As the USA laments the death of yearbooks, a UK yearbook company with only six employees has made its business more social to compete, and buck the American trend.

Only three years’ old, the company came about when its founder Jake Gordon had a bad experience with his hall of residence’s yearbook provider at the University of Nottingham. He decided he could do better, and now has over 350 school, college, university and other customers nationwide.”

Jake said; “In the US, yearbooks are taken extremely seriously. They have yearbook classrooms, yearbook classes, dedicated yearbook staff and even yearbook camp in the summer. But the result is an expensive yearbook that increasingly no one wants to buy.”

Social networking sites such as Facebook are being blamed for the demise of the US yearbook. According to US yearbook publisher Jostens, research shows that 15 years ago there were 2,400 US colleges in the US publishing yearbooks, today there’s only about 1,000 US colleges with hard copy yearbooks. So what’s helping this UK company’s success where large US companies are failing?

“The yearbook market in the US is in steep decline”, agrees Jake. “The huge yearbook companies there are too slow in reacting to a rapidly changing market. With a far smaller and more vibrant market here in the UK, companies such as AllYearbooks are able to act quicker, we’re constantly adapting our product to our customers’ needs.

“At AllYearbooks the focus is on a yearbook created collaboratively by everyone involved, doing it online as easily as posting stuff to Facebook. The result is a yearbook, which represents the whole year-group, and this is a product that people truly want to buy.”