The challenge 

When Adam Gildersleeve and Alistair Brown started image library Latent Light in 2003, the world was a very different place. It would be a year before the word Facebook elicited anything but blank stares, Flickr had not been founded, and Instagram was just a distant dream.

Fast forward just three years, and online photo sharing had started to seriously take hold. So much so that Gildersleeve and Brown decided to leave their full-time jobs at camera retailer Jessops to concentrate all their energies on transforming Latent Light into a photo printing service for professional photographers and large-scale retailers wanting to offer photo products.

A few years on again, and appetite for photo products was going from strength to strength. Consumers had, by around the 2011/2012 mark, become much more aware of the possibilities of getting Gran immortalised, not only in a book or canvas print, but on a calendar, keyring and a Christmas bauble too. Consumers were also becoming more savvy about shopping around online for the best deal.

The opportunity presenting itself to a nicely expanding Latent Light now, then, was to trade not only with its existing B2B contacts, but also direct to consumers. 

The company was aware right from the get-go, however, that this wouldn’t be as straightforward a departure as it might at first seem. Although the products printed would be broadly similar, consumer marketing and customer care strategies would be anything but. 

The method

Key right from the off was to establish a very separate identity for the B2C venture, reports Latent Light managing director Gildersleeve. So the company bought the web domain Photogifts.co.uk for this express consumer-targeting purpose.

“Trying to pitch to two different areas with the same platform is very difficult because if you set your prices at consumer levels, consumers will purchase, but business customers won’t because they think you’re too cheap,” says Gildersleeve.

He explains that production for both sides of the business is shared, as are other staff currently. But the precedent for treating the two sides of the business as two separate entities has been nicely set by Brown heading this up as managing director of Photogifts. 

“How the site talks to the consumers is all dealt with by Alistair,” says Gildesleeve. “Product ranges are designed by me internally, then we say ‘we’ve got these products we think would fit into Photogifts really well’. As Photogifts grows, Alistair will have a marketing team and it will be kept completely separate.”

Most crucial to the venture’s success, has been building the right ordering platform, says Gildersleeve. “We launched it originally using someone else’s software, but we had major issues and pulled the plug on it,” he says.

“Because it was someone else’s software, we had to abide by their rules and their admin; it was very time consuming to launch products and we had major security issues with things like Internet Explorer and those sort of programs where consumers had to download software to create their product,” he says, adding: “Trade customers don’t mind downloading something, but with consumers, they go into panic mode so what we found was no one was downloading the software because of all the warnings.”

So the company decided to bite the bullet and invest around £200,000 –  once man-hours are factored in – to build their own, launching this in February 2013.

Advice on how to ensure the ordering process is as consumer-friendly as possible, has come from a surprising, but actually very logical, source. “We test all of our website changes with my mum and some of her friends,” reports Gildersleeve. “It certainly shows up different things about how they want to order that you would just never ever have thought about.”

The team also ask Mum Gildersleeve and friends for advice on SEO. “If you ask your mum to go and search for a printed mug she’ll use completely different search parameters than we would,” reports Gildersleeve, adding that SEO is such a crucial area that the company has also enlisted the expertise of a professional SEO firm.

Even more so than with B2B work, getting the right product price point is crucial, says Gildersleeve. But this, he adds, can’t come at the price of quality.

“You have to look at your production process, your raw materials, the machines you print on; you could go solvent as solvent is a hell of a lot cheaper. But the quality’s not there,” he claims.

The business has opted, then, to continue its long-standing relationship with Canon, its most recent investment being a Canon imagePress C7000VP to cope with the increased demand this new venture is creating. 

“We’re really happy with the speed and quality of those,” says Gildersleeve. “You can get faster but you lose the quality.”

Workflow to reduce manual handling and so make one-off orders as cost-effective as possible, is also crucial. “Our workflow is a big point of difference for us,” says Gildersleeve, declining to reveal the brand. “It took me a long time to find it and a long time to program. I would say having that software actually halved my staffing levels.”

Finally, B2C customer service has required an unexpectedly big cultural shift, says Gildersleeve. “We would say we probably get 10 times the amount of enquiries through the customer service system from consumers than we do trade clients,” he says. “So we’ve allocated more time to dealing with those enquires. We’ve started looking at giving them more information on the website to cut down the phone calls.”

