MITYO is a company that specializes in decor and interior art products as well as custom design services. The company works with a local manufacturer that does all of their printing. Following is an interview with CEO Josh Krouse.
Who are the partners?
Our Printing partner is DKM Ad-Art located in Buffalo.
When did it form?
MITYO became an LLC in 2018, I started working on it in at the end of 2017 after taking time off of it in 2015 to work on other projects and companies. My business partner Tom Mason began working with me full time in October after moving back to Buffalo from Columbus Ohio working as a professional architect. I also have a 3rd business partner – his name is Rahul Tripathi, and he is our software developer, we brought him to work with us more recently in the late December Early January time frame, and he’s been developing an immersive new user experience for mityo.com that we’re launching to coincide with the Buffalo Home Show this weekend.
Does this fill a niche in the Buffalo design market? What is your customer base?
We think that we fill an untapped niche in Buffalo, nationally and globally and that niche is our focus on the customer to help them personalize their lives and their story. We make custom products that consumers and businesses want, on art gallery quality materials where we print directly on acrylic, canvas, faux canvas, abs textured plastic, birch wood, glass, vinyl, aluminum and more and nothing is mass produced, so we minimize waste, and focus on sustainability. For us it’s a more efficient way to produce goods for customers. And we’re able to build a service that fulfills customer desire for customized products at scale.
We have access to large scale machinery typically only used for large scale industrial purposes but we bring it to our consumer and business customers at the personal scale and offer the Grade A customer service, personalization, and customer experience that you don’t see from companies these days. We’ve had sales from customers throughout the East Coast, the Mid West and the West Coast, as well as business in Europe. We want to connect with more local artists and photographers to help them when it comes time for them to work with clients so that they can highlight their work on the best materials possible with a special attention to detail through our quality control and assurance with our local manufacturing partners.
Who are the photographers? And the artists?
We have 23 artists and photographers (they were joining faster than we could handle at our current capacity), but in June we put a hold on allowing new artists to join our MITYO Artist Collective.This is because we’re currently in the process of building our website community tools on our new site to allow artists and photographers to have more control on royalty pricing, products and materials they choose to make available for their prints, quantities per limited run, etc.
What are your most popular images?
The work by MITYO Artist Collective partner Mine Batiyel from Istanbul Turkey is our most popular art.
What is the context of your design work? Where is it applied?
We apply our design work to the home consumer, the office and business customer and also in the architectural sense. We offer rendering for business owners on branding, and concepts for designing spaces. We have done sticker/decal printing and logo design for businesses that request it. We also design custom wall coverings (think decorative textured wallpapers) that we’ll be showing off this weekend at the Buffalo Home Show.
Do you have a brick and mortar location?
We do have a brick and mortar location, we have an office at 553 Smith St. Buffalo NY 14210 it’s located right off of Seneca St. near Flying Bision Brewing Co. Tom and I are typically in the office 7 days a week. We don’t have a traditional store front as we’re on the 2nd floor. But we’re planning on testing out some pop-up events this summer when Food Truck Tuesday rolls back around. We do take walk-ins for consultations as long as we have a call or email from customers about 5-10 minutes before they arrive.
What’s in store for you next? What’s big in 2019?
We’re deep into the Launch of our Updated website on mityo.com as we roll out and introduce new features like our custom geometric shapes series we will be launching this Friday at the Buffalo Home Show. We’ll be improving MITYO Artist Collective, we would love to work with more local photographers and artists, and build a greater awareness about what we do and how we can help them for little to no cost. We also plan on traveling to a few other Trade Shows in NY and across the US to build relationships with new consumer and commercial partners.
Anything else?
The name MITYO stands for May I Take Your Order, it’s a little acronym I came up with in the summer of 2011 when I really found myself attached to the idea of building a business with a high priority of customer focused development.
We allow artists to print their work through our platform where they can can dictate design and royalties and pricing details, then our customers can select from our gallery quality materials, and print these works of art on acrylic, glass, abs plastic, canvas, wood, dozens of vinyls, and many other materials.
This week at the Buffalo Home Show we’re launching our revamped custom office and home products launching our new MITYO Single, Geometric Shape series. This series focuses on the playfulness of circle, square, rectangle and triangle shapes. Customers can visit us at the Buffalo Convention Center March 8-10th and 15-17th to see our products first hand, we’ll have some surprises for attendees that I think I’d like to save for the show!
Believe it or not we also offer a range of custom parking and traffic signage that has attracted a fair amount of unexpected traction for us.
We can do anything from whole office decor to single family homes, to boutique hotels and everything in between. We have a lot of custom orders from consumers who want to bring their iPhone or other smartphone pictures to life in large gallery quality formats. Our unique materials and proprietary printing process really help us to get details and showcase parts of an image that people may not have seen before.
We can work with customers from prototype phase to finished product and then to service work after install.
Get connected: mityo.com