Complaint Review: SlapFish

The past year or so I was interested in opening a Fast Casual Restaurant. After looking into several fast casual restaurants I settled on Slapfish. Slapfish had a cult following, great social media presence, and Andrew Gruel was the prefect face for the company. So I decided to reach out to Fransmart to discuss franchising Slapfish.

Everything started out perfect. I first met with Fransmart; they are the company selling the franchise. Fransmart seemed like honest, caring people. Next, I met with Andrew Gruel. He was the same way an honest, caring person. Andrew and I spoke on several occasions. Andrew made everything sound fine and dandy. He mentioned all the other successful Multi-unit operators, and all the future stores in the works. However, I asked him if there were any legal issues with Slapfish Corporate or Financial issues that I should know about. He reassured me that the answer was NO. Nonetheless, I was a little skeptical.

So I begin to look into any pending lawsuits against Slapfish. Sure enough, I found several pending lawsuits naming Slapfish as the defendant. The first lawsuit I found is a fraud case showing slapfish first multi-unit operator as the plaintiff and slapfish as the defendant. Neither, Fransmart or Slapfish made that franchisee available for me to talk to. The next lawsuit really blew the socks off of me. Fransmart itself has filed a lawsuit against the very same franchise they tried selling me. It looks as if Slapfish owes Fransmart a significant amount of money. The third and hopefully last lawsuit I found is from a design and marketing company in the Boston area. This marketing company did the design, artwork, and marketing for slapfish several years ago. Slapfish didn’t have money to pay the design company, so slapfish offered 5% equity in the company. Sure enough, it looks as if Slapfish screwed the company and left them with nothing.

I thank god that I did not sign on to become a Slapfish Franchisee. These lawsuits look like they very well can sink this young company. I can't imagine Slapfish survives these 3 pending lawsuits. Slapfish seems very urgent and desperate to open more locations to fund their litigation. I hope potential Slapfish Franchisee's see this company for who they really are.