Another learning curve has been the quality parameters to set. Showing that uploaded photos, though not the highest quality, are still acceptable, will also hopefully cut down customer service enquiries. 

“We’re looking at changing when the red face shows and when the green face shows, so changing the dpi settings,” says Gildersleeve. “Because consumers are buying products emotionally. So for instance they might only have one picture of the family dog that died, and a lot of the time they’re quite happy if it’s a bit blurred or pixelated, because that’s better than nothing.”

The result

Although Photogifts is still very much in its infancy, Gildersleeve and Brown are pleased with how business is going so far.

What Gildersleeve finds most encouraging is the strength of the front- and back-end of Photogift.co.uk. “The key thing for us is the speed of launching a new product. It only takes me a day to set up a whole new product range; I can launch a new size or template within the hour,” he says.

“If a customer comes to us and says we want a 20-by-8 framed print, can you give me a price for it, we can put that size on the website very quickly and allow people to buy it.”

The aim is for Photogifts to go from making up around 2%-3% of Latent Light’s total turnover, to 10%-15% in around a year’s time. “We’ve grown web traffic 10 times since launching last year,” says Gildersleeve. “Christmas is key and those volumes were really good.”

The company certainly has plenty of future developments in the pipeline too. The business is expanding the options for photobook page layouts, with the changes rolled out in a couple of months. The Photogifts division is also looking at improving its B2C marketing strategy, with automated emails about new products and helpful tips on taking better pictures for example.

The company also plans to open a new Customer Experience Centre at its Lawrence Hill Industrial Park premises, where consumers can come in and see all of the products in the flesh.

Latent is allocating £100,000 to creating this space and revamping the outside of the building, and hopes the centre will be ready in a couple of months. 

“Some people like to see what they’re getting. A lot of our products are touchy-feely; it’s an emotional buying experience, and some people just like the guidance,” says Gildersleeve, adding: “A lot of people aren’t creative; they want to be told what they’re going to buy and the reasons why.”

So for Gildersleeve and Brown, business has come full circle. While the ever-growing digital photo sharing revolution has certainly shown their decision to set up Latent Light and Photogifts.co.uk to be a shrewd one, so too is their recognition that consumers still value a personal touch.

And their recognition of the different price, ordering and customer service requirements of consumers, means Photogifts looks set for success. 

Vital statistics Latent Light

Location Bristol

Inspection host Adam Gildersleeve, managing director 

Size Turnover: just under £1m; staff: eight; production unit: 1,160sqm 

Established In 2003 as an image library, transforming into a photo printing business in 2006

Products B2B and B2C canvas prints, acrylic blocks and panels, poster prints, custom framing, photobooks and a range of photo gifts

Kit Seven Canon IPF printers (six 44in and one 60in), Canon imagePress 6000VP, Canon imagePress 7000VP, Duplo 645 cutter-creaser, Duplo perfect binder, Renz calender machines, four Hot Press laminators, three 44in roller laminators, two 24in roller laminators, Gunnar mount cutter, under pinner, framing saw, two canvas stretchers, 10-tonne press 

Inspection focus Branching out from B2B to B2C work

Top tips

• Don’t confuse your audiences. Have a separate identity for your B2C offering that’s distinct from the B2B brand. “The one thing I would say would be don’t try and be both with the same people – it gets very confusing,” says Gildersleeve.
• To ensure this, it may be helpful to have a clear division of labour (though the production department will probably be the same for both). “You definitely have to have a split of personnel to get in the mindset of selling to a consumer,” says Gildersleeve.
• Plan your launch intelligently. “For us the volumes in photo gifts are very seasonal, with the most sales between October and December. So I would recommend planning a launch in September.”
• Consider building your own W2P site for maximum flexibility. “There are platforms out there that will give you the majority of what you need straight out of the box. If you wanted to launch a full spectrum of products, there are other solutions out there but they’re quite expensive.” 
• Ask people you know who fit your target consumer demographic to review your photo product creation platform and for advice on how they’d search for such a product online.
• Ensure you have plenty of customer service firepower in place.