Artifact Uprising

CREATIVITY

for all things, endless possibility. for every story, endless ways to tell it.

COMMUNITY

we are only as great as the community behind us. we believe in its power to ignite creativity. we strive to cultivate a community of inspired storytellers—of movers, shakers, do-ers, designers, artists, thinkers, joy-makers.

THE POWER OF ONE

to create art. and change the world.

We call the Rocky Mountains of Colorado home – and we believe that anyone who has ever floated one of our state’s canyons or skied a bluebird powder day would agree that these wild places inspire so much within us. These are places worth protecting. These are places where better decisions are more important than better profits.

As a company, we are taking decisive actions to be a leader in our approach to how we source materials for our products. Our goal is to develop products that use waste materials where possible – and to create choices that empower our customers to do the same.

From day one, we’ve decided our interior printed pages of our hard and softcover books would be made of recycled content - with pages made of 100% Post-Consumer Waste

If you’ve had the chance to play in the Colorado high-country, you’re no stranger to its dying forests. More than 4 million acres of lodgepole and ponderosa pine trees across America’s Rocky Mountains are being killed by the pine beetle infestation—an epidemic that has left our forests in a sad and not-so-green state.

The millions of beetle-infected trees turn from green to red to gray, ultimately becoming a sea of dead and fallen trees—and seemingly, waste.

But there’s hope. Our forests now have a continued future thanks to the ingenuity of a few craftsmen. You see, the logs themselves are just as rigid and harmless as their

RECYCLED OPTIONS

Born from our love for the outdoors, we strive to create innovative products that reflect and respect the wild places that inspire so much within us. This is why you'll find many of our products use recycled and reclaimed materials where possible. We aim to not only create products that won't end up in a landfill, but—by using recycled paper in our books—we limit what gets to the landfill in the first place.

In 2004, as a recent college graduate, spending money was hard to come by. My husband Matty was getting his elementary teaching license and we lived paycheck to paycheck, finding happiness camping almost every weekend.  Life was simple–but awesome. Rafting down the Green River that summer, a family of otters followed us for five days. I couldn't get a good picture of them to save my life. I was determined to come home from that trip and learn how to use a real camera–you know, the kind with lenses and all sorts of functions I didn't understand. However, funds were short–and saving for such a toy was going to take time.

Three days after this trip, I told my father-in-law that I wanted to learn photography. The next day, I kid you not, he found a camera sitting next to a dumpster in a shiny metal case–lenses and all.  The abandoned camera–it turns out–had once belonged to a local hospital. No longer a part of their inventory, they said it was ours to keep.

Sometimes the world shouts at you to take life in a different direction–and we did just that. One year later, I quit my job to become a professional photographer. Six months later my sister Katie and husband Matt joined me. We've been working together as creatives ever since.

We worked as professional photographers for 8 years–making permanence of experiences that move minds and hearts. As one click of the shutter turned to another turned to hundreds of thousands of photos, we realized our documented lives were sitting on our phones and computers with no true place to live on. It’s something we kept coming back to–‘What are we leaving behind?’

This question spiraled into experiments that included baking photo books in our oven (yes, you can bake books in your oven–though I can’t say we were successful!) and eventually into dreams of a photo book business.

PRESSING PLAY

With gratitude in our hearts and nervous energy running through our bones, we launched Artifact Uprising on October 9th, 2012 from our basement.

I will never forget the first order that came through by photographer Jeff Gleason – the very. first. order. Thank you Jeff. Or to Holly Becker at Decor8 for sharing our photo books on her blog – your words inspired many and changed the course of our company. We cannot say thank you enough. To the first day when over 7,000 of you visited the site – to the first 1 million images uploaded into the databases. To the bloggers and photographers, for all of your tweets and pins – the big guys and the little guys. Thank you. We are humbled.

Since that day, we've grown from three people working in a basement to a team of fourteen - yet the roots remain the same. We pride ourselves on being an authentic company — and we think that matters. Because at the end of the day, we take it personally. All of it.