Article: Replay Photos

As an All-American basketball player for Duke University in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Sue Harnett knew how to take great shots. Today, as president of a 16-person photo reproduction company in Durham, N.C., she’s still a shot doctor of sorts. Her company, Replay Photos builds and manages online photo stores for college athletic departments and professional sports teams.

Replay also has exclusive licensing rights to the GigaPixel FanCam, which augments traditional online storefronts with social media applications that allow fans to find and tag themselves in high-definition crowd shots. ”Everyone loves capturing the ‘big game’ or the ‘big event’ into something they can have forever,” Harnett says. “For us, it’s all about sharing those moments.”

The idea for Replay came into focus in 2002. Harnett was working as a healthcare administrator and volunteering for Duke’s athletic department in her spare time. The athletic director asked her to come up with new ways to identify revenue sources. After wandering through the archives, it hit her: all the old sports photos had to be worth something.

With personal savings and help from her two original partners, Harnett spent months compiling images into a database for an online photo store. She hired a programmer (who became the company’s lead developer) to build an e-commerce engine that could run the site. And in 2005, she tanked her healthcare job to work on Replay full time.