How Sports Photos Go From Courtside to Greeting Cards

This NBA greeting card product is simple enough: Basketball fans can order customized, printed cards with current photos of players. You can see it in action at nba.com/greetingcards.

Under the hood, it takes a complicated chain of new technologies and licensing agreements to make this product possible—and make it fast. Potentially, a fan can choose a photo from a game they watched last night and have it sent to a friend within about two days. We recently spoke to some of the people behind this print-on-demand technology about how it works.

The NBA greeting card service uses pictures from Getty Images’ library of sports photos. Getty has a contract to handle commercial licensing for NBA images. Photographers feed digital images from basketball games into the Getty system almost immediately, and the NBA approves certain Getty photographs for commercial use, such as the greeting cards.

Every day, the latest NBA-approved photos get sent to a London-based company called Print Fair. Print Fair manages the interface that customers use to design and order the cards. Customers can pick out their favorite photo and personalize their cards with borders and type. The cards cost $11.20 each including shipping.

Print Fair has been working with Getty for several years to develop custom photo products for sports in Europe, says David Hyams, managing director of Print-Fair. The NBA store is Print Fair’s first such venture in the U.S “It’s a very automated system,” Hyams says. “You can go from courtside to print in minutes if you wanted to.”

Once a customer builds a card using Print Fair’s interface, the design gets sent to GlobalSoft Digital, a printer and communications company in Mahwah, New Jersey. 

GlobalSoft prints the cards with an HP Indigo press 5500, which uses a six-color CMYK process (the two extra ink colors are light cyan and light magenta). “We can do things lighting fast and we can bring personalization to it,” boasts GlobalSoft president and CEO Chris Petro.

As soon as they're printed, the cards get a glossy coating and then get distributed via mail from GlobalSoft’s facility.

The NBA postcard store is still in its first season, and a real marketing push won't start until next year. If it catches on with customers, the service may expand to offer other items such as posters or T-shirts. Hyams and Petro say they’re eager to find more partners who want to try this platform, too.

Success could be good for photo libraries. Getty and the NBA provide the images on a commission basis; they get a cut of every sale.