Value Added
Advertising Feature
Gavin Stoker profiles photo presentation specialist Photovalue, celebrating its 30th anniversary with special offers and innovative product
From its base in Dublin, Ireland, since 1981 Photovalue Ltd has consistently offered high quality folders and strut mounts to professional photographers throughout the UK. Of course, nobody survives 30 years of trading without doing something right. So what’s Photovalue’s secret?
The answer is simple. According to Sales and Marketing Director Ronan Ryle, who along with his brother Keith took over the business from their father, it has the most extensive range of photographic presentation products available on the market. Plus, by investing in and using its own market leading equipment, Photovalue has managed to live up to its name by being extremely price competitive.
Mounting excitement
With an online presence in Photovalue.com further bolstering business, as well as supplying mounts to event, portrait, wedding and landscape photographers, the company also delivers many millions of mounts each year to its customers in the schools photography sector.
According to Ronan, this constitutes about a third of its business, the other two thirds made up of marketing direct to social photographers – with around 1200 regular, repeat customers – and, interestingly, manufacturing foil packaging for pharmaceuticals.
Although the latter might seem like a random addition to the business, the knock on effect is that Photovalue has what it considers is the best equipment for making photo strut mounts on the market. “Which means we can make mounts more efficiently than anyone else, at higher speeds,” says Ronan.
In 1996 when I took over at Photovalue, at that stage photo mounts were a very small part of the business. But we undertook a study of the market and then went knocking on doors.
“Through a mixture of hard graft and the right product, one of the first companies that I got was School Pictures International in Mansfield, who were [at the time] one of Spicer Hallfield’s biggest customers.
“We were able to offer some patented technology for solving a problem that they had of glue lines moving on their existing mounts. By ensuring that glue lines didn’t move, we managed to help them increase their packing speeds and we won the contract thereafter.”
Focused on photography
Having been involved with the photography market since 1989, it’s obviously extremely helpful to Photovalue’s customer base that Ronan has almost a quarter of a century’s experience under his belt.
“In 2001, because we already had about 50% of the available school photography business for our mounts, we thought ‘where do we go next?’ and started to target wedding and social photographers and bypass the distributors who were taking us out of the market for that channel,” Ronan explains. “Although we don’t make wedding albums ourselves we got some agencies on board for albums that are made in Italy, and we set up photovalue.com to target that market with our own products and add-on products like wedding albums.
“We have about 9,000 photographers registered on our database now. Our aim is to continue to grow that business through acquiring new customers and offering more products and services that are relevant to existing ones.”
Of course the beauty of the Internet is that Photovalue.com can sell direct to photographers wherever they are, another way to save on cost and ensure the best deals all round.
With his own marketing background Rona is clearly someone who thinks ahead, with the result that his company can also now help photographers out with the business side of things.
“What we do that’s a little bit different is that we give the photographer the opportunity to promote themselves, by replacing the horrible sticker they might otherwise put on the back of a mount with block printed text,” he reveals. “We ‘block’ for free any photographer’s details on a mount or folder. You can have your studio name like an artist’s signature on the bottom of the mount, or some photographers might want their whole name, address and website on the back. For most customers it doesn’t tend to be an issue that the photographer’s details are on there.”
This basic service is currently offered for free, but if the photographer has an event and they want the event details added, there is a charge. “As a manufacturer we’re able to do that, whereas for a distributor it’s much more difficult for them to be able to do that.” The charge for the block tool is £40, and then it’s £5 per box of mounts regardless of what size the box is.
Albums covered
Diversification in a challenging market is also a key to success and stability, and, following requests from visitors at this Focus on Imaging show, Photovalue has also recently widened its product range and customer appeal to include both traditional loose cover and ‘modern’ digital photo albums, handcrafted in Italy by I Nobili.
“So we’ve just launched a new coffee table book album – the Artists Collection is a new venture – and have another simple new idea that we’re going to be launching six months down the line, for order online,” says Photovalue’s Director Ronan Ryle, without wishing to give the game away at this stage
In terms of Photovalue’s most popular product lines, there seems to be a move back towards more traditional albums, according to Ronan. “It’s still very early but this [was] something I sensed at Focus this year. It could be because companies like Spicer Hallfield are gone and their customers are looking elsewhere. It’s a hunch I have.
“In terms of mounts, black is the most popular colour and brand wise our matt black is the most popular one. We have also just launched a mount specifically for the event photographer, which is very competitively priced and is good quality. We’ve geared it towards the event photographer who’s dealing with volume, so it’s only available in quantities of 500 per size.”
By way of example the price per 9x6 mount, the most popular size for events, is 34p before VAT. Pit this against the fact that a standard 9x6 mount would normally be 49p, and the value speaks for itself. And, besides, a little investment when it comes to presentation can go a long way towards helping to reap a reward.
“Packaging is very important as to perceived value,” Ronan nods. “I know in the schools market they looked at offering prints without mounts but found that a very small percentage of parents went for the un-mounted packs. To me that indicates that there is perceived value in a mount.”
So, if you’re a social, schools or events photographer looking for ways to up your game and get ahead of the competition, then such a modest investment could well be the way to boost public profile and your bottom line at the same time.
For more information on Photovalue’s extensive product range and latest deals, go direct to:
www.photovalue.com
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