We are very happy to introduce our newest CatLABS team members: Matt M. a talented engineer who has a long and illustrious background in analog photography will be joining Maeghan F. our very own marketing and management integration specialist.
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| Maeghan, Omer, Matt |
We have been inundated with messages and emails and are so grateful for the amazing support we have received the analog photography community. Due to the sheer volume of messages we are unable to all of them, but we do read each and every one and take the words of encouragement to heart.
As the project evolves we have identified financing as the primary factor in moving ahead. As we are crunching the numbers, we can't help but go back to something we have been talking about ever since we started getting involved with packfilm - the price.
Like with every other aspect of business and marketing, there is ample research for measuring the effects of price changes on levels of consumption. In a very over simplified way of looking at things, these studies demonstrate that in mass markets, as prices go up, sales slow down. Companies use elaborate analysis charts and graphs to find out what the end result to their bottom might be.
In the case of packfilm, at first look, there is an anomaly. Fuji packfilm prices have remained stagnant (up until recent the discontinuation announcement) for more then a decade, and even in the preceding decade, there was only a very minor change in price making the price essentially the same for the past 15-20 years. This is in spite of soaring petroleum and other raw material prices, changes in cost of living as well as new regulations and laws which have drastically affected prices of other photo products, even in Fuji's own product range.
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| FP100c price between 2009 and now. |
We know of no other photo related product that has had the same price stability as a Costco hotdog and soda combo. This incredible fact seems to be lacking from the discussion about the end of life of packfilm by Fuji, but is critical to understand before the future of packfilm can be restarted.
From Fuji's perspective, the price at which FP100 was selling represented some kind of equilibrium - they sold enough to make enough, but as sales dwindled, they looked at their charts, and found that from a certain point onward, changing the price to increase profitability due reduced sales, will only further erode the amounts of product sold, up to a point, which was unrecoverable. There was no need to change the price over time, because a certain balance was maintained. When that balance balance was disrupted, it would seem that at no point in time in the future will the profit generated from this product be greater then the cost to make it. In no small part, this is due to the fact Fuji originally designed this product for production on a scale that would never return. Fuji is too big a company and operation to be able to scale down production to a size that would produce a sales/price chart capable of showing profit.
The good news is, Polaroid's machines were designed and built in the 50's and 60's, Fuji's machines in the 80's. Thanks many technological advances, when tackling this question today, we have many tools at our disposal that neither Polaroid nor Fuji ever had.
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