Pixiq

On Feb. 3, 2001,  I wrote a post for Pixiq entitled Fotomoto Saved My Life  and had the prescient subtitle, Uhm, is that over the top.

If you haven't read the previous post, you should.  Like many happy reviews, it was written shortly after I had the product in hand (so to speak).  I've noticed this tendency a lot - the camera is hardly out of the box and the review is finished.

Fotomoto is a company that specializes in being the middleman between you (the photographer) and the customer.  They supply you with code to have a shopping cart on your site.  

The customer browses through your site (they don't have anything to do with the design or the hosting of the site) until they find a print they want to buy.  Customer clicks the print(s) they want and are taken to a very nice box where they can select the size(s), the paper, and where it should be shipped to.  They would be the turnkey order fulfilment system for photographers.

The ultimate idea is to let you do your photography, and let them supply the goods (both prints and/or digital) to the customer.  

For me, this was exactly what I was looking for.  My main business is selling actual physical prints.  My business had gotten out of hand the previous year.  Especially during the Christmas season, I spent all my time printing, matting, doing online shipping labels with Fedex, packaging various sized prints, and eventually carting them to the local Fedex office.

So then, how did I go from such a glowing write-up to not using them at all.  In fact, there are other companies that offer similar services and I don't use them either.

You need to know one other thing about my business: I sell mostly black and white photographs, and they are in the fine-art tradition.  I originally sold fiber darkroom prints, and eventually moved to high-end inkjet prints on papers like Crane/Museo Silver Rag, and then the Epson Exhibition F Gloss.  The quality of the print was extremely important.

And so with that said - here's what went wrong.

1. The first issue I ran into was the paper choices.  I know that some people like a nice heavy mat fine art paper - but I don't.  I like a paper that mimics the old double-weight air-dried fiber paper.  Since they didn't offer that fine-art paper (they did offer others) I was going to have to choose between the various papers that were processed chemically which are commonly offered in the Kodak Endura line.

So there was going to be a compromise from day one on the paper.  I believe I chose the Lustre - or maybe it was called Semi-Gloss but it didn't matter since I tested all three offerings and used what I thought was best.  However - best is not the same as a heavy-weight paper with a long tonal scale.  Nevertheless, maybe I could have gotten away with this but a problem cropped up...

2. A few customers complained about the quality of the prints.  But what was most disturbing was that some of these were former customers who had my prints on the wall from both my darkroom and inkjet days.  And they wrote to say that they were disappointed with the quality.

Not everyone felt this way.  But given that I am used to being complimented on the prints, and in almost a decade of work had maybe one print that a customer didn't like, and even then it wasn't the print quality but she thought the print didn't fit in with her decor... 

I really couldn't think of a single time when a customer wanted to send a print back because of the quality.  There is no way to substitute for the real thing if that's what your customers are used to.  And at that point, there was no other paper that I could offer.  

So I pressed the company to offer the paper that I use now - Epson Exhibition F.  And it took longer than it should have - but they did eventually offer that paper.

In the meantime, I noticed other things going wrong.

3. No signature.

And this is also related to the previous section with print problems.  Since I wasn't seeing prints before they went to the customer, how could I know if the prints were any good?  If someone did complain, I could only ask them to return the print to me so that I could take a look at it.

There were funny things that happened.  For example, one woman hadn't removed the heavy plastic covering and was looking at the print through it.  Of course it didn't look too good.  When I removed the plastic and looked at it - it was fine for what it could be.  I couldn't compare it with a very good darkroom fiber print, or with a high-end inkjet, but it was acceptable.

When someone told me that the print they had received was terrible, I would routinely ask them if they had removed it from the plastic.  They had.  

And not being able to see the print before it went out, also meant that I couldn't sign it.  Again, these little things became bigger and bigger.  It turned out that getting a print from the photographer was a personal thing.  And I began to nag Fotomoto to come up with a way to ship the print to the photographer for signature, or to put some promotional things in, etc. as well as to be able to have a look at it before it went out.

