Bill McCurry's Marketing Newsleter for the photo and minilab industry

Tweaking Jerry Harmen's Idea
Steve Hagensieker - Jack's Camera Shop - Muncie, IN - www.jackscamera.com

Bill,

We’ve been using various versions of Jerry’s idea for years, but we find we’re constantly tweaking it. (In issue 148 Jerry Harmen told what he does to avoid selling empty boxes to customers.

In the old days we simply turned the display box upside down and placed it at the back or bottom of the pile of units. As Jerry noted the weight of many products are now negligible compared to the books, batteries and cables. We now stick a post-it note on the display box that also indicates any accessories (chargers, batteries, cradles) that we also put on display with the major component. This is particular helpful when we have things like cameras with kit lenses. We can easily find out which body and/or lens is on display and what box it goes in.

Additionally, when we happen to have an opportunity to purchase demo equipment at a discount, I now make copies of the invoice and attach it to the box.. I don’t receive the goods into our inventory but I put a flag in the product info file so that I can immediately identify that we have a demo piece. That helps me from over-stocking. When the demo period is up or if we need to sell the demo I now have instant access to what we paid for that item and don’t have to remember whether we got 10 or 20% off, but was that before or after the last price increase or decrease?

Thanks,
Steve Hagensieker

editor's note - look at the Jack's Camera website. www.jackscamera.com It's clean and stylish.

Rob Burkitt - Photo Color - Melbourne, AUSTRALIA - shop@photocolor.com.au

Really loved Michael St. Germain's idea of the mat print. We made up a sample and as we already offer a raised mat style framing we tried it on this and the result was stunning. We use strips of 5mm foam core around the edge of the print and attach the matt above this. Two layers of the foam core looks best for prints over 8x10". Then to try something else we made the mat print with saturation reduced to 50% and considerably lightened, again giving a very exciting result.

Thank you for helping us to survive.

Making kiosk usage easier for our customers
Chris Lydle - Chris' Camera Center - Aiken, SC - http://www.chriscamera.com

While we always try to have a "kiosk concierge" on hand to help our customers master the art of ordering, we've also developed a couple of tools that help. One is an illustrated instruction book for using the kiosk. It uses lots of screen grabs and works through each step. There are separate pages for the optional tasks such as reducing red eye or special cropping. We avoid jargon and use only simple, colloquial English.

To make this project, I opened Photoshop and my Silverwire Kiosk software simultaneously. I made a screen grab (alt-print screen) of the kiosk software entry page, then toggled (alt-tab) to Photoshop.

When you've got a screen grab in memory, creating a new page in Photoshop automatically makes it exactly the size of the image. So I pasted the screen grab (ctrl-v) into the file and tabbed back to the kiosk.

I worked through the entire procedure of making an order, grabbing each screen and pasting it onto the same file in Photoshop. When I was done I had a PSD file with about 15 layers, and each layer was a page of the kiosk ordering procedure. Then I made a series of 8"x10" pages using two or three screen grabs per page and appropriate text.

We also made an illustration for inserting memory cards into the proper slot. Since doing that, we haven't had to disassemble any equipment because a customer put a card in the wrong hole.

The last page suggests that when they're done, they should hit the EASY Button, which we bought at Staples for $4.99. If you haven't seen one, when you mash the button it says "that was easy."

"Mash the button?" What's up with that? It's a popular southern colloquialism, and means the same as "push the clicker" or "carefully depress the shutter release." I don't know what the Aussie equivalent would be.

Incidentally, the gross revenue from sales of Easy Buttons at Staples is donated to the Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs of America.

May is National Photo Month

National Photo Month promotional materials are available for download from the PMAI website. http://www.pmai.org/npm/

Bill's analysis, sponsored by HP, focused on whether or not specialty retailers might find the new HP equipment a way to profit. The special report is at www.photoimagenews.com/hpsweetideas

Volume 149 - March 23, 2006

May is National Photo Month