Challenge
Like other photographic labs serving professional photographers, H&H Color Lab has seen a shift in its customer base—from large studio storefronts to more and more single-person businesses. With that shift has come a marked decline in the number of transactions for each customer—as well as the dollar value for each of those transactions.
“The reality is that a customer today is worth half as much in sales as they were five years ago,” says David Drum, business development manager at H&H.
With professional studios buying fewer photographic prints, H&H realized it needed to offer new products and attract new customers if it wanted to continue to grow and thrive. The key, though, was to do so while staying true to the company’s core values of customer service and uncompromising quality.
Solution
H&H needed a way to accommodate short-run printing—such as to output one photo book or 24 greeting cards—using lots of variable data. “A digital press was the only way we’d get a press,”
says Drum.
But Drum and his colleagues had looked at digital presses in the past and felt that the quality they delivered for photo applications wouldn’t live up to the quality H&H had become known for. Then they looked at Xerox.
