The centre, at its Lawrence Hill Industrial Park unit, will be a shop space aimed at the photo product printers’ consumer customers.

The launch will follow Latent Light setting up a consumer division of its previously B2B model with the launch of photogifts.co.uk in February last year.

“It’ll show all the different ranges that we produce,” said managing director of Latent Light Adam Gildersleeve.

He added: “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. A lot of people aren’t creative; they want to be told what they’re going to buy and the reasons why.”

£100,000 has been allocated for this venture. “It may well be we end up changing the outside of the building so it doesn’t look like an industrial unit,” said Gildersleeve. “There’s plenty of parking here already though.”

Gildersleeve added that the company might also work with small high street photographic retailers in future, to offer their product creation software and product range through a kiosk set-up.

“We would work with small retailers who want some amazing products but don’t want to spend lots of money on getting that solution from someone else,” said Gildersleeve.

The company is also looking into offering its purpose-built photo product W2P system as a white label product to other printers.

“We’ve got quite a few people interested in using it. But we’ve got to work out the pricing model and who would run that internally here,” said Gildersleeve.

The B2C offshoot of Latent Light, Photogifts, currently accounts for around 2-3% of the company’s turnover. But the printer hopes this will account for 10-15% in around a year.

For more on Latent Light's new Photogift venture, check out PrintWeek's 19 May Business Inspection.