Kate Backdrop Feature

Product development process

The Origin

After graduation in 2007, Kate’s founder——David got into foreign trade and cross-border online shopping for the first time.David loves photography, and he often selected and purchased photographic apparatus and accessories on those oversea shopping sites. During the period, he found that backdrop is a good photographic equipment. Through investigation analysis, David eventually confirmed that photography backdrops would have broad market prospects, while there was few backdrop brands that could provide user-friendly and cost-effective products at that time. Under the circumstance, David decided to enter the backdrop market and embarked upon the long journey to find suppliers.

At the end of 2012, David finally chose a textiles factory after searching and comparison with caution. The vinyl cloth produced by this factory is regarded as the ideal raw material of backdrops.

The 1st Products Upgrade

Early in 2013, David took the idea into practice and create a brand, which was named after his lover Kate. At that time, however, the characteristics of vinyl makes products fail to meet the customers’ requirements. David sincerely sought advice from customers and found the microfiber fabric at last. This kind of cloth is thick and soft, wrinkle-resistant, but costs more on printing.

After several failures on the experiment, David got his eye on heat transfer printing technology, which was initially intended to produce pillows and he tried to apply this to microfiber fabric printing.This attempt perfectly solved the traditional problem of high printing cost, and was also marked the first iterations of Kate’s productions. It is, assuredly, a unique, original achievement belonging to Kate backdrop.

The truth is, the decision that using microfiber fabric as the raw material instead of vinyl cloth nearly double the cost, and once caused a rise in prices. Many consumers who were accustomed to vinyl backdrops chose to leave, while David still insisted to practice the decision in order to improve the quality of products.

The 2nd Products Upgrade

By the year of 2016, our factory could only manufactured small-sized backdrops, while large-sized ones needed stitch. With the expansion of our customer base and reinforcement of our brand’s popularity, David purchased a batch of advanced equipment that can produce 3 meters wide seamless backdrops. Based on that, customers gave more feedback and hope that there could be a pocket on the top of the backdrop to make it easy to hang. During the fieldwork in the factory for meeting this requirement, David observed that seamless backdrops were difficult to perfectly cut, which could lead to noticeably uneven edges. After learning the situation, David released precise instruction that every Kate backdrop must be produced with hems and a pocket on it. This move was regarded as developing a new industry standard.

In 2018, David had already clarified the brand mission of Kate backdrop. Kate starts its journey from backdrops, and aspires to offer attentive one-step services on photography——from professional consulting, equipment supply, post production, photo printing and so on. Our mission is to remove all obstacles on your road of photography.