eFrame is an online picture frame and Mount supplier that provides a unique interactive web site for people to design these products online.

We use cutting-edge technology throughout our business to take orders, manufacture and deliver custom and standard size high quality frames and mounts direct to the customer at less than half the price of the typical high street framer.

At present, our entire product range is made at our dedicated, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in South Cambridgshire by a team of approximately 18 skilled staff.

Founded in 2003, the company was formed by Andrew and Jayne Lowther to make bespoke frames for friends and neighbours. Soon after, and whilst still working from the "garden shed", an opportunity arose to provide a service to primary schools whereby childrens' artwork was framed in order to be sold to parents at a fundraising school art exhibition. During this phase of the company's growth over 100,000 children had their artwork framed by us. This business, together with other areas of activity, formed the bulk of the company's operations until 2005 when the company moved into brand new premises in Cambridgeshire.

It was always the intent that the growth of the company was going to be tied to the increasing popularity of online shopping. To this end, Andrew, whose background is as a software engineer for leading UK and American financial institutions, began to develop the company web site. After a short trial and error phase it became obvious that we had developed a winning idea; if people can buy bespoke frames on the high street, why shouldn't they go about buying them online at a much reduced cost?

By investing in the continuing development of the web site, together with sophisticated computerised machinery and extensive staff training, we are now able to provide a first class quality product to all of our customers. Volumes don't present a problem. Our capability extends to manufacturing hundreds of thousands of frames and mounts annually.

From humble beginnings the company is now a leader in it's field and has recently doubled the size of the factory. This will allow us to expand the existing product line and geographical reach.

The web site allows everybody to buy frames, mounts and mirrors from a quantity of one upwards. We currently supply to all parts of the UK, and our customers include the following...

• Individuals
• Companies
• Government-related (eg council offices, schools, military)
• Hotels, restaurants and conference venues
• Artists and Photographers
• Interior Designers
• Shopfitters
• Retail shops
• Marketing, advertising and promotional companies
• Charities

Our Testimonial and Case Study pages highlight some of our customer experiences.

By manufacturing all products ourselves we are able to pass on substantial savings to the customer whilst at the same time justifying the huge cost of advertising and promotion required. Pricing is based on volume - those that buy more get a bigger discount.

The product range constitutes picture frames, photo frames, poster frames, picture mounts and framed mirrors. With over 600 moulding styles in wood and aluminium, and 350 mount styles we have the largest selection available online. Our web site allows the user to enter a size they want, combine the mouldings and mounts in an almost infinite number of ways and see the finished bespoke product on screen before they place the order.

To manufacture the frames, the company uses high quality wooden moulding from sustainable sources as well as solid aluminium moulding sourced from Nielsen mouldings in Germany.

All products are presently manufactured on site at our factory.

We have invested heavily in advanced technology to give that 'cutting edge' when it comes to quality and output. Last year we were the first company in the UK to take delivery of the most up to date computerised mitre saw available. With an accuracy and repeatability of .1mm over a length of up to 2.5m.

The factory is also equipped with computerised underpinners for joining the frame corners, and a flat-bed computer-driven mount-cutting machine.

These are just a few of the factors that allows us to provide a bespoke service at such a value-for-money price.

From nothing more than an idea 2 years ago, our web site now currently serves 1,000,000 pages per month to 24,000 customers all over the UK.

Designed and built in-house, the technical groundwork for the site is ASP server-side and HTML/CSS/Javascript client side. In order to provide the ground-breaking Frame and Mount Design Studio we decided to use a third-party graphics library, itself built on top of Quicktime from Apple. In order to provide fast and easy interactive functionality to the user the tool uses the AJAX set of technologies extensively and intelligently.

The database on which our data is stored is, surprisingly in the eyes of many, MS Access.

Our dedicated server hardware is hosted in the UK and is a dual quad-core Intel machine with 4GB RAM and a RAID 3 hard disk array.

All transactions are secured using 128-bit technology.

The company's growth plan is ambitious. We aim to double the revenue of the business by end of 2009. A comprehensive marketing plan is in place that will see us add new products, increase our marketing activity, improve the web site with new and enhanced functionality, and expand our geographical coverage into Europe.

• Andrew Lowther - Managing Director
• Jayne Lowther GCF - Production Director
• Phil Baker - Production Manager
• Nichola Donald - Office Administration
• Paula Thorn - Customer Support

Our employee numbers change regularly, but currently number 18

Andrew Lowther - MD

Email: andrew (@) eframe.co.uk

Tel: 01767 677888