Celebrating 3 years of FO2

Over the last 3 years, we've told journeys of people from the world of photography. As we are entering our 4th year, we've taken the challenge to write our own!

We are celebrating our 3rd birthday, but our journey goes back to 2015 when our parent company was formed. It started as a different startup but with the same motive of building a community of artists. While we explored the community & established a name, we hit a major bump but it wasn't enough to demotivate us.

Even though things were running down the hill, they inspired us to create something better & much more functional. And one day, over a cup of coffee, the idea of creating FO2 was popped, & yet again, a cafe saved a startup.

Every idea sounds good when you talk about it passionately, but to impress an investor, it takes much more. It took us months to create a pitch that could be good enough for an investor but we couldn't get any luck. Somehow, money came in to start this passion project.

Launch day always brings some unique feelings. There is anxiety, relief & many possibilities. 3 years ago, we finally made our website live! From an idea in our head FO2 became a digital reality. We eagerly waited for the first order, the notification popped, & today after delivering more than 14k orders, the joy of receiving orders is the same.

Now that the website was live, it was time to go back to our roots to create a community of artists. This gave birth to our dedicated community segments. From shifting offices in different cities & 3 pandemic waves later, we managed to deliver 1000s of orders, published more than a 100 stories, and opened our 1st store- a place for artists. Our latest community initiative was to start taking workshops, which fueled us to create a much bigger workshop-STAGE on this world photography day.

So here we are, celebrating 3 years of FO2; sharing these happy memories. These are only the highlights but life isn't just that. We've faced struggles throughout the journey. To sum up our learnings, we believe that, 

"Everyone should give themselves the opportunity to create something of their own, it could be something small or personal. You never know what it could grow into."