Michael's Place

For the last two and a half years Multiply has been outsourcing its photo-printing to a company called Club Photo. For the most part our customers were satisfied with the quality of the prints, and we were satisfied with the reliability and turn-key nature of our relationship.

Around 1AM on Wednesday morning Mary, a fellow Multiply employee, received an e-mail from our former business development liaison at Club Photo. It happened to be from an "@photoTLC.com" e-mail address. It began:

I am writing to let you know that PhotoTLC has decided to close their business today without notifying any customers in advance. I WISH I HAD MORE OF A HEADS UP BUT I WAS NOTIFIED THE SAME TIME YOU WERE. It has been a tough day and a huge shock to me as well as I had no idea this was going to happen. I wish I had more to say but words can’t express exactly how I feel at this time.

Actually, we weren't notified the same time. Excluding this e-mail from what sounded like a recently laid-off employee...we were actually never notified. Not even to this point, since it wasn’t clear from this e-mail precisely how Multiply would be affected.

Not one to immediately panic, I first wanted to confirm what relationship, if any, there was between photoTLC and Club Photo. It turns out photoTCL acquired Club Photo in December 2005.

I checked out the Club Photo web-site at http://www.clubphoto.com. It was working fine. I then logged into the affiliate tools Club Photo provides us to check the status of orders. It was fully functional and I was able to confirm orders shipping as of March 5th. Behind the scenes, our process for sending orders from Multiply to Club Photo was working fine too.

Puzzled, I tried to get information directly from the company. Unable to reach anybody at their business number I tried a cell-phone number I found in an old email. The person I called, a technical liaison we had with the company, was actually laid off a few months ago and was surprised with my questions and news. He offered to call some friends of his that still worked (or so he thought) at the company. He called me back about 15 minutes later.

Apparently, some time on March 6th, everybody at the company was let go. Everybody. All photoTCL staff (including subsidiaries like Club Photo) were told to pack their desks and be out in one hour. They were told not to login and send emails. Accounts were frozen. Locks to the doors were also changed. (This is 3rd or 4th hand gossip.)

Despite the above,as of right now, the Club Photo web-site is still taking orders for prints! Is that even legal if the company is shut-down? I guess they fired everybody who had access to update the web-site.

If Mary was out of the office on vacation, or mistakenly deleted an e-mail from an unexpected domain as spam, Multiply may still be taking orders and charges from users and submitting orders to Club Photo. Everything is still functioning fine despite this story which states that photoTLC "abruptly ceased operations."

At Multiply, we immediately removed our "order prints" links (while we look for and implement a better replacement). Of course, we're also giving prompt refunds to our customers who have recently submitted print orders that weren't processed yet. But what about people that have orders at clubphoto.com? If there's no staff left capable of turning off the web-site, is there anyone around to process refunds? What about people still making orders? Where does that money go?

I can't possibly think of how just turning things off as they have done, with no notice to partners and customers, was the best business decision. I would love for someone involved in that decision to explain why they couldn't give even just 24 hours notice, and why they didn't turn off their site (and affiliate partner interface).