Our Story

Our story starts with two moments I couldn’t ignore.

One night, the children’s room was dark and quiet – except for a digital photo frame, glowing like a tiny TV. The colours were harsh, the screen was glaring. Since then, I always flip the screen to face the wall every night.

Another day, my one-year-old discovered the same frame’s dangling cable and tried to drag it down from the shelf. The frame was eventually removed. That was the moment I realised: despite all the digital features of modern photo frames, there are many drawbacks that make them less attractive. They can’t really be hung on the wall without an ugly cable showing, and their glowing screens cannot present a nice artistic poster – to name just a few.

I talked about this with my tech-savvy friend Jaka. Together, we went looking for a better way, and that’s when we discovered color e-Ink. E-Ink displays don’t glow or flicker. They’re matte and still, almost like a high-quality paper print. The newly released Spectra™ 6 e-Ink technology even makes the presentation of colour images possible. When we first saw it, something clicked: what if a digital frame didn’t feel “digital” at all?

We started our journey to design MelonFrame. Since then, we’ve iterated through several prototypes. We added a small buzzer to distinguish different device states. We integrated an accelerometer to enable automatic rotation and wakeup of the device. We 3D-printed multiple housing designs. We ordered different frame samples to test various image ratios and proportions on real walls and shelves.

All of this was for one single goal: to create something smart, design-led, simple and reliable.

Our engineering background and our care for detail and quality led us to make MelonFrame not only a smart device, but a true design object.