How Heirloom saved months of dev work and unlocked a new revenue stream

How Heirloom saved months of dev work and unlocked a new revenue stream

How Heirloom saved months of dev work and unlocked a new revenue stream

up to 50% extra markup

Users happily pay extra for personalizing their product with Polotno

Thousands of new sales

Custom covers became a new top revenue stream

Launched in under 2 weeks

From integration to production with just one developer

Heirloom is a family-founded business creating physical video books – elegant, giftable devices that auto-play uploaded videos and photos when opened. With customers ranging from individual families to large corporations like Delta Airlines, SendHeirloom lets anyone send a truly memorable, tangible gift.

The challenge

Heirloom faced growing demand for personalized covers but lacked a scalable, user-friendly way to let customers design them without heavy support or costly development.

The outcome

By integrating Polotno SDK, they launched a fully branded, self-serve cover editor in weeks – turning a support burden into a profitable product line with thousands of custom covers sold.

The challenge

How do you scale custom covers without building your own editor?

As demand grew, SendHeirloom saw increasing interest from customers wanting custom-designed covers. Their existing process – manually designing or labeling covers – was not scalable and risked becoming a bottleneck.

Internally, the team faced a classic build-vs-buy decision. Building a cover editor from scratch would have required months of development and substantial investment in engineering, not to mention ongoing maintenance and feature gaps. The team needed a powerful, embeddable editor that felt native and intuitive to non-technical users, particularly for use cases involving emotional, often time-sensitive gifts.

The solution

What if users designed covers and paid more — with zero support load?

SendHeirloom integrated Polotno SDK directly into its Book Builder flow. Within two weeks — with just one developer — they launched a fully branded, in-product editor for creating custom covers. Key features like templates, mobile photo upload, and intuitive UX made the integration smooth both technically and for end users.

Polotno allowed Heirloom’s customers to personalize:

  • Front, spine, and back covers

  • Inside cover messages

  • B2B-branded bulk orders at scale

The editor matched their vision of keeping the entire experience self-serve, fast, and joyful — even for elderly or non-tech-savvy users.

"Our only alternative would have been to implement our own cover design editor. That would have amounted to a lot of development time, a lot of maintenance, and would have missed huge features. I still remember how delighted I was when I saw the Polotno editor already supports things like templates that we would not have had time to build".

Zack Bloom

Co-founder @ Heirloom

The outcome

Custom covers, no dev drain – just revenue

The integration of Polotno into Heirloom workflow resulted in several positive outcomes:

  • Thousands of custom covers sold, each carrying a significant upcharge — sometimes nearly 50% of the base book price.

  • High adoption: A “huge %” of all SendHeirloom orders now include customized covers.

  • Zero-touch support: The editor's usability means customers rarely need help.

  • Seamless scaling: From individual gifts to corporate orders, the editor adapts.

  • Instant ROI: Despite being Heirloom’s largest fixed SaaS expense, the revenue from custom covers makes it a net-positive investment.

Polotno SDK gave SendHeirloom:

  • A plug-and-play Canva-like editor, not just a toolkit

  • Fast implementation — 2 days to prototype, 2 weeks to go live

  • Stable, well-documented tooling that hasn’t required support

  • Creative freedom to expand cover customization to the entire book surface

Experience the Polotno advantage

Save engineering time and effort, launch quickly and delight your users with robust visual editing capabilities

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