If you've been to a corporate party in the past year, you've likely shared space with The Bosco â a gif photo booth â and The Bosco Boys â the charismatic group of party boys manning the machine and the helping to steer the startup's success.
WN How did you end up on this couch today? JAKE I actually grew up with Aaron, one of the founders. I do client relations and long-term relationships and projects. JOEY And you play music. JAKE And music. I play the drums. Thatâs a common thread â we all have little things that we do. WN Where did you go to school? JAKE Wesleyan University. JOEY Iâm Joey, Iâm from Pittsburgh. I know all these people basically from Oberlin where I went to school. JAKE Whereâd you guys go again? Kenyan? Kenyan college? JOEY Oberlin. ERIK Oberlin! JOEY You know Lena Dunham? You heard of her? JAKE The Ohio State University? JOEY The Oberlin College. I thought I was going to go to grad school right away for design and then I ended up in New York becoming a male model. JAKE A male model mind you. JOEY Always open to new things. When this got started, I started working events, then doing project management and that led to all of the sales stuff. So now Iâm one of the sales people. JAKE Head of Sales. JOEY Head of Sales, Joey Pope. Bookings, events, meetings, client relations â everyone kind of wears like, seven hats here. JAKE Yeah we do a mix. WN Thatâs the fun thing about startups right? JOEY Exactly, exactly. Hashtag: startup life. ERIK Iâm Erik, I went to school with Joey. I was doing carpentry and metal working with an artist⌠JOEY Living in a warehouse under the Long Island Expressway. ERIC In a warehouse under the Long Island Expressway. JOEY Didnât pay any rent. ERIC Didnât pay any rent. WN Wait what? JOEY Lived a mile from the nearest subway. ERIC It was a mile from the nearest subway. We threw great parties though. I got hit by a car. WN Hashtag: startup life. ERIC Hashtag: startup life. I got a fungal infection on my nuts. JOEY Come on. OK, stop it. ERIC What? It was startup life. JAKE No, no, no. Iâve never had that. I work here. Iâve never had that. ERIK After Sandy the shop got really fucked up. There was a period of time with no work and Aaron was nice enough to let me start working Bosco events. So thatâs how I got here. Iâve been doing like, events as an event worker for a while, but um, Iâm more recently full-time.
WN Tell me what Bosco means. JOEY I got this guys. So, Bosco, we do event photo booths on a rental basis. We do a lot of music festivals, fashion events, corporate parties, harping on this candid fun, goofy experience thatâs trending now in terms of creating content at events. Weâve always been pulled to these high-end interactive media installations so itâs something weâre trying to capitalize on. But weâll do everything from Cindyâs Bat Mitzvah to the Lady Gaga tour, thatâs how we describe it. JAKE We figure out interesting ways to tie in technology and social media into photography. JOEY And weâre a bunch of party boys. And people love that. ERIK And all of that comes from Nick and Aaron, who founded the company. JOEY We kind of associate with people that are like, kind of post-collegiate bohemian creative types that are broke. JAKE I would never describe myself that way. WN Iâm familiar with you as a gif booth. Is that the main draw? ERIC The company is know as the first gif booth. Itâs also Joeyâs model look book. WN I like the graphic design. Is that Joey too? ERIK No, Dennis. Dennis does all this cool shit. DENNIS What do I do? [Dennis rolls his chair over from across the room] JAKE Cool shit. ERIK Everything thatâs cool.
