Photobooks an “enormous” growth market

Momento marketing manager David Watson told ProPrint: “There’s still enormous potential for growth there. There’s a large portion of the market that isn’t quite aware how easy it is to create photobooks.”

Watson admitted the sector did face threats from people choosing to upload photos online rather than print them. “It’s definitely a challenge we’re aware of, and it’s something the industry is grappling with.”

Paul Curtis from the Photo Imaging Council of Australia pointed to figures that showed 30 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook every year.

“Facebook is big competition for us, and even Flickr has over 4 billion photos. One third of the world’s population is under 15, so that’s an entire generation we have to capture.”

“But I would ask, ‘do you really want to trust your long-term memories to a dotcom?’ Print is future-proof technology, digital might go the way of 8-tracks and vinyl records.”

In addition to the growth of on-demand printing, Curtis told ProPrint the photobook market has also got a shot in the arm from the development of better finishing technology.

“We now have access to good efficient perfect binding and case binding. Binding has always been the ‘bug bear’ from a cost point of view.”

Momento has enjoyed a steady rise since being founded by Geoff Hunt, Libby Jeffery and James Whitwell in 2004. The company has grown to more than 30 people and been named in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 Australia list, as well as the Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific list.

Momento moved into its current Chippendale site in 2008 to bring production in-house, despite none of the founders having any hands-on printing experience.

“We always though we wouldn’t own our own production facility. It was a fairly big leap for us, but the time was right, business was booming.”

The company produces most of its photobook work on an HP Indigo 5500 and also runs a variety of wide-format HP and Epson printers, as well as finishing equipment.

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