This week, we had the opportunity to speak with Florent Bourgeois, the CEO of
TwicPics. We discussed the company’s beginnings, its mission, and how Florent envisions the future of the industry.
Please present TwicPics to our audience.
It’s not a secret that our brains are wired to respond to visual content. Images and videos are at the heart of all marketing strategies. Visual quality is more important than ever.
But websites are heavier than ever, and the main culprits are visual assets. They eat up network bandwidth and increase the time visitors spend waiting for pages to load while being responsible for most of the carbon emissions on the Web.
Moreover, tailoring media is extremely challenging with all kinds of devices, screen sizes, and network qualities out in the wild.
TwicPics smartly automates images and videos processing. As a result, it guarantees visual quality and web performance while reducing websites’ carbon footprint.
Context-aware media processing
With TwicPics, developers only deal with high-resolution versions of their media while end-users receive optimized, perfectly sized, device-adapted versions delivered from a server close to them.
TwicPics acts as a proxy. It requests master images or videos on a web server, cloud storage, or DAM, then generates content-driven and device-adapted responsive versions with best-in-class compression, delivered directly to the end-user from the closest delivery point available.
TwicPics provides a brand new future-proof approach to smartly automating media processing. Thanks to a Javascript library and artificial intelligence, it analyzes the browsing context and automatically detects when to load media and which transformations it should apply to them.
TwicPics components
TwicPics Components is an open-source collection of web components that make it dead easy to unleash the power of TwicPics in projects based on modern Javascript frameworks such as React, VueJS, Angular or Svelte.
TwicPics Components provide a low-code way to enhance the native HTML image and video tags with must-have features on nowadays websites. In addition, they significantly and transparently optimize web performances with features such as LQIP (Low-Quality Image Placeholders) and lazy-loading out of the box.
As a result, TwicPics components combined with TwicPics core processing features enable businesses to offer an effortlessly flawless user experience.
Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
TwicPics co-founders are developers. For years, the Web struggled with image and embedded videos performance issues. We scouted for services to alleviate the pain, but none addressed the problem in its entirety. To us, such a service had to:
- Handle the server-side part automagically: ideal compression, optimal caching policy, fast processing, fast delivery, etc.
- Integrate transparently into our front-end workflow and respect web standards.
- Not mess with our storage strategy.
We finally decided to develop our own solution. Today, TwicPics is available to the public as a SaaS. We incorporated the company in 2019 at the Station F incubator, and we are now operating from our very own offices, located in Paris, France.
What is the mission of TwicPics?
Our vision at TwicPics from day 1 has been to help our customers deliver the best possible visual experience to their users — pixel perfect, lightning-fast, and personalized — via any type of device — at home, at work, and on the go.
TwicPics’ mission is to empower Web professionals with low-code tools to create and deliver state-of-the-art Web experiences.
What separates you from other similar websites/companies?
TwicPics’ competition requires configuring the presets for any image or video transformation. These manual tasks translate into tedious work during the set-up and substantial maintenance efforts. In contrast, TwicPics takes a front-end approach and automates this workload. TwicPics understands end users’ context and CSS to adapt images on the fly in a fully automated mode.
Who are your typical customers, and what do you think is the main challenge that your product solves for them?
TwicPics’ customers are any digital professionals who build or deliver online content at scale.
Significant brands like L’Oréal, Orange, Burger King, LVMH, General Mills, and startups like Dayuse, Staycation, Lumapps use TwicPics to:
- accelerate the display of web pages
- deliver pixel-perfect images and videos tailored to each client device
- improve UX and Core Web Vitals
- produce eco-designed websites
- simplify their workflow
TwicPics improves the main KPIs of websites and apps: bounce rate, conversion rates, engagement, and SEO.
How do you envision the future of your industry?
Traditional Web platforms offer a one-size-fits-all solution from a single vendor, many complete with the basic capabilities to set up and run a website.
This worked well for businesses in the first wave of digital commerce when companies went online for the first time, but that is no longer the case. No single vendor can offer all of the applications needed to deliver Web experiences that meet the demands of today’s customers, especially in e-commerce.
Fortunately, the Web has evolved. Modern approaches like MACH (Microservices, API, Cloud, Headless) and JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) enable businesses to take advantage of a composable and best-of-breed strategy.
At TwicPics, we advocate for this paradigm shift. We are visual content specialists. We provide the end-to-end multimedia delivery software of future-proof architectures.
