There was a time, not too long ago, that Polaroid cameras were ubiquitous. In many ways, Polaroid was the original photo-sharing camera. Now, in the age of digital, Polaroid is back trying to reclaim its roots as the ultimate sharing brand. I spoke with Scott Hardy, Polaroid’s CEO and president, about their resurgence and business strategy going forward.
JG: Tell me a little bit about where you came from.
SH: I got involved with Polaroid back in 2004, initially as a licensee, and then I joined Polaroid Corporation in 2005 through a merger. When I first joined the company I headed up product development for the business that included product management, product planning and R&D, and I managed some of the sourcing relationships. In 2007 I was made the general manager and executive vice president of the Americas territory, in charge of all aspects of the area, including sales, marketing, product management sourcing, service and logistics. Then the company was sold in 2009 to a group of private equity investors, and at that point I was appointed president of the business.
Obviously Polaroid has a rich history in photography, but has it become more of a licensing brand?
In 2009, the company was acquired by a joint venture group, Gordon Brothers out of Boston, Massachusetts—a 110-year-old global advisory, lending and investment firm—Hilco Trading out of Chicago, and Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners out of Toronto. Their business model was to take vertical brands and transform them into IP holding companies that license out their trademarks as a brand licensor and marketing company. The rationale being they’re able to rebuild the brand without significant working capital to run the day-to-day operations while letting third parties who are experts in their respective areas go to market for a specfic category in a specific territory as the exclusive licensee.
One example is our digital camera licensee; it’s a company called Sakar International, which owns the Vivitar brand. They’ve taken on Polaroid to augment their product portfolio and service two different product segments. So starting in 2009, we basically took what was a vertical company and made it into a pure licensing company, with some product development and heavy marketing.
Another company we work with is C&A Marketing, which recently acquired key portions of Ritz Camera. C&A is our instant camera, camera accessory and action sports camera licensee. So for our ZINK digital instant cameras, C&A is our go-to-market partner.
Let’s talk about your new product lines.
Sure. We’re very excited about the Z2300 instant digital camera. It’s a 10 megapixel camera, but what’s compelling and cool is it has an integrated instant printer. So consumers can actually take an instant photograph—and they can load 10 sheets of prints at a time into its tray—and then hit the camera’s print button and print out an instant photograph. We always say Polaroid was the original social network: take a picture and share it. Most social networks revolve around photography and photo sharing, and we think it’s cool that we provide all the benefits of digital, with the ability to post photos to a favorite social media site, and also print a physical copy instantly. The photos it prints have sticky backs that users can peel off so the photos can be stuck on any object. If they’re at a wedding or scrapbooking or anything like that, they can stick the photo on whatever they want.
Was the thought to take the heritage of the Polaroid brand and expand it to current technology?
Yes, it’s how we differentiate ourselves. What’s cool is the technology in this paper is called ZINK, which stands for Zero Ink. It’s manufacured by a company called ZINK Imaging, and ZINK was born inside of Polaroid. There were hundreds of millions of dollars invested through the early to mid-2000s. They basically manufacture the media or paper. The 2×3-inch wallet-size photograph has a billion dye crystals—cyan, yellow, magenta—and after the paper undergoes a heat-activated process, the “developed” picture comes out the exit slot.
The ZINK paper goes through a thermal process where it gets hit with 200-million pulses of heat that bring out just the right colors in the photograph instantaneously. The heat activates the crystals to produce the colors that ultimately show up. It’s pretty cool. The Z2300 camera retails for $159.99, and it’s in production now.
What’s your distribution strategy?
This product initially launched on air with HSN, but the photo channel is critical for us. It is also sold in the photo channel at places such as B&H, J&R, Adorama and other independent photo retailers. We think there is some mass opportunity with this product as well. Perhaps in the spring, given its price point, there will be some mass distribution possibilities.
Who’s your target? Are you going after kids?
Great question. Photo-loving moms make up the majority of the demographic; 65% of it would be 30- to 35-year-old photo-centric moms who’d love to be able to print photographs in the moment and share them. There is an 18- to 25-year-old play as well, which is more event oriented, perfect for weddings, parties, scrapbooking and other events. It doesn’t replace a digital camera; rather it augments a portfolio of products you might carry with you.
What’s in the pipeline? What is Polaroid’s overall direction?
We also have a larger product, the Polaroid Z340, which takes 3×4-inch photographs, so a fully sized Polaroid.
Also instant printing?
Yes, it’s instant digital. It’s for sale at all the major photo channel retailers and all the major dotcoms.
We also have a true analog instant product that we worked on in production with Fujifilm, which is one of the last instant film manufacturers. It’s called the Polaroid PIC-300, and it retails at mass marketers like Target, Toys“R”Us and Kmart. It also prints wallet-size instant photographs. You take a shot and it prints out an analog image.
In terms of what we’re building outside of that, there are some pretty cool products. One of the popular ones we’ve been selling is the Polaroid iF045, a dual-view, twin-view waterproof camera. Polaroid stands for sharing, fun and authenticity, and we’ve had tremendous success with this product in the mass channel like Sears and Kmart. It has a screen on the front so you can actually be in the moment, take pictures, share them easily and see what you’re sharing. That’s what the Polaroid brand is all about—sharing.
What else is new?
