Fade to Blacks

Every Canadian news outlet today reported that Blacks, a 67-year-old Canadian retail chain of 59 photography stores, will shut down within two months.

[Update: It didn’t completely shut down. See end of post].

(To be accurate: In 1930, Eddie Black opened a Toronto radio and appliance store, “Eddie Black’s Limited,” which later sold a few cameras. In 1947, his sons opened a section in the store that sold guns, fishing tackle and cameras. The following year, in 1948, the sons took over the business and launched “Eddie Black’s Camera Store.”)

Today’s news stories repeatedly mentioned that the increased use of cell phone cameras has killed the photo store. The irony is that Blacks is owned by a cell phone company.

All the news outlets reporting on this story used the same tired clichés: technology has changed . . . digital cameras . . . cell phone cameras . . . etc.

But that’s not entirely what happened. It’s a case of Blacks not understanding what’s going on, using yesterday’s business model and some bad marketing.

Black’s photography and fried chicken

From the mid-1960s to late 1980s, Black’s Photography (now just Blacks) enjoyed huge success as it expanded across Canada and into the US. Around 1980, I bought my first SLR, some lenses, first enlarger and other darkroom equipment from Black’s.

The company’s slogan was “Black’s is photography.”

By the mid-1980s, Blacks stopped being about photography. It became more about the sale of photofinishing, albums, frames and photo accessories. By coincidence(?), two things happened at this time:

(i) the Black family sold the business to a restaurant company which owned the country’s Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, and

(ii) the arrival of the very lucrative one-hour photofinishing machines.

A long list of problems

But the real issues that led to today’s announcement of Blacks’ impending closing are:

1) Being currently owned by a cell phone company is/was a bad match. When Telus bought Black’s Photo in 2009, it said its intentions were to use the photo stores to sell more cell phones. Wrong answer! That was the death knell for Blacks.

2) Blacks business model is/was: get people in the store to buy photo prints and then sell them cheap albums, cheap frames, a few cheap photo accessories and maybe a cell phone. Its entire business model relied upon a (shrinking) photofinishing funnel.

Even though prints today are cheaper and better than what they were 15 to 20 years ago, most people no longer buy prints, albums or frames. This a terrible shame and folks will live to regret it. A picture is not really a photograph until it’s printed. Paper prints are also generally the most archival method of storing images. Digital image files will be lost sooner or later because most people don’t have backups.

3) Beyond its web site promotions, Blacks never bothered to remind people of the value and importance of photography. Walmart, Costco, etc. also do photofinishing but these stores can subsidize their photofinishing through other product sales in their stores. Blacks couldn’t do this so it should have promoted photography, photography, photography, which it didn’t.

4) Photography is the most popular hobby in the world and it’s grwoing. It’s the number one way people prefer to communicate and it’s also alot of fun. Blacks did almost nothing in this regard. It did very little to build an audience beyond having the same old, boring corporate Facebook/Twitter presence. The medium may be the message but Blacks had no message worth listening to.

5) Blacks today is mostly about room decor – how to decorate with photos. But what Blacks should have done is create and build excitement around photography first and leave the decorating tips for later.

French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said (roughly translated):

When you want to build a ship, don’t start by gathering wood, cutting boards and distributing the work, but awaken in men a desire for the vast and endless sea.

Blacks is a good example of trying to sell a product for which the customer has no apparent need. It isn’t going to work no matter how many times you redo your web site, renovate your stores or change the store logo. Blacks should have been busy creating a desire for photography rather than for buying prints, photo accessories and cell phones.

6) Blacks never “talked” to photographers. Instead, Blacks targeted mostly low-volume, low-end, occasional customers: mothers who need a few family prints and vacationers with holiday snaps. As a result, Blacks brand was amateur photofinishing not photography.

7) Blacks never helped its customers grow their photography hobby, other than trying to sell them more prints. Make your customers more successful and they will return the favour through repeat business. Some other camera stores have photo seminars, photo walks or online photography tutorials.

8) Perhaps Blacks should have years ago become strictly an online photo printer like Shutterfly in the US. Blacks was too slow to move online. [Update: see end of post.]

9) Several large US online photo-sharing companies, like SmugMug, use third-party photofinishers to do fulfillment for them. None are in Canada. Why didn’t Blacks jump on this a dozen years ago? Who does print fulfillment in Canada for Apple? Why didn’t Blacks do this a decade ago?

10) Why didn’t every Telus cell phone come with a Blacks photofinishing app preinstalled? Why didn’t every Telus cell phone come with coupons for, say, one free 8×10 print per month? Why didn’t Telus encourage its customers to print their cell phone snaps? Why didn’t Telus ever feature photography in its cell phone stores?

11) One wonders if shutting down Blacks is about the lack of demand for photofinishing or if it’s really about the lack of cell phone sales at Blacks. After all, Telus bought the photo chain to sell cell phones not photography.

Blacks lost touch with photography and photographers a long time ago and each successive owner of Blacks moved it further away.

Update: Well, well, well. Blacks didn’t really shut down after all. August 8th was to be the final day of business. Instead, Blacks has become strictly an online photo printer. Les Pros de la Photo in Montreal now owns, or at least uses, the Blacks name and runs the Blacks web site. Les Pros de la Photo supplies photofinishing to a number of drug stores in Quebec.