Matboard and More

Mehdi Kajbaf was an engineer with an MBA who couldn't survive the 9-5 corporate world. In 2012, after years of soul-searching—including a failed attempt to break into HR consulting at P&G with heavy MBA debt—the opportunity came to work on Matboard and More with his brother and brother-in-law. The founding team recognized that the picture framing industry, one of the oldest in the world, was ripe for digitization. "With some technology and sophistication we could create something new and fresh," Mehdi explains. The insight was simple: customers should be able to order custom mats and frames in any color, size, and quantity with just a few clicks.

The initial website was deliberately simple—just a wizard to pick a matboard, change size and quantity, and order. "No accessories, very few options and a pretty rough layout. It worked though, we were getting orders!" But those orders came at a cost: they were expensive to acquire through AdWords. Mehdi took a hands-on approach, calling every customer at midnight if needed, personally handling a $200 rush order to show gratitude. For the entire first year, the team's singular focus was relentless: pay for traffic, analyze it, get feedback, and iterate on marketing campaigns and the website. "After about a year we had a website that was turning a positive ROI on marketing spend and I had become an SEO/PPC expert," Mehdi recalls. Only then did they expand to add frames and accessories.

The first customers came through paid search—Google AdWords. Mehdi spent hours daily optimizing campaigns, experimenting with keywords, bids, and ad copy. The company had no outside financing, so every dollar of marketing spend had to justify itself through ROI. This constraint became a strength: it forced disciplined testing and optimization. By year three, Matboard and More ranked number one for most of their target keywords and had highly effective PPC campaigns. The slow, steady growth was grueling at times—production couldn't keep up, machines broke down, employees quit—but it forced the team to build sustainable systems.

Google search dominated. "Showing up in search is so valuable and nothing in our marketing has ever come close," Mehdi states. Facebook and social media broadly failed to generate meaningful returns. The company experimented with display ads, trade shows, and other channels, but none came close to Google's performance. One major mistake was neglecting mobile for too long; they're only now launching a mobile-friendly redesign years later. Another was not investing more aggressively in technology and website development early on. A critical operational failure came during a second Christmas season when unexpected demand overwhelmed production, leading to weeks of 24/7 work and forcing a year-long focus on internal systems rather than growth—a painful but necessary pivot.

Matboard and More is generating $170,000 per month in revenue and is the number one online retailer of custom matting and framing in the US. Mehdi acknowledges that slow, steady growth—while sometimes frustrating given missed opportunities—gave the team time to work through operational kinks that might have derailed faster growth. The biggest remaining challenge is that the matboard market (excluding frames) is inherently niche; most people have seen hundreds of mats in their lifetime but don't know the term "matboard." This limits organic search volume. With frames, the opposite problem exists: a hyper-competitive market with expensive PPC bids. They've found a balance and are excited about the upcoming mobile-friendly website launch, which they believe will unlock significant growth in the frames market and beyond.