Business SMART:

At the Beginning
 

By: Dennis A. Conforto
A-Z Media Group

The world’s first commercially produced camera, built in France in 1839, was sold this past week for a staggering $800,000 making it the most expensive camera in the world. The creation of the first camera marked the dawning of a new day because it allowed the next generation to see what the previous generation REALLY looked like. For the last 170 years, annual figures for the number of photos taken have grown exponentially. Now with cameras built into phones and becoming even more portable, photography is at an all-time high.

One of my daughters often takes photos of her daughter through her cell phone and sends at least five of them to my cell phone every week. I now have more photos of Baby Amber, who is two, than I do of myself and I’m 55! Photography has gone from a casual pastime to what I call the photo-taking lifestyle. People are taking and electronically storing so many photos these days they have replaced the shoebox with the PC and the cell phone.

With an increasing number of photos being taken annually, the growth potential for the scrapbooking industry is enormous. I am convinced that the more we get our message out, the more the everyday person will use some variation of scrapbooking, even though it may be something as simple as organizing their photos.

With all of the initial growth scrapbooking enjoyed, there are less scrapbooking pages produced today in relation to the number of photos taken. The growth rate of photos being taken is increasing faster than the growth rate of photos being scrapbooked. Right now, less than 1/1000 of a percent of photos are part of a scrapbook page. Needless to say, we have a long way to go to get our message out about the power of scrapbooking and are, in some ways, at the very beginning of learning how to market the scrapbooking category.

A recent study showed that the most popular scrapbook page contained at least three photos. This is good news to our photo friends who are looking for ways to get more pictures from cell phones and hard drives into print. This is the crux of the matter. How do we increase the printed world of photos and scrapbooking?

When the printing press was invented it forever changed the world. For the first time the masses had access to information they never had before. Until that time, it didn’t even make sense to learn to read and write. The only books being written were transcribed by the hands of monks. One monk might have spent his entire life creating just one single bible.

Recently, I went to the Getty museum and saw the world’s largest collection of these handmade bibles. I was stunned at the detail and beauty of each page. It was then that I truly understood why it would take a lifetime to complete one book.

Another more recent invention made available to the general population was the Internet. The same daughter who sends me pictures each week, created a home page for me in less than an hour on a popular website, and from that page I was able to view my daughters’ pages. I was blown away by my oldest daughter’s page. She had music in the background and pictures of my granddaughters came to life as they rotated in and out with the music. It was stunning to view and caused me to reflect on the true definition of scrapbooking.

I realized that others are defining what scrapbooking is and is not because we do not spend enough dollars to relay our message. This is just another of the many reasons why I am pushing the industry to not let the inventions of new scrapbooking forms happen outside our industry. We can control who we are and what our collective mission is or we can do nothing and continue to allow outside forces to dictate parts of what we do.

One could reason that scrapbooking is a way that we neatly organize our lives to say, “Here I am. This is who I was, what I thought, what I felt and what was important to me.” In many ways, some of the future’s most important historians will be the scrapbookers of today. They will be the ones who will help paint a clear picture of what our world was really like when we walked and talked on the planet.

It started 170 years ago with the first commercial camera, before the creation of the telephone, the Internet, the PC or the cell phone. I wonder if those guys in France had any idea what they started… They must have been so excited to see that very first photo and know that the world would be forever changed. They had no way of knowing that millions of bits of information with words and pictures would be floating through our communication devices today. They had no idea how big it would really be.

And so it is with us. We have no idea how big scrapbooking is going to be, but it’s going to be big. We have no idea what new things will get invented to make what we do today even better, faster and more powerful. We do know that we can control it. We can be the leaders or we can follow. The time is at hand for us to lead the way. And that is what being business SMART is all about.