this for a few years, previously working out of San Francisco and then Philadelphia, but when they decided last year to stop outsourcing and start printing their own products, they had to make a new business model and find a new home. Las Vegas has proven to be a great decision, Campbell told me, because the company’s only real costs now are administrative, ink and fabric — rent in the industrial sector (its neighbor is a crankshaft repair shop) is practically a non-factor — and the city actually has a great mix of artists and printing professionals that honed their skills working on projects for casinos and trade shows. Right now, Walls 360 makes most of its money from partnerships like those with EA around its video games, from contract printing jobs for conventions and other events, and from individual sales of its custom prints. However, because individual orders are printed on demand, Campbell said the plan is to let customers upload their own images and have Walls 360 print them. She said Walls 360 is also thinking about leveraging cheap storefront space in downtown Las Vegas to open its own store, possibly doubling as a gallery where artists could display and sell their work as Walls 360 prints.
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Walls360 is a cool startup in Las Vegas that makes high-quality (but affordable) wall art. They’ve got the license to some great properties, like Star Trek, Plants vs. Zombies and a host of children’s books, and now they are offering nearly all of the icon artwork produced by famed designer Susan Kare. The company scored some work with Zazzle, but they actually have a higher purpose than just printing other people’s stuff. If you think these are merely wall stickers, I think it’s important to explain how committed to art the team really is. The team itself is made up of artists, for example. Here’s a bit of background…Vulcan, the on-demand production lead is a legendary aerosol artist who created the Graffiti Hall of Fame in Harlem in the ’80s. Chris (Levy), director of creative services, co-founded one of the first on-demand wall graphics companies in the world while an undergraduate at UNLV…The founders, John Doffing and Tavia Campbell, have 20 years of digital imaging experience. CEO John even ran afoul of App Store guidelines early on in the store’s history. So Walls360 is made up of artists and geeks, and I was more than impressed with their on-demand factory for printing these awesome wall art pieces.
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The plan was to take graphics orders on a website and outsource printing. But Doffing and Campbell found they needed to provide the products, shipping and customer service in order to be successful. In its glorified garage near Tropicana Avenue and Arville Street, the company designs, prints, cuts and ships wall graphics. Walls 360 produces art that sticks to most surfaces but can be removed as many as 200 times without leaving a residue. Kids can crumple the stickers up and smooth them back down without so much as a wrinkle. A big part of Walls 360’s business is licensing content used in graphics. Every new deal, like a partnership with Penguin being announced at the trade show next week, adds to the company’s catalog. New content, such as images of Marilyn Monroe, Moshi Monsters and vintage art from the Moulin Rouge in Paris, goes live every month. The biggest slice of the company’s business is video game graphics, but business-to-business products such as corporate badges for conventions and step-and-repeat logos subsidize more creative efforts, like tangrams, moveable geometric shape stickers for children. Walls 360 has shipped more than 100,000 logos since opening its production facility.
Las Vegas Review Journal, June 2012
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Those deals are emblematic of the company’s growth since moving from San Francisco last August. But the reasons the firm came here in the first place say a lot about Las Vegas’ future. “Vegas was perfect,” co-founder John Doffing says. “Much cheaper cost of living, no corporate or personal income taxes and a highly trained work force in digital printing from all the trade shows. We knew our money would go three to five times further here, and it’s close to shipping hubs.” But all of that wasn’t enough to close the deal for Doffing, who says he was the company’s “last holdout” in the decision to move. Only when he got wind of downtown’s revival and Tony Hsieh’s feverish activity in the urban core did he realize this was the place to be. “Seeing First Friday and the Downtown Project pushed me over the edge,” he says.
Nevada was recently listed by CNN as one the nation’s top 10 most entrepreneurial states, citing the state’s growing number of startup companies as a major contributing factor. Walls 360 is one of those startups helping to diversify the Las Vegas economy…The company opened in Las Vegas last September, and has been building up its on-demand production facilities and clientele, which includes major video game publishers Electronic Arts and PopCap. In addition to the licensed artwork, Walls 360 also creates custom wall graphics and stickers for customers. “If you want one big sticker, we can make you one big sticker. If you want 500 little stickers, we’ll make you 500 little stickers,” said Campbell. Walls 360 started in San Francisco, but relocated to Las Vegas last September due in part to Nevada’s non-existent corporate taxes and low cost of living. The Nevada Development Authority, which works to diversify and improve the economy of Southern Nevada, assisted them through the complicated process of relocation…The stickers and murals Walls 360 produce are reusable and removable without leaving sticky residue. Their collection range from artistic, abstract designs to pop culture icons and brands. Everything they offer is created on-demand and shipped in as little as 48 hours, a level of service made possible by the founders’ decision not to outsource the printing. Walls 360 was recently listed by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the country’s 100 Brilliant Companies.
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It’s likely that the walls of the Bali Hai country club had never been adorned by characters from Plants Vs. Zombies, but we have Walls360 to thank for the new decor. The company creates fabric-woven, re-positionable wall graphics and wrappers that are much more than stickers and, in many cases, draw heavily on the mobile world for their influences. From video game characters, to logos, monsters, and tanagrams, Walls360’s wrappers can be reused on almost any indoor surface up to 200 times. They can also be crumpled, then smoothed out and used again without damaging the wrap. Walls 360 also works with Zazzle.com to make on-demand wall graphics, as well as making full-sized poster graphics.
Walls 360, a Las Vegas graphics start-up, may be an avatar of the Valley’s hopes as a tech incubator. But its latest product line is a testimony to the enduring appeal of the town’s past. The company’s new Vintage Vegas gallery features images from UNLV Special Collections, a repository of the visual and documentary history of Southern Nevada. Visitors to the gallery can select images of the city’s past and order them as repositionable wall art. That means Vegas-lovers can now have a 5-foot tall vintage shot of the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign or reproduction of the 1945 Helldorado program cover. The Las Vegas photos now share a place in the Walls 360 lineup alongside graphics from games such as Plants vs. Zombies and Mass Effect 3, entertainment phenomena such as Star Trek and icons such as Marilyn Monroe. It shows how ingrained Las Vegas has become in the global pop-cultural imagination. You have to read the small print on each page, though, to see the real significance of this gallery. The boilerplate description of each graphic, “Origin: MADE IN USA: Las Vegas, Nevada,” hints at the subtle shift at work here. The Las Vegas brand isn’t just something we burnish to attract visitors; it’s now a commodity that can be exported. And the selling of that brand just might be a key to the future for a city that’s no longer the world’s leading gaming destination.
ArtCorgi co-founders Malcolm and Simone Collins (yes, they’re a couple — Malcolm proposed to Simone using commissioned art) created ArtCling in partnership with Walls360, a company that prints images on adhesive, non-damaging fabric. Basically, “ArtClings” are sturdy-looking posters that you can stick straight on your walls and peel off again without any damage…To be clear, the printing process existed before, thanks to Walls360, but you couldn’t commission personalized art on this fabric; that’s what you get by combining Walls360 with ArtCorgi/ArtCling’s marketplace.
@EddieMcClintock @Walls360 Interestingly disturbing.
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) May 6, 2014
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