4 minute read
I don’t reorder from many art sites. Most are one-and-done: you find a piece, it shows up, and you never think about the brand again. DROOL is the exception for me. I’ve bought from them more than once, and whenever I’m hunting for something new for a wall at home, they’re where I start.
That loyalty isn’t an accident, and it’s worth explaining why, because “I like the prints” is the easy part. The harder question is why a print shop earns repeat business when the internet is drowning in places that will sell you wall art.
Featured image prints: Regular Breaks, Lonesome, and Soft Hands
What DROOL actually is
DROOL is an independent contemporary art print brand out of the UK, founded by a graphic designer named Alex Liepman who got fed up trying to find affordable art for his own flat that looked anything like the work he followed online. Nothing matched the styles he loved, so he built the thing he wanted instead.
The model is the interesting part. Every piece on the site is exclusive to DROOL, sourced from emerging artists the company actively pays and promotes rather than licensing the same stock images everyone else sells. They call it “run by creatives, for creatives,” and they handle the printing, fulfillment, and global distribution so the artists don’t have to. The practical upshot for me as a buyer is a catalog with an actual point of view. You’re not scrolling past the same five mass-market posters you’ve seen in every apartment since 2015.
The prints are where it earns the reorder
This is the whole ballgame. The work skews bold and graphic: a lot of strong typography, abstract pieces, Japanese-influenced design, photography, and painting reproductions from artists like Javi Cazenave, Caitlin Flood-Molyneux, and Othman Zougam. If your taste runs contemporary, the browse alone is fun.
On the production side, these are giclée prints on 200gsm archival matte paper, printed with water-based UV inks on FSC-certified stock and rated to resist fading for 80-plus years. In plain English, that means proper heavyweight fine-art prints, not the flimsy poster paper that curls at the corners a month after you tack it up. The quality is the actual reason I keep going back instead of chasing a few dollars in savings somewhere cheaper. A print you’ll look at every day for years is the wrong place to cut corners.
Frames, sizes, and the stuff that trips people up
Sizes run from small A4 pieces up to A0 XL statement prints, so you can buy something for a tight gallery wall or commit to a single large anchor piece. Unframed prints generally sit around £40, though they run frequent sales and I’ve seen pieces drop to the £14 to £28 range. Handmade wood frames add roughly £36 for black, white, or solid oak, and a bit more for the colored options.
One honest heads-up for US readers: prices are in GBP because the company is British. Don’t let that scare you off on shipping, though. DROOL runs print labs in the US, UK, Netherlands, and Australia and ships from whichever is closest to you, so a US order isn’t the slow transatlantic wait you’d assume. They say 80 percent of orders ship within 24 hours, the return window is 14 days, and anything that arrives damaged gets a free express replacement.
They also make a translucent neon GlowFrame that slot-loads from the top and can hold two prints back to back so you can flip the design when you want a change. It’s more novelty than necessity, but it’s a genuinely clever idea if you like rotating your art.
Who it’s actually for
DROOL is not the place to find a faithful reproduction of an old master or a specific famous photograph. That’s not a knock, it’s just the lane. This is for people who want something current and a little unexpected on the wall, who’d rather support an emerging artist than hang the same print as half their neighbors. If you want safe, neutral, beige landscapes, you’ll be happier elsewhere. If you want bold and contemporary, that’s the entire premise.
That’s the short version of why I keep coming back. The catalog stays interesting, the prints hold up, and the company is pointed at something I’m happy to put money behind. If you’ve been staring at a blank wall for too long, start with their best-sellers page or run the art finder quiz, then go from there.
