Birkenstock-clad, Hydroflask-toting, oversized T-shirt-wearing VSCO girls are so 2019. In 2025, VSCO is emphasizing its roots with professional and aspiring photographers, and it recently showed up at NBA All-Star Weekend to make that more polished identity known.
At the NBA event, the photo sharing and editing app’s team hosted a basketball-focused photo exhibit called “Courtside” alongside a panel discussion with three established photographers who use the platform, Squint, Meredith Minkow, and Moses Kinnah. The exhibit, which featured prints from those photographers and a digital photo display from other VSCO creators, ran the length of the weekend and attracted hundreds of visitors, including brand representatives from Adidas and Bleacher Report and photographers like Devin Allen and Jordan “Jsquared” Jimenez.
VSCO CEO Eric Wittman said the event was dreamt up by the platform’s professional user base, which the brand is looking to emphasize as it continues focusing on growing its paid users and finding ways to connect brands with creative talent.
“We haven’t been as noisy the last couple years, but we’re getting back to that,” Wittman told Marketing Brew.
Net success
“Courtside” didn’t come from the VSCO corporate team. Instead, Wittman said, Squint, who received a grant from the company in 2019, had the idea to use NBA All-Star Weekend to platform the VSCO community and its creators, and Wittman saw the opportunity to give its users “a beautiful forum to showcase their amazing talent and their work.”
As a recognized sports photographer, Squint had prepared for All-Star Weekend for about a year, he told us, and while he said he had been asked to do photo installations and galleries for the event, he wanted to show off VSCO’s artists more directly.
“It’s cool to get requests,” he said. “But I was like, I really would love VSCO to have this community [represented] because we’re actually the artists.”
VSCO’s community element is important to Wittman, too, and even before All-Star Weekend came around, Wittman said the team had been focused on providing programming and tools for budding photographers—something that’s long been central to VSCO’s operation.
The brand began in 2011 as a website that sold presets for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, and after introducing its mobile app in 2012, has amassed more than 300 million sign-ups. VSCO runs a freemium model where a basic version is available at no charge, and premium paid memberships give users access to features like video-editing tools, a shared photo gallery called Spaces, direct messaging, and more customizable profiles. According to the company, paid memberships make up a majority of its revenue, and it first turned a profit in 2022.
Some of the premium features are key to what Wittman said helps facilitate community-building on VSCO. “Our mission as a company…is really about nurturing creativity, so that people have the opportunity to make it as professional photographers, as professional creators,” he said.
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One aspect of “making it” is facilitating brand connections, and outside of All-Star Weekend, Wittman said the team has worked to connect users with brands like Liquid I.V, and Vera Wang on creative campaigns and on photo challenges, where brands pose a creative prompt to VSCO users, who can upload and tag their photos to participate and potentially score a paid gig.
To make those brand opportunities happen, Wittman said the team often polls its user base for brands they’d like to work with and has proactively reached out to companies like Nike, Levi’s, and Marriott to ask about potential collaborations. Brands are also coming to VSCO directly in search of creative talent, Wittman said.
“More and more brands care about brand trust and brand safety, and they care about tapping into communities of creators and photographers,” Wittman said. “It’s beneficial to [them] as a brand, that’s important, and beneficial to our community, and then we can be the platform that helps activate that.”
Then and now
Children of the internet might hear the platform’s name and think of the VSCO girl meme from 2019, but Wittman emphasized that while the VSCO girl temporarily turned the platform into what he called “almost an alt social network,” the viral moment in time has passed.
“We look back at those times and think of them fondly, because that’s actually where a lot of people, mostly younger women, came to VSCO and [were] like, ‘Hey, this is a place where I can express myself—I’m not getting bullied, I’m not getting trolled,’” Wittman said. “We still love that.”
While the VSCO girl is still welcome, Wittman said the platform is aiming to be “more about serious creators” focused on making photography a career, which is why the app has focused on fostering intentionality and creativity, which could lead to more discoverability, brand involvement, and success.
For Squint, seeing the app’s creative and professional journey lead to the All-Star Weekend partnership was uniquely exciting. As a longtime user, he’s seen the app’s creative community evolve, and the event was a culmination of sorts—one that brought a brand with heart like the NBA to work with a creative community he champions.
“I just think it’s a very healthy relationship, and I would love to see more artists [represented],” Squint said. “I love the fact that [this partnership] actually has some elite artists.”
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