WN Why did you want to make a photo booth company? DENNIS Um, it was something that Nick and I kind of did in college for beer money, basically. We saw a photo booth at a party one time and weâre like hey, like, we can probably make that. Weâre both like, crafty and smart. When I moved here about a year and a half ago, Nick was talking to Aaron about doing a photo booth company and I was talking to another of my friends about doing a photo booth company, so we took the ground work, paved way, and it kind of turned into this. WN Did the persona of âthe Bosco Boys,â this lively effervescent group of boys as a selling point, develop on its own? DENNIS No. ERIK It was organic. JAKE In Erikâs fantasy world. ERIK It happens to be the people we hire. Really charismatic, charming⌠JOEY Effervescent. ERIC Effervescent people. Not Jake. JAKE I bring a different personality. JOEY Itâs a collective of people that had this trajectory that never once in their mind thought they were going to be working for a photo booth company. People on that cusp of design, fun, interesting, and cool. The lynchpin of it has been making money, but everyone wants it to be some sort of fun creative flow that people are pouring their intuition or their natural cool into. JAKE Yeah, it comes from people with good taste trying to make a photo booth company. ERIK You know, personally, I just wanted my mom to stop worrying about me. She sends care packages when sheâs afraid.
WN You said personality is whatâs driving the brand. Letâs talk like your personal inspiration: what keeps you creatively inspired? JOEY I donât know. For me it was strange because I was uh, I was an art student very much into understanding the parameters of where my creatively was flowing. My senior thesis was a wilderness of animal sounds and video art and a ton of mulch in a gallery space, but I didnât necessarily see the transition of, like, how does that translate to me being in New York? The Boscoâs been a really wonderful transition to like, what I was doing just to make ends meet and also the joining of a regimented adult life and some sort of creative output. WN Are you still doing experiential design? JOEY Yeah. The first big thing we did was Pitchfork Music Festival where people put on headphones and listened to songs and they put their hands down in these plastic boxes that would complete a circuit and take sensory data from them. And as theyâre listening to these different songs they would snap photos of themselves and it would create some sort of colorful sheen or cloud over. JOEY It was called the aurora booth â it was kind of like a mood ring booth. WN Who came up with that idea? JOEY It was E Music and Mother. We do a lot with Mother. And I think the echelon weâve like, been working within, weâve been able to pitch some really fun ideas using the technical platforms that we have but in fun, quirky, interactive ways that allow users to experience or interact with things, whether itâs long light exposure, dance booths or whatever.
WN Where do you see Bosco five years from now? JAKE Five years? ERIK I donât know if Iâll be alive in five years. WN I hope youâre going to be alive. Donât go back to that warehouse, JAKE Itâs not a company where you know the end point. JOEY Yeah. JAKE Itâs not just like, oh in 5 years weâre gonna have a fucking office in every city in America and weâre going to be doing gif booths as much as we can you know? Itâs like, such in the hands of the employees and itâs kind of, we kind of decide. âWe decideâ is like a little catch phrase around the office. Itâs also our wifi password. And so thatâs what it is, we decide we want to try something new and we do that.
WN What was the craziest call youâve gotten? JAKE When I first started we had three booths and I got a call from AT&T where they wanted five locations in America, 10 concerts at each location over the course of 3 months which means we would basically have had to build six more photo booths and we just thought it was a joke, and then somehow we got the deal. We built six more photo booths and then doubled overnight basically. That was pretty crazy for me. WN You canât have an event without a photo booth. DENNIS Itâs like, most of the content that you consume throughout the day is your friendsâ tweets, your friendsâ Facebook posts, and how are you going to break into that? You have to brand your friendsâ Facebook posts basically, so itâs like, you have a picture of yourself thatâs got a Heineken logo on it or something like that and instantly, you know, they become an advertisement to you. So thatâs why this is so valuable to people. JOEY And itâs attractive because weâre all so goddamn attractive. JAKE Speak for yourself goddamn it.
WN If you could describe Bosco in one word what would it be? ERIK Nice. JOEY Awkward. DENNIS Joey, you said awkward? JOEY No. ERIK Whatâs wrong with you? DENNIS I thought you were gonna say turnt or trill or.. ERIC Joey say turnt. Bosco ⌠you have to act turnt. JOEY Turnt. ERIK Yeah Iâd say trill. No wait wait no can I take it back? I want to say Pyrex. Hashtag it, hashtag it. Iâm trying to blow up. I got this new Pyrex.
THE BOSCO BOYS | thebos.co
PHOTOS: MEGHAN MCGARRY | WORDS: KELLY SHERMAN
















