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| Dougie Dunbar Pyramid Imaging, Bread Street |
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| Pyramid Imaging, Grassmarket, Edinburgh |
I worked for Dougie Dunbar, the then owner of Pyramid
Imaging, for over eight years and watched this happen first hand. When digital
cameras came out the quality was terrible but gradually they improved to not
only match film but exceed the quality of film. The inevitable fall out was slow
and painful to watch…. Just about every week another photographer proclaimed
they had “gone digital” and then we rarely saw them again. The bottom line was
they didn’t need us any more to do the processing as they could access their
photos directly, hence why the photo printing destination shop started to decline.
Add to that mix a terrible recession, Facebook removing the
need for photos to be printed at all and bigger and better T.V.’s for
displaying your photos and, well, we were just not required any more.
The trouble was the shop still needed to pay all the bills -
staff wages (me included), electricity (man that E6 processor ate the juice),
rates, rent, maintenance, processing chemicals, and the biggest expenditure of
all was the bank loan for all the equipment…… Never ending! Eventually the
“High Street” shop becomes economically unviable to run.
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| Pyramid Imaging, Leith |
There was no way we could compete with the exact same
products and internet prices that were from huge companies arranging to print their
products using the lowest bidder (usually from another country). At this point
Pyramid closed down - I shook hands with Dougie and he sold everything on eBay
to someone from Wales.
A sad day indeed! He went off and retrained and is now working in the oil
industry, and I moped around for a bit and then launched Canvas Printmaker.
This time round it was mail order and internet only. And it
worked - small businesses can compete online with the “big boys” as long as you
sell products that they cannot hope to match. As Canvas Printmaker specialise
in canvas prints, particularly quality canvas prints, we can and have been
doing so for over five years now. We still supply National Galleries with canvas prints and we still maintain our quality standards - very few online
canvas printers are prepared to varnish their canvas prints because the varnish
is tricky to apply properly and takes time to do dry, but we do because we care!
Likewise, whenever we get asked to print collages and
montages we do it the way the customer wants and not the way the company is
prepared to do it - it takes longer, you see, to prepare customised collages
rather than the computer generated one button press, however it is exactly what the customer wants.
This is the single biggest factor that small businesses need to do when adapting
to change - keep the customers happy and your business continues to trade.
Many, many big companies have forgotten that and you can use their customer
indifference to your advantage.
However, we are starting to notice a new online trend with
Google search results. There was a time when searching for “canvas prints”
would actually produce a set of results of businesses that actually made the canvases themselves. These days
searching for “canvas prints” turns up “Tesco”, “Asda”, “Aldi”, “Boots”, “John
Lewis” - none of which actually print the canvases themselves. (As a side note
we used to print Asda roll up banners for design agencies - it certainly wasn’t
Asda printing them). Not to mention the irrelevant Wikipedia article - surely
it is more likely that I would be looking to buy canvas prints than find out
what they were? And if you are starting to see this too then I would ask
yourself: Would you rather go to a qualified dentist or take your chances with
a supermarket? If the answer to that is “dentist” then apply the same reasoning
with printing - use businesses that know what they are doing! Look for their
reviews to confirm this, and hey, try pressing the next button and see what’s
beyond Google’s biased page one.
