Photography News | Issue 42 | absolutephoto.com
Interview 20
Profile DuncanMidwood CEWE is one of the biggest names in European photo printing. We catch up with the UK managing director on the state of the printing business
Can you introduce us to CEWE please? How long has the business been around? CEWE is 55 years old and the company invested heavily in digital from early on and expanded across Europe,buyingacompanyherecalled Standard Photographic in 2005. I joined the company in 2010 and the evolution has continued. We had to put in all the digital equipment and, therefore, started to attract people who wanted digital and photo books is probably the most important. So in the UK we always had a digital focus and photo books is our biggest category. How many people do you have working at your Warwick facility? We have about 70 working here in Warwick, going up to 100 around Christmas with temporary staff. How does it work with you in the UK and Germany? The company is a traditional north German company with a family ownership. In the UK we are a very different culture within that. We are more entrepreneurial and because we are a small business we try to respond quickly and be very agile. For me we are acting like a small company operating with a big company in the background. Germany is pretty hands-off. On the commercial side, we are given a lot of autonomy; as long as I deliver the growth they are happy. Are you a web-based business, or can customers get your products on the high street? Our approach is to work through retailers to develop the brand. The only way you might spend £40 on a CEWE Photobook instead of £20 on another brand’s photo book is to appreciate the quality and you only do that by touching and feeling. The problem with websites is that everyone will say their books are great quality because no one will say they are selling poor-quality product. So the words are all the same and the only way to tell is to see the product. When we go to shows, we watch people come round and touch and feel the product and that is what we want. We do The Photography Show and increasingly we are focusing on the travel sector and we exhibit at most major travel shows. We’re pushing on travel shows because of all the categories of events that people use our products for, travel is the biggest. About 60% of our photo books we make are related to travel and the next most popular is weddings and babies and then special birthdays. Travel is dominant.
offered, so how is CEWE doing in the photo print business? Photo books are growing strongly and so too are calendars andwall art. The market is also changing in that some products are commoditized – prints are really commoditized and it is all about price; canvas prints have gone that way as well. Photo books are more difficult to commoditize because part of the photo book is not just product but how the product is created and it is more differentiable. A photo book is very different depending on how you experience it whereas a print is a print is a print. That is why we concentrate on photo books because we think we can differentiate our offering against anyone else’s with our software, the inspiration and the support and the product itself. You mentioned your software, I have tried it and found it is easy to use while being very versatile too. I liked being able to work offline too. How important has the app been in your success? Our app is key to our business and the are several reasons why ours is a good solution. With bigger and bigger files even with the fastest broadband it is still quite a challenge so doing it offline is preferable. We know a lot of people want to go online and create quick and easy photo books but we purposefully don’t position the CEWE Photobook brand to compete with that. We can do those and our entry level price is £5.99 generally and that competes with any of them but we tend to focus on people who spend time creating their books and really value the beauty of it. Our belief is if you spend a couple of hours on a photo book and you get an A6 booklet you will be pleased but not bowled over by it. If you invest the same amount of time and get a 12-inch square book with lay-flat photographic paper you will be wowed by it with the same investment of time. Has there been growth in the bigger photo book sizes? Absolutely, generally what we find is that people are starting to trade up more and more. The A4 landscape book is where most people start and we help customers trade up, not just in size but also in paper type, finish and number of pages. Part of the reason for doing this is that we bring people into our heartland where we provide the best products out of the price competition area. Every site says their books are wonderful and well made but when you get two books side by side you see the difference. When a year later the binding is starting to come apart
So people are already telling us that our products are perfect to remember premium travel so working backwards we want to be where there is a premium travel experience. If you are paying £2- 5K on a holiday you are not really looking for the cheapest photo book, you want the one you know will represent your pictures. I gather that CEWE UK developed the premium matte photo book. How did that come about? Yes, that is an interesting story. We’d launched a personalised online card service called here Cardtown which was a bit like Moonpig. We have some non-industry standard print machines here that we were using to produce these cards. I asked the machine makers to come in to show us how we could get more premium from the cards we were making. One thing they showed us was to produce a matte finish so I asked if we could do photo books with that finish and they said, sure, you can do that. We did some trials, showed them to one of our customers and they absolutely loved them so they started selling them. We eventually presented them to Germany and everyone in the whole group loved them so we launched them. They have transformed our business and 50% of our production now is on premium matte photo books and we print for the whole of CEWE Europe. It is a real success story because we did what no other CEWE lab had done before and supplied CEWE Germany. A German lab does now print premium matte books but we do about two thirds of them. How do you come up with your innovations? We listen to the market. Sometimes our customers give us ideas, we research the market, not just in photography but in gifting, we look at what our competitors are doing because they occasionally come up with something that we don’t have and then we have an internal process within the group. In the UK we collate all our ideas and vote on them to decide the most important ones and then move those forward to a group process. Once a year hundreds of products are displayed at an internal fair, where everyone votes on products. We literally get to the point where everyone has 50 stickers to put on products they like. We did this with the premium matte book and it was covered in stickers so it was obviously very popular. Photo books are very popular and the service is widely
you really see the difference. But of course people don't buy two books and generally don't test over a year so we have to get people to trust us that we give the best quality. This is where Trustpilot and the like are so important, where there are real reviews from real people. Everyone tells me that we don't print enough compared with when we shot film, is this true? It is a funny one and a question I get asked a lot. Now people share pictures by passing their mobile phone around or by social media. The reality is that people are taking more pictures than ever before and I saw a statistic the other day that says in the next two years we will make more prints than in the history of photography to date. As a percentage fewer people are printing photographs and that’s true, but the number of photos we are printing off is more than ever before– it is just a smallerproportion of the pictures that get taken. People are printing off in different ways. So take an average photo book which might have 100 pictures, that is a higher added value to the customer and to us as the producer than 100 prints which is what we used to do. So the number of photos we are printing off is going up all the time, and the format of those prints is very different. What we are trying to say is take time to look at the pictures you treasure and share them, and we help to make things as easy as possible. It seems wherever you go people are taking photographs with their smartphones. Is this reflected in CEWE’s turnover? While we don’t really aim at people using their smartphones it is now the most popular capture device for images in our photo books. The iPhone is the number one capturing device in our photo books, overtaking Canon DSLRs. What is next for CEWE UK? Our focus in the UK is to get the CEWE brand and in particular the CEWEPhotobookbrand, firstlywell known and then widely recognised as the best, so our aim right now is to get the CEWE brand out there. What makes you proud working for CEWE? I do feel proud every day of the products we make. It is a cliché but it is true. You go round the lab and you see prints coming off and these are not just pieces of paper with prints on, they are real peoples’ lives and these are really important to people.
Biography
Years in the photo industry? About seven years Current location? Warwick Last picture taken? On a family walk with the kids. Taking the camera out nowadays is an event and I use the camera phone a lot When youwere younger, what did youwant to bewhen you grewup? A vet when I was really young and then from a teenager I wanted to run my own business Dogs or cats? Definitely a dog man Toast or cereal? Cereal, or if I have the time, both Email or phone call? Phone call for the personal touch 50% of our production now is on premium matte photo books and we print for the whole of CEWE Europe
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