Polaroid is on the comeback trail
Scott Hardy exhales loudly as he takes in the full chaos of Polaroid’s last decade.
The company’s former owner Tom Petters is serving a 50-year prison sentence for masterminding a Ponzi scheme; the business has changed hands three times and been through six different chief executives. Now, it faces a battle to survive in the age of the smartphone camera, having emerged from bankruptcy twice in as many decades.
Hardy insists the company has a proper future after refocusing the business around the licensing of the famous Polaroid brand. It was once a corporate giant.
At its peak in 1991, sales neared US$3 billion but the sharp rise and popularity of digital cameras inflicted some big wounds. The failure to anticipate just how digital cameras would decimate the market for instant models led Polaroid to file for bankruptcy in 2001. Hardy, 45, believes the strategy is paying off. Last year, sales grew by 15 per cent.
This year, it launched its licensed camera, the Pop, which will print digital original-sized white-bordered Polaroid prints. The updated model has a ‘‘selfie’’ button, a non-negotiable function in this era of narcissism.
‘‘People now have this obsessive-compulsive disorder to capture everything that happens around them,’’ Hardy says.’’My kids are the worst for it.
‘‘The sheer quantity of photographs taken each year is more than all of the photographs that have been taken in history. It’s photo neurosis,’’ he says.
But how can Polaroid survive when Instagram and Snapchat have transformed the way photos are taken and traded and hardly anyone prints their smartphone shots?
‘‘When you take a Polaroid photograph and give it to someone, they don’t throw it away, they look after it,’’ Hardy reasons.
‘‘We would say a photograph isn’t a photograph until you print it, otherwise it’s just pixels and data.’’
Hardy uses his children as guinea pigs – his eldest daughter takes a series of Polaroid pictures, presents them artistically then uses her smartphone to take an image that’s uploaded to Instagram. ‘‘She gets hundreds of likes,’’ he says.
The shift between the digital and analogue photographic world is brought into sharp focus by Polaroid’s latest owners.
The company was bought in May for an undisclosed amount by Polish energy industry tycoon Wiacezlaw ‘‘Slava’’ Smolokowski. The deal came about after his son convinced him of the merits of the brand after running ‘‘The Impossible Project’’ which restores traditional Polaroid ink film and refurbishes vintage Polaroid cameras.
In 2004, Polaroid stopped producing the negatives needed to create its instant film, believing it had stockpiled enough for the next decade and shut the last film factory at Enschede, in the Netherlands, four years later.
The decision to close the factory coincided with the dramatic unravelling of Polaroid’s owner, Petters. Just months before the world learnt about Bernie Madoff, Petters was convicted for a Ponzi fraud after conning investors and lenders with false paperwork and assets that failed to materialise.
The company now licenses its brand name to companies that manufacture tablets, televisions and even sells Polaroid branded T-shirts. It has also partnered with a licensee to make Polaroidbranded cameras. Profitability has been restored and sales are growing after the launch of a camera and printer which allowed smartphone pictures to be printed with miniature white-borders.
‘‘When we relaunched Polaroid we were focusing on rebuilding the brand but then something happened’’, Hardy says.
‘‘The instant camera market which had been in steep decline suddenly rebounded and the people taking Polaroid pictures weren’t grandma and grandad, they were young people suddenly infatuated with this hipster, retro thing. We’ve built it into a growing thriving brand,’’ he says. ‘‘Polaroid is back in a big way.’’
– Telegraph