How Heirloom saved months of dev work and unlocked a new revenue stream
Heirloom is a US-based 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.
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.
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.
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