Playing off of Polaroid being fun and making sharing easy and letting people capture everyday moments, we’re launching products like helmet-based cameras, bike-mounted cameras and water sports cameras, probably products you’ve seen promoted by other brands. But we want to get it to the masses, to consumers at an affordable price. We think $299 is not affordable enough for mass consumption, for the soccer mom and her kids.
At CES last year, I thought Polaroid seemed to be placing its name on a lot of different things. I wondered if you were sort of diluting the brand or spreading it a little bit too thin. I’ll be honest with you; I bought my daughter a Polaroid television set when she went to college four or five years ago, and I was like, “That’s cool and it’s a good price, but why is Polaroid on a television set?”
That’s a good question and we get asked it a lot. The answer goes back to what Polaroid stands for. At the end of the day, we talk about sharing, exceptional value and ease of use as key elements of what we stand for. Anything we sell has to have that “Polaroidness” to it. Many people don’t realize that Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, was a pioneer in the technology of polarization, which is now an essential part of the LCD/LED panels used in flat-screen televisions. In the case of a television, generally speaking we’re incorporating features that tie back to the brand—whether it’s being able to view photographs on the TV, the ability to easily share and experience them, an exceptional value, or a very easy user experience, it all plays back to the simplicity of the brand. So that’s our play. It’s a very big business, it’s very competitive, and we think it’s relevant to consumer electronics.
You have separate licensees for each business?
They’re totally separate companies. We’ve learned you can’t be a master of everything, and the licensee model allows us to pick best-in-class partners by product category, by territory. In the case of televisions, we have a company that is expert in manufacturing TVs, and they’re looking for simplicity, sharing, ease of use—everything Polaroid stands for, so the brand works. We have 75 years of history and over a billion dollars spent on marketing and building this phenomenal brand. So when you move into an adjacent category just outside the core, it still translates well, because a consumer could have bought a no-name brand but Polaroid was a step up. We want them to think: “This is my daughter’s dorm room. I want quality but I don’t want to spend a lot. So I’ll buy the Polaroid.”
It’s a trusted brand name.
Yes, it’s trusted, but the product has to deliver. It’s important we have stringent quality standards and testing protocols, so that no matter what you buy you’re getting the Polaroid experience; it’s just not vertically produced by Polaroid.
Let’s go back to photo specialty. How are your sales structures? Do you have a dedicated sales force?
Yes. Our licensee, C&A Marketing, has been in the photo channel for more than 20 years and is very experienced. Historically, they were huge distributors of Polaroid film and were already entrenched in that community very heavily. As a result, they’ve been the perfect partners for us. They know how to take these products to market effectively.
So they’re repping Polaroid as well as other brands?
They’re the exclusive licensee of Polaroid, but they have another business inside the company that distributes products too. They’ve been distributing in the photo channel for many years. They also happen to be our accessory licensee, so all Polaroid accessories go through them. The accessory business is complicated because there are so many SKUs, but they can effectively manage the complexities of the supply chain.
What kinds of accessories?
Among our popular items are our filters. Polaroid is one of the original polarized lens companies, so we have a great filter line that offers exceptional value relative to other types of filters; the quality is phenomenal. We have some of the top-selling tripods, as an example—very aggressive and very affordable. We’re going after people who want best-in-class accessories but they need the value. We’ve had some of the top-selling tripods on Amazon.com recently.
What’s your message to the photo specialty channel in terms of what you want them to think and what you want them to do for Polaroid?
The key mantra for us is that Polaroid shares life in an instant. It’s about how we help consumers to share their life experiences and do it in a way that is drop-dead simple and easy to execute. If you look at the Polaroid ecosystem, we capture and we do printing, of course, which then enables sharing, whether it’s digitally or a hard copy.
So you don’t see Nikon and Canon as competition?
Nikon and Canon are playing in the DSLR business, and we don’t offer DSLRs today. With Micro Four Thirds and mirrorless technology advancements coming, there might be some head-to-head competition in a couple years. But right now, they’re playing in a different price point.
A different niche as well?
Yes, a different niche. It’s not where we play. We offer exceptional value and instant sharing, while they’re focused on features and performance. Polaroid is about fun. If you looked at the relationship on a Venn diagram, they would be in the complexity and the technology quadrant and we’d in the quadrant of simple and fun. It’s just not a head-to-head thing.
So how are you marketing the brand?
We’ve been working with Lady Gaga the past couple of years and have had some tremendous success. It’s been a great way to reach that younger demographic, that 18- to 25-year-old bracket of up-and-coming Polaroid users. That’s one way we do it. Other marketing programs we have are classical marketing vehicles, such as media buys in magazines and trade publications. PR is a huge vehicle, as are trade shows and other promotions. We promote heavily through retailers and do less of the TV big media buys and more of online with social media. Polaroid has a huge group of fans because of our history, and leveraging the viral media has been key. Whether it’s Facebook (where we have more than 200,000 fans) or Twitter, viral is vital.
It seems like Polaroid is back in a lot of ways.
You nailed it! That’s the message. It’s back! It’s different than it used to be, but it’s back. It took us 75 years to be this good and to develop the right model. We think this is a model of the future.
Specialization is bringing people to where there’s value. Our biggest value is the brand. We leverage that as our intellectual property and then we find companies who are better at doing what we used to do, doing it faster, cheaper and stronger. It’s a powerful business model. We feel great about where Polaroid is today—and where we’re headed. polaroid.com
