· What started in 2017 to help their friend get a handmade painting of his girlfriend quickly turned into a side hustle, pooling together Rs 23,000 from friends and family.
· Straight out of college, Sunny Choudhary ditched the traditional career in engineering, converting this side hustle into his business, aka PortraitFlip.
· Despite no orders in the first three months, they persisted and have now served customers in 45+ countries, clocking in 6 crores of revenue in their first 2.5 years.
They say it takes three weeks to build a habit and three months to build a lifestyle, but three months without a single order is enough time to spiral and recalibrate every wrong decision that led you to that point. But PortraitFlip skipped the rumination, triumphing through sheer grit and determination, amassing a revenue of 6 crores over its first two and a half years. That’s the power of consistency. The inception story of this startup is, in their terms, comically simple.
In 2017, a hostel room in Vellore Institute of Technology had students scrambling not for last-minute exam prep or 2 a.m. Maggi cravings, but a noble quest to help two lovers. A friend wanted a handmade painting of his girlfriend, recreated from a photograph he deeply cherished.
Everything is fair in love and war, but countless hours browsing the internet only compounded their disappointment. Not a single service was both affordable and willing to deliver to India. The few options available were either too expensive or didn't ship internationally, igniting frustration.
A small voice at the back of the mind kept whispering: If we couldn’t find a decent, reliable portrait service, how many more suffered from the same problem? This sparked the ‘Eureka’ moment, pushing Sunny Choudhary to pool together Rs 23,000 from his pocket money and petty sums borrowed from friends and family to create PortraitFlip. A mechanical engineer by degree, Choudhary’s decision to ditch the traditional career path to start this business came straight out of college.
He officially registered the company in July 2018, right after graduating. The name he concedes came easily – flipping people’s photos into portraits. What started as a college side hustle slowly turned into something much bigger.
So, what do they do? In simple words, they take your favourite photo and turn it into memorable handmade portraits and paintings. Every portrait they assure is 100% hand painted by a professional artist while iterating the fact that there’s something genuinely irreplaceable about a painting made by human hands, in a world where anyone can generate an image in seconds.
But how do you build trust for such a niche space? You build systems designed to eliminate the anxiety of customers. PortraitFlip developed a win-win situation for the customer and company. The customer pays 20% upfront; the remaining 80% is due only after they’ve seen and approved the final painting, completed with free unlimited revisions and free worldwide shipping, with a real human manager supporting them along the process, not just an automated chatbot.
To date, they’ve worked with 250+ professional artists specialising in different mediums such as oil, watercolour, charcoal, pencil, acrylic, pastel, and colour pencil.
Handmade products have a history of weaving stories and traditions into their works. The canvas becomes a mirror to express your emotions, echoing the timeless reflection of Pablo Picasso, who suggested that art could elevate us from the mundane ‘dust’ of everyday life.
In a world rapidly adopting mass-produced items, handmade paintings are filled with care and exclusivity. No matter what the conditions, two handmade paintings will never be exact replicas, and that is what makes both the artist and consumer part of this elaborate storytelling.
Everyone likes the success, but few are privy to the obstacles around the path. What do you do when not a single order arrives in the first three months? The founder of PortraitFlip put his head down and navigated the technicalities of a website and marketing. They ran their first Google Ad, and that’s when things changed. They received their first order from a place they’d least expected – the USA.
This gave them a much-needed push, but the trajectory of any business has its crests and troughs. No organisation, no matter how distinguished, moves in an upward projectile growth trajectory forever. Bouncing back from the lows is what makes the highs even sweeter.
Aside from creating trust, they had to navigate major Google Algorithm updates, tariffs on international orders, and maintain quality. Each struggle made the business sharper, from maintaining customer relations to fixing things on the go.
For a business that started with the bare minimum in a hostel room, they have now managed to serve over 25,000 customers across 45+ countries. Their advice for the young entrepreneur has a Zen-like simplicity to it– don’t wait for the perfect idea or time. Every moment counts, and experience can educate more than most MBA degrees.
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