And that was a very big holdup because I was promised that it was something they were working on - and it was sort of always just around the corner - and at one point I told them that I was going to leave Fotomoto if they couldn't ship it to the photographer first - and they said that I was one of the few people asking for that and if I left they had other things that were higher on the todo list.  

And so I hung in there.

I really wanted this thing to work for me.  And so while I was waiting for the "ship to photographer" item to be implimented, the new Epson Gloss F paper arrived.  Well, believe it or not - this didn't go that smoothly either.

The first issue I had was that their pricing (and it's not really their pricing but their printer's pricing) for working with this paper was high.  Not crazy high - but frankly - it's about what I would charge if I was doing prints for someone else on this paper.

The paper is expensive.  And it's hard to work with.  There are other papers with a similar feel such as the Crane/Museo Silver Rag, but the truth is that doing a large inkjet with these types of papers - it's pretty common for things to go wrong.

I just did a print for someone yesterday where the surface of the Epson Gloss was ever so slightly scratched.

And a friend recently got back a print from another high end lab that uses Silver Rag - and that I've used for very large prints - and there were tiny bits of dust on the surface.

These sorts of issues are very common when working with black and white prints.

You really need to carefully check these prints before they go out, and they need to be packaged so carefully.  And then I'm losing money because the print is costing a lot to make, and so I raised the price to try and cover that, and the complaints came in:

"Not only are you charging more, but it doesn't even have your signature, or that nice Certificate of Authenticity that you used to include.  We're paying more and getting less."

So now I was beginning to think that even if the ability to ship the print to the photographer was eventually implimented - could I truly sell fine art prints if someone else was doing (and charging, and making a profit) on the printing.

The answer to that was no.

Maybe, if I were famous.  But even then, I would just charge much higher prices, and insist on seeing prints and signing them before they were shipped.  In which case I really wouldn't need the middleman any longer.  I could use my own cart and just have the prints done as real silver prints if I wanted to (with the Silver Digital LAMBDA process)...

And while I was in that frame of mind, the final straw broke the photographers back.  I had sold a large black and white print on the Exhibition paper to go into a boardroom in Australia.

I received an angry e-mail from the person who had ordered the print, basically saying that it was lousy.  Awful.  Junk.

Now they have the print in Australia.  I'm in the U.S.  I have no idea what happened.  Maybe a profile was wrong.  Maybe the printer used the wrong settings for the paper.  What am I supposed to do?  Ask them to ship it to me in the States so I can take a look at it.

So I severed my Fotomoto connection.  Was very sad to do so.  And since then have gone back to doing all my own printing.  Not a single problem.  Not only that, but I began to receive the nice "thank you" emails from customers.

My problem was that I couldn't get prints to people in a timely way.  Sometimes it took over a month to ship a print.  Now I've just about caught up, though I have one woman's order for about 12 prints, and it's close to two months and I've spoken with her and she has been very understanding.  But c'mon.  Today I plan to spend the rest of the day printing and tomorrow packaging and some day, maybe I'll be able to take pictures again. 

p.s. I have to say, that all throughout this process, the people at Fotomoto did their best to work with me and I felt terrible to pull the plug.  But for my type of business - it wasn't going to work.  I can imagine that it would work for wedding photographers (for example) and other more commerical sorts of work.  But for fine art black and white - I can't see how it can work out in the long run unless the photographer gets it first to review, and that the photographer can charge enough to make up for the fact that the printer is now charging heavily to do the print.

p.s.s. The prints in the gallery are just there for show.  I haven't posted anything at Pixiq for a long time - so that's some of what I've been up to lately.  You can see more of my latest work at Google Plus.  No - you don't need to join (though I think if you're interested in photography you'll find good people there).  Here's my G+ address: 

https://plus.google.com/116247667398036716276/posts