Editorial

Staff · Issue 84, May/Jun 2015 · pp. 4

Editorial Retail When I was in u/w photo retail from the mid 70’s to 90’s it was a different world. In the early days of my era communications were nowhere near as quick as today; faxes were only just starting to replace written letters, envelopes and stamps. My customer’s phone enquiries were nearly all from the UK and usually resulted in posting out a printed catalogue or a series of brochures for the customer to study at their leisure. It all sounds so quaint now. The market was so small that manufacturers dealt directly with specialist retailers like myself and there was no financial room nor business logic in having a distributor because there were so few retailers. In addition the manufacturers only communicated with these specialist retailers so they were the font of all knowledge about that particular manufacturer’s products and their plans for new models. The result was that cus…